Under the electric clouds

This quote by Paul Cezanne serves as the epigraph to the picture. With these words, Aleksey German Jr. emphasized that "he went to this cinema as a kind of attempt through poetic drama, through a return to impressionism, after many years to embody the feeling of the country and time." Alexei German Jr. illustrated the plot of the film: “<this picture> about a country that is crucified between the past, present and future. Time is not linear at all in Russia, we are paradoxical in this respect, where the clock hands can move forward first, then rewind, then forward again ^[1] . ”

The film takes place in 2017. This year was not chosen by chance - this is the centenary of the Great October Revolution. The world is waiting for a big war. The storylines of the lives of the main characters are almost not connected, the main characters are very different, but each of them belongs to those who are called "superfluous people" in classical Russian literature. The picture unfolds around one unfinished building, around which the fate of the main characters is scattered.

The film “Under Electric Clouds” consists of seven chapters: “Alien Speech”, “Heirs”, “Long Dreams of a Lawyer on Land Issues”, “Construction Site”, “Hostage”, “Architect” and “Mistress”. These are stories of different people from a guest worker to an architect, from a generation that grew up on Dostoevsky to the generation of the Apple brand. Each story has its own hero: rich and poor, Russian and an immigrant living in peace and one who has just returned from the war. Heroes' stories are united by chance encounters taking place in large cities of Russia and on its outskirts. The film “Under the Electric Clouds” is a story reflecting the fate of contemporaries who face a moral choice - not momentary, but balanced and informed. In creating the film, Alexei German Jr. followed the traditions of the Russian novel. “Kinoroman, whose chapters are interconnected, each complements the big picture. There are many storylines and a variety of characters, the duration of the action is between the 90s and the near future, 2017. This is an attempt in poetic form to capture the image of time ^[2] . "

The electric clouds that appear in the title of the film symbolize how people from different generations perceive the same concept in their own way: for some, these are thunderclouds in the sky, for others, cloud storage in modern gadgets ^[3] .

The film starred both professional artists and people without acting education. A number of roles of the first and second plan was performed by non-professional actors. The casting was attended by over 11 thousand people. One of the main roles went to Victoria Korotkova, actress of the St. Petersburg Bolshoi Puppet Theater , and Louis Frank , musician of Esthetic Education .

Chulpan Khamatova (previously starred in such films by Alexei German Jr. as "Garpastum", "Paper Soldier" and the short film "From Tokyo") plays a silent teenager. To work in the film “Under the Electric Clouds”, the actress cut her hair short and therefore she appeared with a short haircut at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Sochi.

Actor Merab Ninidze ( “Paper Soldier ”, “From Tokyo”) combined work on the film “Under Electric Clouds” with the filming of Stephen Spielberg.

Also starred in the film: Anastasia Melnikova, Victor Bugakov, Karim Pakachakov, Konstantin Zeliger.

Filming "Under the electric clouds" took place in Russia and Ukraine. The first block, launched in 2012, was removed in Ukraine - in Odessa, Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk. The second - from December 2013 to March 2014, after the change of power in Ukraine in 2014 , in Russia, St. Petersburg ^[4] .

The idea of ​​the film came from the director and scriptwriter of the film Alexei German Jr. back in 2008, but filming began only in 2012. In total, the production took six years: a year was spent on the script, five years on the set. Alexei German Jr. was forced to suspend the project due to work on the completion of the final picture of Alexei German Sr. "It is difficult to be God," as well as the search for funding.

Everything in the film was created from scratch, ranging from huge monuments to contemporary art exhibitions with complex projections. The entire art world “Under the Electric Clouds” was created by Elena Okopnaya, the main production designer and costume designer. According to Elena, each element in the frame is not accidental. She even painted in the frame with gravel, sometimes with snow, reinforcing bars, the smallest elements of a suit and props, and many others. Ukrainian designer Fyodor Vozianov also worked on some of the costumes.

Industrial divers were responsible for the installation of the 5-meter sculpture of Lenin in the Gulf of Finland. Using a floating crane at a depth of four meters, they planned to place the installation. Several dives were conducted to study the topography of the bottom and soil. Immediately before the start of the installation of the scenery, stormy weather began, and the shooting was moved closer to the shore.

Filming of the film was actively promoted by the air port of the northern capital and the railway. The arrival scene of the main characters was shot in the sterile area of ​​the new Pulkovo airport terminal a month before the commissioning of the State Commission facility. Especially for the duration of the work of the crew in the terminal, the construction was completely stopped. The scene from the novel “Alien Speech” in the finale with Karim’s passage past the cafe was shot at the Aeroport railway station in a vibrant area of ​​St. Petersburg. For 10 days, the station was completely rebuilt both inside and outside to decorate the cafe-bar.

Environmentalists deliberately drained the lake for the construction of the Lenexpo exhibition complex and filming the scene of the Karim construction site. In late December, due to abnormally warm weather, the field at the bottom of this lake with an area of ​​several square kilometers turned into a mess. On the last shooting day, frost hit - hundreds of meters of cable and some household equipment had to be left and taken out months later in the spring.

For the scene of the architect’s death in the alluvial territories near the new Seaport, a construction site was built: formwork, reinforcement, concrete structures and several units of large construction equipment, including pile machines, bulldozers and excavators.

The central object of the painting is the unfinished high-rise building. An all-Russian competition was held to develop a model of this building. 160 works took part in the competition. The winner was the project of Anna Tkacheva and Andrei Volintsev. Their names are indicated in the credits.

The premiere of "Under Electric Clouds" took place on February 10 at the 65th Berlin Festival . This is the only Russian film presented in the main competition "Berlinale". Cameramen Sergey Mikhalchuk and Evgeny Privin received the Silver Bear for their outstanding contribution to cinema.

The foreign press responded well about the picture. In particular, The Hollywood Reporter noted that “the visual series is bewitching”, and the French newspaper Le Figaro described the film as “a grand and charming dream-fantasy about post-modern Russia”. According to Screen Daily , the film is “a true miracle of excellence, the triumph of non-linear cinema.” And Darren Aronofsky , the jury president of the 65th Berlin Film Festival, said that the film “Under Electric Clouds” is “a peculiar, original and unique picture, the graphic series of which does not let its audience go for a long time”.

Russian film critics also reacted favorably to the film. So, Andrei Plakhov ( Kommersant ) stated that "this is a very unexpected work ...". According to Boris Groys , “this mesmerizing, atmospheric film has long haunted the viewer after watching it.” Anton Dolin noted that "the new painting by Alexei German Jr. is his fourth, probably the best, as if the most sophisticated and complex - a potential bomb ^[5] ."

On the eve of the release of the film Under Electric Clouds, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art June 5, 2015 opened the exhibition NOW2017 based on a painting by Alexei German Jr. The curators of the exhibition were Antonio Geusa and film artist Elena Okopnaya ^[6] .

During the international campaign “ Night at the Museum ”, which took place in Moscow on May 16, 2015, in the courtyard of MMOMA on Gogolevsky Boulevard 10, the installation-teaser “DIALOG” was created by the artist Elena Okopnaya. For a few hours, a flying person from one scene of the film was designed on a 17-meter organza screen. Rain and a strong wind nearly thwarted the installation - the canvas had to be changed several times, and the mounts reinstalled. But despite the bad weather, the installation took place.

Installation is part of the set for the film “Under the Electric Clouds”. According to Elena Okopnaya, she is a visualization of her internal dialogue with the surrounding universe and with the archetypes of everyday life. “A tense body in fetters, the energy of tormenting flight, the absence of a habitual color for life - all this for me is synonymous with a dialogue between a fragile human soul and the surrounding universe, a conversation with time in all its diversity, which sometimes roughly invades personal space. Therefore, the rhythm, and the transformation of volume, and the geometry of space serve primarily for the dialogue of each specific viewer and installation, which is nothing more than a projection of my sensations projected onto a transparent fabric swaying from the wind. ”

To create a special visual series of the picture “Under Electric Clouds”, work on the film was carried out in winter and spring.

Most of the selected objects for filming (unfinished buildings, the airport under construction) were surrounded by typical blue building fences. In total, during the filming, several kilometers of construction barriers were dismantled and installed back ^[7] .

The depth of individual frames was several kilometers.

On the eve of the first shooting day, a fragment of the statue of Lenin was abducted by a local resident who removed the statue on an SUV at night. He subsequently could not explain his actions.

In one of the frames, a helicopter flies over the actors' heads. This frame was shot without the use of computer graphics ^[7] .

Three sculptures five meters high were made for the scene of the final art exhibition. These are not fake designs, but full-fledged art objects.

The total power of lighting devices to create an artistic lighting pattern inside only one decoration “Sasha and Dani’s house” was 72 kW; to place all the devices, 6 load-lifting automobile platforms and traffic restrictions on one of the main streets of St. Petersburg for three days were required. Most scenes are solved by complex multi-faceted single-frame solutions with the movement of characters within the entire depth of the frame. Each full-frame shot included in the editing of the film was shot strictly at the time of sunset — into the most picturesque natural mode ^[7] .

Cameramen Sergei Mikhalchuk and Eugene Privin never met on the set ^[8] .

After the shooting, 1333 units were donated to the costume shop of the Lenfilm film studio.