Leaving the woods Daniil Kolotov and his team made a film intrusion into a graffiti party – a parallel reality with its code of honor, hierarchy and language. And this reality appeared before the viewer - evil, sexy and ecstatic free.
The director breaks into a closed community of street artists with the help of a “new wave” key – immersing actors in a documentary environment using manual shooting. Orchestrated events are often indistinguishable from accidental ones: Daniil Kolotov pushes his actors onto Moscow and St. Petersburg streets. Heroes: Pasha and his film-loving friend, through whose subjective camera we see everything happening, come from the province to Moscow and, instead of entering the institute, merge into the capital’s graffiti subculture. They “attach” to the leading writer of Moscow Khas and participate in his numerous adventures.
On the one hand, Fatality is a detailed cultural study of the phenomenon of graffiti. In Russian cinema there are no feature films about graffiti artists, except for amateur ones, unable to give a clear idea of street artists. Documentary films are more interesting to writers, since they record directly the process of writing without deciphering the values of the picture.
It is difficult to get into a graffiti party except through a conductor. They become the “older brother” of the main character Vanya. He is a graffiti hunter: a photographer who carefully captures new “pieces” (drawing graffiti in slang). Street art, radical and aggressive, is at the same time extremely vulnerable. The very application of the inscription on the city walls is under constant danger of arrest, and its existence is threatened with extinction at the hands of a utility worker. Vani’s character, as a reasoner, decodes the ‘encrypted’ and hidden writing process throughout the first half of the film. He also proclaims a key law of the street world: “graffiti is about the here and now.” This statement refers directly to Ernst Jünger’s “Gone to the Woods”: “The guerrilla’s verdict is ‘Here and Now’ – he is a man of free and independent action.” Laws of preservation of internal freedom, manifested in the book of E. Junger, are embodied in the phenomenon of graffiti.
Photography and, in this case, cinema – the only thing that allows you to save the trace of the “piece” in the present. The camera, endowed with the inquisitive temperament of a young provincial, peers into the surrounding world. It, like writers, attacks reality, extremely close to the heroes, provoking them.
Greedy and detailed fixation of the creation of graffiti captures the performative and categorical essence of street art. In this environment, there is no other account than Hamburg. The difficulties of the writer’s work: the police, the aggression of passers-by, the unrecoverability of spent materials, heavy and monotonous physical labor, the vulnerability of the drawing – require samurai determination and perseverance. Even for the smallest action like attaching a sticker, a decisive and calibrated movement is necessary, because it is impossible to “regulate”.
On the other hand, Fatality unlocks the political potential of graffiti as a protest. Documentary scenes were filmed during night walks in Moscow with real writers. The installation of the scenes is built on the eternal eluding police cars, the walk itself turns into a chase. The attack on the urban environment is a political gesture, because, as one of the heroes notes, “clean walls are an illusion of order.” Ernst Jünger, in his work “Getting to the Woods”, which examines resistance, writes of street protest as the only effective expression of the position: “One word “no” would be enough, and everyone who looked at it would know exactly what it meant. This is a sign that the suppression has not fully succeeded. It is against a monotonous background that the symbols flash especially brightly. Gray areas correspond to thickening in the closest space. This would be the first step out of a statistically controlled and controlled world.
In the street world, independence, including political independence, is achieved through risk and constantly needs to be reaffirmed. Violation of taboos: language, body and state – a steady motif of the film. Heroes are released from language norms, social conventions and clothing equally rapidly. A kind of initiation process for the main characters becomes shoplifting. This is a test of the ability to get high caught thief, snatched with a chocolate bar moment of freedom. In this elusive liberation lies the concept of radical art, which must be paid for by regular risk, readiness to escape and fight.
The film sets two poles of street art: street art aimed at each passer-by, and graffiti, the value of which is obvious only to the closed community - they are presented in two capital artists. Has, performed by Dima Hasanov, is an adventurer with a frenzied energy. He treats graffiti like a sport and leaves his markers all over Moscow, appropriating a shrewd city. Another artist, Dmitri Chesha, has his own cultural strategy, which should open the subculture to culture. He conceives graffiti, which, in accordance with strict genre laws, is both an encrypted message "his" and an open wide challenge to every passer-by. Their grandiose joint plan, uniting all the main characters, requires the characters to suppress their own weaknesses and crimes of laws: state and subcultural. In the face of other writers, police and interpersonal conflicts, a new level of inner freedom and a new conquest of reality are achieved. As a result, a huge mural in the city center is a manifestation of its presence, belonging to the world.
In his method, Daniil Kolotov and his team re-actualize the precepts of the neorealists and the French New Wave. The drama and characters of Fatality grow directly from the pulsating full-blooded reality of the underground, whose independent creative power provokes any, most unimaginable events. The plot, acting, editing violate many taboos of the official Russian film culture, which correspond to the problems of the film. At the same time, the director transforms the motif of the new-wave flanery of the heroes. The characters of the film are not distant observers in an alienated city – they fight for their place in an evil and beautiful reality. Their rapid movement around the city is a pursuit of an elusive world, taking it for themselves. The variety of graffiti on the dull sterility of the Moscow walls clearly declares the existence of the heroes and their position. Marginal boiling energy of the suburbs spills into the monotonous space of the city center, and the elusive moment of freedom freezes with an inscription right here and now.
