The feeling that gives birth to beauty Real artists always enter the established world from an unusual side, making there their small but bright window in which the light will burn as long as it is believed. Vaclav Fomich Nijinsky, a man with Polish blood and Russian soul, once discovered the amazing gift of dance, which became the main business of his life, the evil genius of his fate, which can only be called fatal. Suffice it to say that it took Nijinsky a decade, and perhaps a lifetime, to destroy stereotypes about the female beginning of ballet dance and to give his proof of the ability of a male dancer to be not just a partner of ballerinas, but an independent creator-artist.
Nijinsky’s revolution was his unsurpassed technique. According to the memoirs of Václav Bronislava’s sister, it was impossible to catch when he finished one step and began the following: “He was part of the music itself, disembodied and ephemeral.” Diaghilev called him the “miracle of dance”, the audience – the “god of dance”, but the most objective assessment of himself was probably Nijinsky himself in 1919, before he was finally recognized as mentally ill. The diary was written by him in the Swiss town of St. Moritz, where he stayed with his wife Romola and young daughter Kira after a painful break with the dance world, waiting for the end of the First World War. This curious work has only recently become available to the Russian-speaking reader, and abroad the diary entries of Nizhinsky have become an invaluable source of the unknown side of the personality of a great man.
According to director Paul Cox, who filmed Nijinsky’s diary, he first heard about it in the 60s of the last century on the radio, where excerpts from the text were read by actor Paul Scofield. The idea of creating a feature film firmly seized him, and reading a copy of the diary was the decisive moment. In the 90s, he managed to contact Kira Nijinskaya, who approved the idea of the film, but the final version of the picture came out in the early XX century. For Paul Cox, who left the world this year, The Diaries of Vaclav Nijinsky was not the first documentary about famous people, but perhaps his most perfect work about Vaclav Nijinsky, a pure and absolutely open look into his soul, forever closed to the outside world, when the dancer was not even thirty years old.
The key role was played by the idea to build the film only on monologues from the diary, pronounced by the voice of actor Derek Jacoby. He met Cox on the set of Molokai. The story of Damien’s father, where he played a major role. Under the rhythm and tonality of Jacoby’s voice were gracefully selected classical music and melodies of contemporary composer Paul Grabowski. The rest and most of the content is devoted to visible manifestations of the harmony of the Soul and Body, which many are trying to find and pay a high price for it.
In the multi-layer visualization fit stage productions, bearing both a certain and free character, staging of the family life of Nijinsky and his entourage at the time of the creation of the diary, frames of nature. The emphasis is not only on the nature of the images, but also on their repetition. They go through a certain painful cycle, as if feeling the inevitability of a fatal omen. In accordance with the profession of the main character, the director gave his film the character of a dance. In motion are not only human images, but also nature - swaying tree branches, running water, birds. A number of long continuous ballet scenes recorded by the camera make it part of the overall dance performance, blurring the line between spontaneous and debugged manifestations of the plot.
Paul Cox did a decent job that put a piece of his personal life into. The face of the girl, who appears in the footage at the end of the film, belongs to his own daughter, captured at the age of three. And this girl's name is Kira, too. Her pretty face is full of feelings, the presence of which for Nijinsky was a sign of God. Feeling belongs to everything, it is the basis of Love. Paul Cox’s film was a recognition of this director in his feelings for the beautiful, expressed as symbolically as Nijinsky’s work.