watching Down Terrace

Went To Ben Wheatley's film Down Terrace last night, which is being show as part of the New British Films Festival here. Offered as a crime thriller, it is actually very very funny, with the action mainly set in claustrophobic close-up in a Brighton crime family's seedy terraced house. Besides some odd questions - (Why have you filmed in such a shabby house? Why are no policemen shown? Why doesn't the plot make sense? Are all British families like this?) which Wheatley answered with droll good humour - the film's disfunctional characters, chaotic family relationships and miscellaneous murders seemed to resonate just as happily with a Russian audience as they did with me. 

in the garage

The reason I noticed the police out and about yesterday is that we did a quick 'culture' trip to catch up on the latest show at Garage. Called Futurologia/Russian Utopias and running until 23rd May 2010, the main part of the exhibition is made up of commissioned work by contemporary Russian artists, responding to the 'pioneering' directions of Kazmir Malevich in both his abstract and figurative versions.

The work is pretty varied, with some really interesting pieces as well as some real clunkers - well, at least that is what I feel about an iPod spiralled into a plastic Tatlin Tower.....

Frustratingly there is no catalogue, photographs are not allowed and the best artist's work -such as Aidan Salakhova's amazing paintings and Olga Chernysheva's series of photographic and journal entry light-boxes which delicately and straightforwardly explore experiences of Russia, travel and life - do not seem to have made it to any website yet, so I can't share them with you.

And, as usual at Garage, I am both deeply impressed with the quality and amount of work going on to promote contemporary Russian art and culture (through Daria Zhukova's non-for-profit Iris Foundation) and completely stunned by the amount of private money that must be involved; not only commissioning - as far as I can tell - 26 new works, but also in yet another interior re-build of the centre during the winter.

on gender politics

As far as I can tell International Womens' Day here means that men give women flowers. And the Russians I have been talking to - male and female - really don't see this as a problem; the complexities of gender politics are for the rest of Europe, not here.

And then I watched the (brilliant) 1979 Mosfilm Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears on YouTube, and something - perhaps completely wrong - fell into place. Put simplistically, everyday commonsense in 1950s to 70s America and the UK ideally located middle-class white women as the angels of the house in opposition to male power in the public realm of work. Across the same period in the Soviet Union, men and women were equally envisaged as workers so gender relationships were located differently. Don't want to give the plot away, but MDNBIT centres on how important it is, ultimately, for women to allow male authority in the home.

What I don't know is how much things have changed here since the 1970s. What I do know is that it does not mirrors the path of western feminism.

You can find Moscow does not Believe in Tears in several parts - start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0p17OA5Qn0&feature=PlayList&p=BAA956327D80B5E9&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=97