It has now been twenty years since I embarked on my odyssey into the “art of moving images,” and my filmography has grown to include seventeen works. For the retrospective programme at Message to Man, I have selected six short films created between 2012 and 2021, along with a brand-new feature film, whose material has been gradually accumulating over the course of these two decades.

One rule has always guided my practice: I must first encounter a random event in everyday life, and only then does my imagination begin to work with it. Such events are inconspicuous, glimpsed on the periphery of my vision, “out of (auto)focus,” yet they are always authentic. I avoid using AI-generated imagery, though I am not fundamentally opposed to it, provided creators make sure to indicate such elements with “quotation marks” or “parentheses.” I limit myself to the simplest computer effects, striving not to diminish but to enhance the weight of “manual” labour, and reducing automation to the bare minimum. Ultimately, my task is to discover how a “roll of the dice,” those unforeseen encounters in the real world, can become the spine of cinematic organisms.

A few words about the films. Free Movements, Film for Imaginary Music, and A Plastic Bottle’s Stair Dance form a black-and-white trilogy where the movement and “animation” of objects are bound to the wind. Out of Autofocus and La Bagatelle foreground the presence of the camera itself, both as a device and as a “point of view”—a gaze from outside and from within. Water plays a vital role in both. In Short Circuits, everything is held together by editing, chains of associations, and “materialised metaphors,” with an electric fire serving as the unifying force. The feature film The Spot of Time is a vast, labyrinthine cinematic poem, where viewers find themselves in the “tidal zone” between reality and fantasy, life and cinema.

Mikhail Basov