As part of our ongoing cultural season exploring various aspects of queer sensuality in Russia and beyond, Pushkin House presents a one-off screening of No Place For Fools, a radical work by artist and filmmaker Oleg Mavromatti that premiered in 2015 at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
Mavromatti assembled a found-footage experimental film using fragments of the video blog of the late Sergei Astakhov, a gay man and Orthodox activist who had a developmental disability.
The film is not recommended for audiences younger than 18 years old (tw: suicide, car accident, fire).
The beginning of the conservative turn in Russia is usually associated with the election of Vladimir Putin for a third presidential term in March 2012. Very quickly, new blasphemy and gay propaganda laws were introduced, and then the war broke out in the Donbas. How have these events affected the lives of people who do not fit into right-wing norms and standards? According to Mavromatti, Sergei’s life was dominated by the macabre desires of consumerist culture on the one hand and the restrictions of sexist imperialist propaganda on the other. With the help of the Internet, Mavromatti has resurrected the ‘holy fool’ tradition that was criminalised by Peter the Great in the 18th century, and drawn a critical portrait of contemporary Russia’s darkest side.
Oleg Mavromatti, No Place for Fools (2015), film still, image courtesy Oleg Mavromatti
“Choosing a marginal co-author, Mavromatti builds a model of the Russian citizen, a representative of the so called “majority.” The English slogan of the film “The Outsider who wanted in” unmistakably tells us the reason for what we see: the general loneliness, the common feeling of being not part of the mythical “83%” (of Putin’s supporters). And he gives us a prescription: let’s try to convert our consciousness to accept varieties of expressions of humanness, as opposed to submitting it to the total domination of the abstract slogans of everyday propaganda.”
Oleg Mavromatti (1965, Volgograd, Russia) is an artist and filmmaker who has created films since 1989. In 1995 Mavromatti founded the independent film union SUPERNOVA, manifested as a fortress of Moscow radical cinema. Some films produced within the movement, including “The Green Elephant” (1999) and “Bastards” (2000) attained cult following. Mavromatti is also a prominent representative of radical performance art scene in 1990s Moscow.
He has been legally prosecuted for his critical performance art and films. Mavromatti left the country in 2000 and since then he lives in Bulgaria and New York, where he continues making films and art.
“With No Place for Fools I wanted to draw a portrait of contemporary Russian society. The curious and controversial character I have created with this film is somewhat entertaining but also disturbing introduction to what capitalist Russia means to most of its citizens now. His life can be compared to a nightmarish schizophrenic birthday cake from which an evil naked clown with a suicide belt jumps out. But practically no one who watches these videos in their original form can see all that. Therefore my work as a director is what makes the film’s statement. I would compare my work to the work of an editor of a book, who aggressively re-writes most of the selected texts.”
No Place for Fools
Oleg Mavromatti
2015, Russia/Bulgaria, 82 min.
Screening curated by Dmitry Frolov