{"id":37588,"date":"2025-10-12T22:28:53","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T19:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/?p=37588"},"modified":"2025-10-12T22:34:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T19:34:21","slug":"2025-cinema-culture-spb-1990","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/2025-cinema-culture-spb-1990\/","title":{"rendered":"Egor Sennikov speaks about the program"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

 <\/p>\n

St. Petersburg in the 1990s was a city at a crossroads, suspended between memories of the past and the chaos of a new era. Its historical name restored, it had yet to find a new essence. The films of that decade now serve as a unique archive of the city\u2019s and its inhabitants\u2019 inner state. They captured moments of a familiar world\u2019s collapse and the search for new foundations: some sought to revive interrupted traditions, others unleashed the underground energies of the 1970s and 1980s, while some explored new experimental cinematic languages.<\/p>\n

Feature films of the period turned to grand meanings and allegories. Aleksey Uchitel\u2019s Obvodny Canal<\/i><\/a> depicted the city as a space where incongruous realms coexist: a psychiatric hospital, a cultural centre, a theological academy, and a poetry home gathering\u2014a place where reality and absurdity intertwine in surprising ways. Sergey Selyanov\u2019s Whit Monday<\/i><\/a> crafted a metaphysical parable about a man gifted with hearing the future yet doomed to remain captive to his own memories. Sergey Vinokurov\u2019s Upyr<\/i><\/a> placed a vampiric myth amid Kronstadt\u2019s industrial outskirts, turning horror into a statement on post-Soviet emptiness. Alexander Bashirov\u2019s The Iron Heel of Oligarchy<\/i><\/a> brought St. Petersburg to the forefront of a utopian spectacle, where revolution and farce pulsed to the same rhythm. Victor Aristov\u2019s Rains in the Ocean<\/i><\/a> (completed by Yuri Mamin) transformed motifs from Alexander Belyaev\u2019s novel into a chamber drama about three castaways adrift at sea\u2014a metaphor for the collapse of grandiose ambitions.<\/p>\n

In short films of the same years, these ideas were expressed with sharper edges and brighter contrasts, capturing fragile states, fragments of everyday life, voids, and grotesques. Timur Novikov and Sergey Shutov played with childlike images\u2014an airplane, a submarine, penguins, a sunrise\u2014turning them into postmodern signs of lost grandeur. Eduard Shelganov\u2019s Group Portrait of Loneliness<\/i><\/a> showed the impossibility of \u201cholding still\u201d\u2014whether in frame or in life. Dmitry Frolov\u2019s Phantoms of White Nights<\/i><\/a> portrayed the city\u2019s semi-phantasmal existence on the brink of vanishing, while Dimitri Lurie in Emptiness <\/i><\/a>and Zhuk-1<\/i><\/a> explored corporeality and the raw nerve of the times. Olga Tobreluts\u2019s Neo-Academism Manifesto<\/i><\/a> became a declaration of a new artistic language.<\/p>\n

Together, these films form a polyphonic portrait of a city groping for its identity in a transitional age. In 2025, revisiting these works is important: they allow us to feel the process of transition that unfolded 30 years ago. They remind us that culture not only sums up the past but also preserves traces of searches, mistakes, utopias, and hopes. Returning to them today, we see how the experience of a pivotal era resonates in our present.<\/p>\n

Egor Sennikov<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  St. Petersburg in the 1990s was a city at a crossroads, suspended between memories of the past and the chaos of a new era. Its historical name restored, it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":37591,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"annum":[129],"class_list":["post-37588","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\/37588","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=37588"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37596,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37588\/revisions\/37596"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37588"},{"taxonomy":"annum","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/annum?post=37588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}