Julia Melamed Favorite sickening holiday On honoring the dead 04/11/2022, 08:11

Is there a more sickening holiday than the one we celebrated the other day? Feast of the Dead in Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras, etc. Halloween in the rest of the world. By the way, today Pumpkin also saved in Russia, but, of course, less popular than on the Day of the Border Guard.

Where can one find so much frivolity to pretend to play the Day of the Dead? The cult of the dead, dances with skulls, skeletons in civilian clothes … The famous Calavera Katrina (a skeleton in a fashionable hat), who goes hand in hand with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in the popular painting. The holiday has its roots in a tradition that still remains somewhere in Indonesia and the Philippines, where the most ritualized with the dead is done, where corpses are regularly removed, dressed, and solemnly placed at a communal table. How is it so … “on you” with death?

By the way, we did not always feel such disgust, more recently your ancestors treated the dead in their own way. Without this mystical respect. The corpse does not bite, there is nothing to fear. Not to mention the famous afterlife genre, the tradition of photographing people who have recently died, that emerged with the invention of the daguerreotype in the 19th century. Such photographs were widely circulated at the end of the 19th century. He especially took pictures of his children who left early with lust, dressed and blushed. The horror lies in the fact that the dead sit in the natural poses of living people, screwed so that their heads do not fall, their eyes open. What makes a dead person with their eyes open so special?

But today you cannot look at these pictures without shuddering.

By the way, the dead are the first object of photography. If early cinema cheerfully explored movement, groping for places where a comic effect is possible, then early photography discovered precisely death, that fine line that separates the dead from the living, and photography thrived in this monstrous philosophical soil.

I love cemeteries. Or rather, he loved it. They were a walking place for me and reflections on the fragility of life. Everything that was scary had a soothing appearance.
All my mines are buried in Vagankovsky and Vostrikovo. Vagankovskoye is the resting place of Bohemia. There are almost no (or even no) distasteful funny monuments that Vostrikovo is full of, here these famous tombstones of the dead in full-length sweatpants line the floor of full-size Mercedes – here the crime of the 90s rested in significant numbers. Actual size and most detailed Mercy or Behi, granite casting. It is not just people without taste, education and intelligence who erect tombstones in the shape of a state-of-the-art foreign car and envision the outcome of life in this way. This is a pagan tradition that should be handled with care. It is rare in the modern world of the 21st century that magical representations can be observed so purely. People believe that the deceased will go to the afterlife with the Merc. He will cross the bridge over the holy Styx to the underworld in a Mercedes. In the same way and with exactly the same purpose, they bury their idols and life purpose – Merc, as their ancestors put food, dishes, utensils in the tomb. The modern attitude towards the deceased is no more than 50-70 years old.

My first movie was about a cemetery. My second movie was about a maternity ward. The first was the spirit. The second was successful. At the end of the movie, the child at birth dies.

The first film was shot on Vagankovsky, where there were bad rumors that tombs were being sold, bones were thrown, tomb flowers were sold in the tenth round, and that non-Hamlet gravediggers had burned an opponent in a firebox. local church. At Talkov’s grave, old virgins masturbated at night. Even if you pluck the heads of flowers so that they do not go up for sale again – you already found your flowers tightly packed in cellophane tomorrow at the florist at the cemetery, and if you open them, you can see that the heads are flowering. the handle is screwed with wire. And many other spiritual miracles were performed in Vagankovsky. Something told me it wasn’t worth meeting with such people who worked in the cemetery. True, my instinct told me to enter the cemetery at midnight with the crew. Climb over the cemetery fence – and … The goal was artistically silly – to film the death through the eyes of the deceased. Don’t tell me the same task can be solved much easier (without appreciating its artistic justification), no, just this way, just harsh. It is only given through that you can’t be serious. We (with a 17-kilogram camera) pushed the cameraman into a new grave opened next to Okudzhava’s grave (or maybe it wasn’t Okudzhava’s grave, I don’t remember). And they threw him to the ground with his betta. Removing a fat operator less than two meters tall was not easy. We shot together. But we did. Look at the images. dr. I had to climb again.

The second shot went with a bang. Then we were caught in the cemetery. They unleashed the dogs on us without thinking. Naturally, we ran in all directions, forgetting the fat cameraman inside Okudzhava. Then it turned out that he flapped his wings perfectly from the ground – fear inspires. Then there were long fights, threats, attempts to deceive people who looked like murderers. I will leave this. I can only say that the frame remains in the movie. Death through the eyes of a dead man… Apparently, as I understand it now, I really wanted to shoot this kind of footage, like in Chekhov’s “Gusev” story… A story about how senselessly and inexplicably an ordinary sailor died in the infirmary, and still is. the wind blows through the fishing gear, it just hits the propeller, the waves whip in the same way, the beds creak the same and his body is thrown out to feed the fish, and here he is, Private Gusev, now wrapped in canvas, looking like a radish, floating down, a school of pilot fish and Then he encounters a shark. And this transition between life and death is deliberately and cleverly erased. And I remembered forever. I probably wanted to convey this at the time, but of course I didn’t. This astonishment in Chekhov before the riddle of death is understandable and imminent. And the pagan dances with the dead, designed to joke about the fragility of life, nothing comes of it.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.