{"id":34116,"date":"2025-09-25T12:28:43","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T09:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/?p=34116"},"modified":"2025-10-08T15:20:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T12:20:25","slug":"2025-out-of-autofocus-mikhail-basov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/2025-out-of-autofocus-mikhail-basov\/","title":{"rendered":"Mikhail Basov speaks about the programme"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mikhail<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It has now been twenty years since I embarked on my odyssey into the \u201cart of moving images,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cout of (auto)focus,\u201d yet they are always authentic<\/b>. I avoid using AI-generated imagery, though I am not fundamentally opposed to it, provided creators make sure to indicate such elements with \u201cquotation marks\u201d or \u201cparentheses.\u201d I limit myself to the simplest computer effects, striving not to diminish but to enhance the weight of \u201cmanual\u201d labour, and reducing automation to the bare minimum. Ultimately, my task is to discover how a \u201croll of the dice,\u201d those unforeseen encounters in the real world, can become the spine of cinematic organisms.<\/p>\n

A few words about the films. Free Movements<\/i><\/a>, Film for Imaginary Music<\/em><\/a>, and A Plastic Bottle\u2019s Stair Dance<\/i><\/a> form a black-and-white trilogy where the movement and \u201canimation\u201d of objects are bound to the wind. Out of Autofocus<\/i><\/a> and La Bagatelle<\/i><\/a> foreground the presence of the camera itself, both as a device and as a \u201cpoint of view\u201d\u2014a gaze from outside and from within. Water plays a vital role in both. In Short Circuits<\/i><\/a>, everything is held together by editing, chains of associations, and \u201cmaterialised metaphors,\u201d with an electric fire serving as the unifying force. The feature film The Spot of Time<\/i><\/a> is a vast, labyrinthine cinematic poem, where viewers find themselves in the \u201ctidal zone\u201d between reality and fantasy, life and cinema.<\/p>\n

Mikhail Basov<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  It has now been twenty years since I embarked on my odyssey into the \u201cart of moving images,\u201d and my filmography has grown to include seventeen works. For the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":36574,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"annum":[129],"class_list":["post-34116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-curator-text","annum-129"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34116"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36575,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34116\/revisions\/36575"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34116"},{"taxonomy":"annum","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/annum?post=34116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}