ooo4 – Room and a Half (2009)

(Полторы комнаты или сентиментальное путешествие на родину)

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spacetime coordinate: 40’s > 90’s, Saint Petersburg > New York

When asked in an interview whether he ever intended to return to his Motherland, Joseph Brodsky replied: “Such a journey could only take place anonymously…”

The creators of this film imagined that the journey in question was undertaken after all, selecting the genre of an ironic fairytale. The poet sails to the country of his childhood, and with him we traverse not only geographical expanses, but travel through time as well; stringing together a number of facts from the Nobel Prize Laureate’s biography, we return to the USSR of the 50s and early 60s, soaking up the atmosphere of the “European” city of Petersburg, to this day Russia’s cultural center.  Along with live-action sequences, the film features animation, as well as documentary footage concerning Brodsky and his milieu.

Some of the animated sequences — of winged horses and flying sleds, of Brodsky as a farm animal on all fours drawing a cart — suggest Chagall. Other, more elegant pictures — of pianos and other musical instruments flying in formation while framed against the heroic architecture of St. Petersburg — are closer to Magritte’s surrealism. Visually, it is an ode to St. Petersburg (its museums, architecture and statuary are lovingly photographed), and to the Neva River, which runs by the city.

With its unabashedly nostalgic glow, the film belongs to what might be called the “rosebud” school (after “Citizen Kane”) of film biographies that locate the essence of a life in childhood memories. Recurrent images in the film are visual representations of the family’s house cat. The youthful Brodsky (Evgeniy Ogandzhanyan) is shown conversing with his father in meows and later subverting the solemnity of a school anthem sung by a chorus by substituting cat cries for words. He later confides to a friend that he wants to be reincarnated as a cat in Venice.

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imdb

0003 – Time Bandits 1981

spacetime coordinate: from Napoleonic times to the Middle Ages to the early 1900s, to the time of Legends and the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness

Gilliam has referred to Time Bandits as the first in his “Trilogy of Imagination”, followed by Brazil (1985) and ending with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). All are about the “craziness of our awkwardly ordered society and the desire to escape it through whatever means possible.” All three films focus on these struggles and attempts to escape them through imagination: Time Bandits through the eyes of a child, Brazil through the eyes of a man in his thirties, and Munchausen through the eyes of an elderly man.

portal map

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imdb

0002 – Goya’s Ghosts (2006)

spacetime coordinate: spain 1792

Goya’s Ghosts is a 2006 Spanish-American film, directed by Miloš Forman (his final directorial feature before his death in 2018), and written by him and Jean-Claude Carrière. The film stars Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgård, and was filmed on location in Spain during late 2005. The film was written, produced, and performed in English although it is a Spanish production.

“-So how do you want me to ride?
-How do you want history to perceive
you, madam?
-The way I am,
young and beautiful.”

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Although the historical setting of the film is authentic, the story about Goya trying to defend a model is fictional, as are the characters Brother Lorenzo and the Bilbatúa family.

imdb