Dau. Degeneration review – shocking, six-hour satire of Soviet science
This monumental drama, shot in a replica of Moscow’s real-life Institute of Physical Problems, is an arthouse freakout
Earlier this year at the Berlin film festival, I saw the brutal and bizarre Dau. Natasha. It is one of 14 feature films that have come out of the extraordinary multimedia Dau project devised by Russian film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who over the past decade has built a detailed full-scale replica of the Moscow building housing the real-life Institute of Physical Problems, an experimental psychology unit presided over in the 60s by the free-thinking Soviet scientist Lev Landau (nicknamed “Dau”), and filled it with actors improvising the imagined lives of its scientist researchers on a 24/7 basis. He recorded the results in films, video art and photo collections.
Related: Inside Dau, the 'Stalinist Truman Show': 'I had absolute freedom – until the Kgb grabbed me'...
Earlier this year at the Berlin film festival, I saw the brutal and bizarre Dau. Natasha. It is one of 14 feature films that have come out of the extraordinary multimedia Dau project devised by Russian film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who over the past decade has built a detailed full-scale replica of the Moscow building housing the real-life Institute of Physical Problems, an experimental psychology unit presided over in the 60s by the free-thinking Soviet scientist Lev Landau (nicknamed “Dau”), and filled it with actors improvising the imagined lives of its scientist researchers on a 24/7 basis. He recorded the results in films, video art and photo collections.
Related: Inside Dau, the 'Stalinist Truman Show': 'I had absolute freedom – until the Kgb grabbed me'...
- 4/30/2020
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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