DAU. Diary & Dialogue
“The person who rejects creative power and creativity and the reproduction of oneself through the act of creation, that person rejects life itself, in all its existence.”
—Anatoly Krupitsa, DAU. The Empire. Novel One: Return of the Prodigal Son
At the press conference for the premiere of DAU. Natasha at this year’s Berlinale, director Ilya Khrzhanovsky pre-empted questions regarding the controversial methods involved in the realization of his 14-year passion project—collectively known as DAU—by contrasting the experiences of his actors with the everyday lives of their Soviet-era characters. “All the feelings [depicted in the film] are real,” he said, “but the circumstances are not real in which these feelings happen. In the real world you pay the maximum price. But in this unreal world…you pay in a different way.” Just how and to what extent the 300-plus people who worked on DAU have paid has been the subject of nearly a decade’s worth of controversy and any number of articles detailing the many indiscretions and accusations of misconduct that continue to plague the now 44-year-old Russian filmmaker’s runaway production, which began in 2006 (two years after the arrival of his award-winning first feature, 4) as a fairly straightforward biopic of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau but quickly ballooned into what’s become arguably the most ambitious and notorious film project ever mounted. Following three years of filming in Kharkov, Ukraine, in a 13,000-square-metre recreation of a Soviet physics institute, where much of the nonprofessional cast lived in character during the shoot (and, according to reports, under simulated totalitarian rule), Khrzhanovsky and his team spent a majority of the past decade editing the resulting 700 hours of footage—all of it shot on 35mm by German cinematographer Jürgen Jürges—into 14 films, variations of which were first shown in an elaborate multi-disciplinary installation in Paris in January 2019, after an earlier attempt to present it in Berlin was quashed.
By all accounts, the installation—which, alongside the films, also included components of theatre, music, dance, and performance art—was an organizational disaster. What most correspondents did positively note, however, was that the films themselves, when actually screened at their scheduled start times, were unique and involving dramatic objects—the first sign that ’s proper home isn’t the gallery, but the cinema. For myself and others, this impression was borne out at the Berlinale, where the project’s first two offerings, and the six-hour , were screened in their finished form (the former in Competition and the latter in Berlinale Special). Unequivocal highlights, the films startled first and foremost as works of grand narrative storytelling, only further confirming that and drop the viewer unawares into the strange, surreal world of “the Institute,” an enclosed cityscape modelled after a mid-century quantum physics lab in Moscow where a team of experimental scientists led by Landau lived and worked in the shadow of the communist dictatorship for over three decades. In this fictionalized account, Dau (played with quietly arresting aplomb by the Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis) forms the nexus of a closed community of scholars, physicists, technicians, day labourers, and domestic workers whose lives unfold and intersect across the films with a volatile internal logic. In an era of world-building, not only builds a recognizable world, but populates it, allows it to evolve, and, ultimately, bear witness to its own destruction.
