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Leningrad by (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov from Е-E films on Vimeo. This animated video, entitled "Leningrad", is based on "Shark", a painting from 1988 by Russian artist Evgenij Kozlov, aka E-E (pronounced “yeh-yeh”). Kozlov, a leading member of the Leningrad avant-garde movement from the perestroika period, is known for his striking, inventive portraits reflecting the spiritual strength of his fellow artists, musicians, and his other friends. "Shark", a multi-figured, highly dynamic composition, contains a great number of such portraits, both large and small – among them Georgy Guryanov ("Kino") and Igor Verichev (of the "New Composers"), and also the head of a shark. They are centred around a "massless globe", and are seen to be spiralling around it. The focal point of the composition, however, is a red cross, which forms part of a T‑shirt worn by a figure standing on the right – Timur Novikov – with the former marking the position of Novikov's heart. This red cross, symbolising "the containment of movement", constitutes a counterpoint to the centrifugal forces emitted by the spiralling images. In 2012, film-maker and video artist Carmen pg Granxeiro external link >> assembled a collection of my close-up images of "Shark" into a brief two-minute video piece, creating a sequence of fast cuts that oscillate between full views of the painting and detailed close-ups. She thereby intensified the momentum of "Shark" with the help of strobe transitions, fast zooming, and white light effects. The title of the video, "Leningrad", refers to Novikov's head-mask, which is akin to a warrior's helmet and bears the inscription "Leningrad". "Leningrad" was edited in 2019 with music by Dmitri Pavlov, a composer and pianist with a background in classical as well as experimental music more >>. Pavlov's powerful soundtrack from 2019 enhances Granxeiro's approach, using a funky, rough industrial rhythm – transposing the visual zoom effects into sharp metallic sound rushes and "loading" the images with discharges of electronic thunder. "Leningrad" is (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov's tribute to the Leningrad art and music scene – particularly in relation to the 1980s – and to the creative potential of Russian artists and musicians in general, thereby focusing on the period in which they were finally able to deploy their talent without the imposition of restrictions, towards the end of the Soviet period. Hannelore Fobo, September 2019
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