Evgeny Yufit: exploring a Necrorealist Archive

Necrorealism was a radical art movement that emerged in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. Embracing the absurdist aesthetics of life and necro-acting, the movement explored the liminal zones between life and death, sanity and insanity, Soviet normalcy and apolitical dissidence, the potentiality of black humor and artistic idiocy within and outside the political regime, and the discourses of the late USSR and its everyday reality at a time when, after the death in 1982 of Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the ‘new’ leaders, to quote Russian philosopher Viktor Mazin, ‘were either already undead or forever dying.’[1] Evgeny Yufit (1961-2016) was the movement’s undeniable leader. In 1985, he founded the independent film studio Mzhalala Film in Leningrad. This united various artists, filmmakers, performers, and regular passers-by, among them Igorʹ Bezrukov, Evgenii ‘The Idiot’ Kondratʹev, Oleg Kotelʹnikov, Andrei ‘The Dead’ Kurmoiartsev, Vladimir Kustov, Ivetta Pomerantseva, and others. The film critic Sergei Dobrotvorskii writes as follows about the films made by the studio:

Early necrorealist declarations affirmed the life of the body abandoned by the soul and advocated pure idiocy, uncorrupted by instinct or the subconscious. Their short films recall Mack Sennett’s slapstick style of the 1910s and the shock aesthetics of the French avant-garde, as well as the unrestrained eccentricity of the Soviet cinema of the 1920s. Characters thickly plastered with zombie clay enact mass brawls, suicides, and monosexual erotic acts. In such strategies, it was easy to discern provocations towards the Soviet myth of social immortality. […] Necrocinema sent back to the empire its most well-worn stereotypes: homosexuality as the flipside of exaggerated masculinity; idiocy as an extreme parody of heroic pathos; and disdain for death, as a natural consequence of collective ethics.[2]

PROGRAMME

Since the death of Yufit in 2016, Masha Godovannaya, together with her son, Timothy Yufit, have been the owners and archivists of Yufit’s artistic legacy. Since 2021, together with Janneke van Dalen, an archivist employed by the Austrian Film Museum, Masha has been working on Yufit’s personal film archives. This programme presents unique materials from this archive alongside a selection of his early short films. All the films have been digitized by the Austrian Film Museum on the basis of the originals preserved there.

Accompanied by Masha’s commentary on the historical-cultural context, individual biographies, and family histories, the programme includes home-movie footage shot on Super 8 by Yufit’s grandfather, Aleksei Tsukanov, which shows the family’s living environment and its excursions during the 1960s and ‘70s in the Soviet Union. Tsukanov taught Yufit how to operate a camera and chemically process his films in Lomo tanks. The programme also presents a selection of Yufit’s early filmic ‘études’ and experiments dating from the late 1970s; these culminated in his first short films, Werewolf Orderlies (Sanitarnye-oborotni, 1984), Woodcutter (Lesorub, 1985), and Spring (Vesna, 1987), which launched the Necrorealist movement in cinema. The programme concludes with out-takes from these short films, and ‘behind-the-scenes’ footage – never-before-seen archival material that Yufit’s family now makes available for the first time.

The screenings of the films will be followed by a response from Dr Seth Graham, Associate Professor at UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Dr Graham is a specialist in perestroika-era Soviet cinema and the phenomenon known as ‘chernukha’. This response will be followed by an audience Q & A. The approximate duration of the programme is 70 minutes. The filmic materials contain one or two scenes which some in the audience may find disturbing.

PRESENTER

Masha Godovannaya (born 1976, Moscow, USSR/Russia) is an experimental filmmaker, queer-feminist researcher, curator, and educator. Approaching art production as artistic research and collective action, Masha’s artistic and scholarly practices draw on combinations of approaches and spheres: moving-image theory, experimental cinema and DIY video tradition, social science, post-Soviet/post-socialist studies, queer theory, and decolonial methodologies.

Masha holds an MFA degree in film/video from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, USA; an MA degree in sociology from the European University in St Petersburg, Russia; and a PhD from the Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria.

Masha’s films and visual works have been presented at numerous international festivals and art venues: International Film Festival Rotterdam; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; BFI London Film Festival; Ann Arbor International Film Festival; European Media Art Festival; Vienna Shorts Film Festival; Engauge Experimental Film Festival; Experiments in Cinema; Manifesta 10; 7th Liverpool Biennial; Tate Modern; Centre Georges Pompidou; and The Ludwig Museum at the Russian Museum.

Masha’s works are distributed by Light Cone (Paris), Collectif Jeune Cinéma (Paris), Filmmakers’ Cooperative (New York), and CYLAND Video Archive (New York). These works are included in collections of the St Petersburg State Russian Museum and the Österreichisches Filmmuseum (Vienna).

[1] Viktor Mazin, ed., Kabinet Nekrorealizma: Iufit: Ъ, Kartina mira series VII, Moscow: Skifiia-print, 2015, p. 9.

[2] Sergei Dobrotvorsky, ‘A tired death’, in A. Miller-Pogacar and J. Nathan, eds., Russian Necrorealism: Shock Therapy for a New Culture [exhibition catalogue], Bowling Green, Ohio: Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery, 1993, pp. 7–8 (p. 7).