SCULPTURE, CINEMA, INTERMEDIALITY

Sculpture, the quintessential plastic art, with its immobility and palpable materiality seems to be the opposite of cinema which unfolds an intangible world of images in perpetual motion, conjured up by a mere play of shadows and light. Nevertheless, there are several intriguing possibilities in which these two arts and media have come into contact, both literally: in the form of sculpture appearing in film (or its reverse, film or film projection used in the construction of a sculptural art object), and figuratively: film viewed in terms of sculpture. Both of these literal and figurative contact zones constitute extremely wide and rewarding fields of study.

This essay narrows down this wider perspective to the analysis of two films made by Aleksey Gherman and his son, Aleksey Gherman Jr, Hard to Be a God (Trudno byt bogom, 2013) and Under Electric Clouds (Pod elektricheskimi oblakami, 2015) not because the authors are related, but because sculpture and cinema rarely mix in such a complex intermedial and interart entanglement as we see in the works of these Russian auteurs. The films of the two Ghermans could not be more different, yet both of them share the ambition to break the conventional ‘moulds’ of narrative films and to expand the cinematic experience to enfold sensations of the plastic arts through the intervention of sculptural elements. The aim of joining the two analyses is to define and compare how this intervention can happen by exploiting the sensuous impressions of malleable physical matter, the statuary appearance of both living beings and inanimate things, or the expressivity of sculptural artefacts amassed within the cinematic frame. The ways in which these films ‘expand’ cinema conveys in each case a highly critical, universal vision of humanity, art and society. At the same time, they also rely on specific cultural traditions and, as the analyses will show, they refashion a typically ideology-laden area of interart relationships in Russian cinema by experimenting with an aesthetic based on the phenomenology of the cine-sculptural (Gherman Sr) and by using sculpture as a link between cinema and contemporary art (Gherman Jr). Th e films reveal two distinct ways in which an ‘intermedial sensibility’ may become prominent in contemporary cinema and in a wider context in which, in their own way, sculpture and cinema both have already undergone various processes of ‘expansion’.