Open Lecture by Alexei Gusev — “Through Me the Way into the Suffering City”: The Cinema of Robert Eggers

In contemporary cinema the “transcendent” seems to sit badly with high-budget productions, stars, and the frame of genre. Yet for 10 years now, film after film, Robert Eggers has held the point at which the two are bound inseparably. Defiantly old-fashioned in his tastes, swearing by Grémillon and Murnau, he uses the no longer binding cover of “new horror” to explore the zones of the suggestive and the inarticulable, and finds in them meanings and energies far more contemporary than most of his colleagues chasing novelty. Any niche is too narrow for him, and any festival label superfluous; there is neither elegy nor nostalgia in his cinephilia. His vampires and witches open before the viewer the outlines of a hell more credible than any news feed — and that hell turns out to be the present one.