Mykola Ridnyi: The Kharkiv Trilogy
Growing Sideways: Ericka Beckman, Piper Marshall, Isaac Preiss, Jeff Preiss
Film = weapon or shit?
Early shorts by Želimir Žilnik
Back in the late ’80s, after the wrap-up of both Bambis, Natalya Bondarchuk relays that the animal doubles of the human actors were donated to the child survivors of the Chernobyl meltdown. In my head, I draw a misshapen map of the USSR; motion lines trace the relocation sites of irradiated children and the forever homes of the animal stars. But what of tonight’s nuclear battlefield? Is there a functional live webcam out there in the Zone of Alienation where I can tune into a shaking spider secreting a skewed lattice of sunlit gossamer strands—its bright irregular warp indicating persistent mutations in her body? Might I spy, with jaundiced, remote eye, the spider eating her own web? After a trauma-feed, she’s full (again) on her own distortions.
2 weeks of hell in 7 minutes: a video diary from Mariupol