Self-reflection In the story of Borges “Don Quixote” by Pierre Menard, it was rightly said that if a text identical to the novel by Cervantes was written in our time, the meaning would be completely different. This is the basis of plagiarism, one of the types of conceptual art. Although the short film by Denis Vilenkin and Anton Fomochkin “Donkey-hot” is not fundamentally related.
It is useless to see in their work only an old fairy tale in a new way. Moreover, Boris Khlebnikov succeeded in this in “Crazy Help”, which is still difficult for novice directors to compete with. Their work sometimes seems too fussy, as if the directors want to express themselves to the end and quite, enjoying the very process of speech, like the hero of Andrei Tarkovsky from the notorious opening scene of The Mirror. Especially the statement and dedicated to their film. The ordinary man expresses his thoughts in words, the artist in images. And the statement in the artistic space is difficult for reasons beyond the control of the author.
Cinema is a collective art where the director is just the tip of the iceberg. A considerable number of interesting ideas were never implemented, because the authors could not find funding or a sufficient number of like-minded people. The film crew to a greater extent requires the unanimity of all its participants. After all, it depends on the final result, what the viewer will see on the screen. And the path to the screen is often thorny and regulated by commercial models. Because two friends-directors can not find not only a producer interested in their script, but also to assemble a team of actors. In their film, Fomochkin and Vilenkin exaggeratedly portray the obstacles that confront them, as if holding an allusion to Lars von Trier’s documentary Five Obstacles. On the other hand, the plot of the immortal novel by Cervantes is also played out. Authors like Don Quixote struggle with windmills, constantly lose, but still do not give up and go further. Interestingly, in a sarcastic manner, a scene is presented where professors from VGIK scold their idea, demanding to shoot according to the rules. In the perception of the main characters, they appear as some monsters in animal masks, as if revived vices of stupidity and indifference. Rules, as Jean Vigo rightly said in Zero for Behavior, exist to be broken. The two heroes are quite comparable to the Vigo boys who challenged the adult world. The spirit blows where it wants, and creative thought recognizes no limitations.
In a sense, Donkey Hot is the anti-Five Obstacles variant. Where Trier affirms the useful role of rules, almost censorship, young directors, on the contrary, passionately dream of breaking out of the box. Figuratively speaking, they don’t want to be puppets who are manipulated, they want to make rules themselves. After all, A. S. Pushkin not just said that “the author should be judged according to the laws that he has set himself.”
“Donkey-hot” is a cinematic film, which shows the mental process of creating a film and a variety of approaches to art. As if referring to the work of David Lynch, the master of surrealism, the directors let randomness into their project, as if automatic writing, one of the techniques of surrealism. "Donkey Hot" is as casual a name as "Inner Empire," for example. Directors seem to want to give up excessive reflection, and the rules of making a film to deconstruct. In many ways, they follow the path of Guy Debord, who did not like art, considering him a servant of the bourgeoisie, but it was at the age of 20 that he filmed Howlings in Honor of de Sade, an anti-kino that gave rise to reflection on the essence of art for such masters as Alain René and Michelangelo Antonioni.
Directors (played by the authors themselves) perceive the world through the prism of cinema. But apart from (intentionally or not) a reference to the photogeny of Louis Delluce, this is a serious topic of cognitive dissonance. Sometimes it seems that the authors have lost touch with reality, or perhaps seriously believe that life is a movie. Vilenkin and Fomochkin have the right, because long before them phenomenologists took the existence of the world outside the knowing consciousness for brackets. On the other hand, Guy Debord argued that people consume too much of the “spiritual” goods that capital accumulates, bringing profit to the capitalist. Long before the Wachowski brothers, he saw the world as a matrix in which people voluntarily exist, just to avoid leaving a cozy cinema with soft chairs. Real life cannot be imprinted, for it is an image that instantly becomes a commodity. It always lurks in interframe space, as elusive as reality in the phenomenological films of Michelangelo Antonioni.
Perhaps the authors have driven themselves into a dead end, because the original thought is lost in the polyphony of the voices of their film, and mutually exclusive ideas cause cognitive dissonance in the viewer. At the same time, the creative search for young talents, their reluctance to exchange themselves for commercial cinema, as well as defending their point of view, cannot but attract. Sometimes it seems that the main characters themselves have a bad idea of what they want to shoot, but they know for sure that they will not shoot. And in the space of their film, as if in accordance with dialectics, theories, approaches come into dispute, and objects of admiration for someone, such as the narcissistic Vladimir Epifantsev, an episode with which is like hello to the star system, or the idle-thinking film critic Boris Nelepo, ready to announce any nonsense with a new word, appear in a comical key. Authors have the courage to think only of themselves as the source of truth, but they have the intelligence not to try to explain everything.
Jean-Luc Godard once said that cinema is not a station, but a train. The main advantage of “Donkey-hota” is that it reflects the very process of thinking, and doubts and accidents are not bugs in the creative program, but what allows art to develop, despite all the superstructures that were invented around it by producers and film critics.
7 out of 10
