Russian Film Day

15:00, Film Showing
AELITA QUEEN OF MARS
silent film with music by Juliet Merchant

This is a rare showing of Protazanov’s silent film, based on a 1923 novella by Aleksey N. Tolstoy and accompanied by a live musical score created by Oxford-based film composer, Juliet Merchant. The extraordinary imagery of this film and its science fiction content resonates strongly with film noir and with the work of future filmmakers such as Tarkovsky, Hitchcock and Lynch. This film also casts an interesting light on the Bolshevik Revolution, having been filmed almost contemporaneously with the publication of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which supported space exploration as a way of developing a new utopian society.

17:15, Lecture
RAISING ONE'S VOICE
the political-social works of composer Eugene Birman

This lecture by the Latvian-born composer Eugene Birman charts a course through his daring and often controversial vocal and operatic works, confronting Russian aggression, the post- Soviet identity (and border) crises, as well as the European Union's own broken promises in the context of human rights and civil society. The lecture examines the earlier choral work '289' (2014), which set to music the words of a League of Nations treaty on the border between the Soviet Union and Estonia. He also introduces his Guggenheim-awarded 'Russia: Today' (2020), shown immediately after the lecture.

18:30, Film Showing
RUSSIA: TODAY
by Eugene Birman and Scott Diel

This season we are delighted to bring back by popular demand the remarkable film of Eugene Birman’s documentary opera ’Russia: Today’, with kind permission from the composer and producer Tonya Wechsler. The story of how this film was made is alone remarkable. In response to a commission from the English choir EXAUDI, Eugene Birman and his librettist Scott Diel undertook around 125 interviews with members of the public in Moscow, Vladivostok, Riga, Helsinki and a host of other countries close to Russia in 2018 and 2019. The interviewees were asked for their thoughts about Russia’s identity, particularly in relation to its former status as the central part of the Soviet Union. This happened at a time when Russia was seeking to expand its borders again, as shown by what happened in Crimea in 2014. These testimonies were translated and reordered to form a 70-minute choral work, punctuated by some of the recordings of the interviewees’ responses. ’Russia: Today’ also plays on the idea of a traditional Russian Orthodox panikhida, a form of requiem prayer for the soul after death. When the pandemic struck in 2020, a film version of the work was made using natural imagery of Russia by Alexandra Karelina, with music recorded by the Latvian ensemble Argentum. The film, premiered in Vladivostok in 2021, has become all the more hard-hitting for the light it throws on Putin’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

19:45, Discussion
RUSSIAN IDENTITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY
Jade McGlynn and Eugene Birman

This discussion is an opportunity to consider RUSSIA: TODAY in the light of current events, drawing both on Eugene Birman’s lecture on his work at 5.15pm and on ideas drawn from Jade McGlynn’s recent books on Russian identity. A graduate of Oxford University and a leading broadcaster commenting on Russia and the Ukrainian War, Jade McGlynn is the author of Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia (2023) and Russia’s War (2023).