Short films by Ivan I. Tverdovsky (part 3) Tverdovsky’s work in the third year of VGIK “As if I’m waiting for a bus” is the most famous of his short films in Runet, which is not surprising, this is his most gloomy work, seemingly unsophisticated (think, meeting, drinking and casual sex), but, in the final, taking the viewer by the throat with a brilliantly rhymed monologue of the heroine and a video sequence in which she moves away from the camera to a stop. This film could be called by analogy with Blok’s poem “Night, Street, Lantern, Pharmacy”, because the hopeless cyclicality of Russian life, the complete absence of any changes for the better in it, coupled with poor life and drunkenness, is shown by Tverdovsky incredibly and stunningly convincingly.
The dream of getting on a bus that will take away from this life, and he does not come, and the routine strangles like a loop - all this is conveyed through the smallest, barely noticeable visual (for example, a fly crawls on the walls of a mug, unable to get out of it) and acoustic nuances (soundtracks - have always been a strong side of Tverdovsky's films, both short and feature-length), which indicates the sense of the frame, the ability to speak with the viewer outside the box. In a short meter of Tverdovsky, so that he did not shoot a documentary or feature film, there is absolutely no “water”, which cannot be said about the same “Toss”. “As if waiting for the bus” was filmed, like many other short films by Tverdovsky in a game format, mimicking the document (like “Snow” and “Dog High”). What is impossible to capture in real life is simulated and simulated, but very skillfully. Like a strange flower sprouting through the asphalt, symbolic generalizations grow in Tverdovsky’s films from documentary, everyday material, while growing organically and naturally.