thread of DAU

coming this autumn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dau_(film)

I promise it's not pr0n, though some of the images are NSFW:

https://dau.xxx

Mad that this isn’t a thread about the Depend Adult Undergarment

from last year:

What is Dau? Well, Dau is a movie. Or ten movies. Or perhaps twelve. I wish I had all the answers – the production company, Phenomen Films, is notoriously tight-lipped – but despite cameras rolling on this mega-production back in 2006, with the shoot lasting almost a full six goddamn years, there’s been very little press coverage because of just how secretive and quite frankly dumbfounding the whole affair is. Imagine yourself in an average modern production office on the outskirts of Kharkov, a Ukrainian town of about a million and a half. Now imagine being re-dressed and entirely remade whether you’re an actor or an assistant, from hair to socks to underwear, in Soviet garb circa 1952 before being led to the connected set. Only it isn’t a “set” so much as it is a fully functioning city housed within an enormous brick building; a built-to-scale section of Stalin’s Moscow spanning 130,000 square feet.

Every lodging populated, every “extra” a working part of a time-displaced totalitarian society, exchanging period-appropriate Rubles for tins of Soviet food marked with 1950s expiration dates and living in fear of local security. Fully-stocked refrigerators, or as stocked as they would have been at the time. Working toilets with pipes measured to the exact dimensions of the era so as to make a specific flushing sound. Grandiose music blaring from mounted loudspeakers to set you on edge, if the gargantuan statues of arms and sickles don’t do the trick, and a ban on modern technology and words like “set” and “lighting,” or any anachronism that didn’t line up with the given decade being filmed, like if Westworld had a wing for the misery of post-war Russia.

https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/08/01/dau-art-imitating-life-on-an-unprecedented-scale

This thing seems to be going on in Paris at the moment. it sounds intriguing, although I still haven't got the faintest idea what it really is.

https://www.dau.com/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/arts/dau-paris-berlin-ilya-khrzhanovsky.html

I'm still totally unclear on what constitutes "real" in this footage!

if it does make it to london i'll definitely visit, but my main reaction is just where did they get the money for all this?

Enormous new article on this thing:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/26/inside-the-stalinist-truman-show-dau-i-had-absolute-freedom-until-the-kgb-grabbed-me

Containing an answer to devvine's question.

So if I have this straight, there are actually 14 features, one as-yet-unfinished "main" one and 13 seemingly more hyperfocused one? And also a series?

The wildest part to me is how little was filmed. Tbh though my reaction to the description of his supposed future project was "sign me up."

visited the Piccadilly office a few years ago to discuss possible involvement. we’ve all been on job interviews where character and personality is being screened even more than your skills / aesthetics / chops, but this was obviously, even as a discussion just to be involved as an installation contributor, an all in or all out situation. I’m a little disappointed in the wary criticisms being summarized in that Guardian article; what they were going for was very delineated, very clear, no surprises, and I did get the sense their radar was set to avoid taking on people who would have been traumatized / incapable of consent. They were not shopping for victims or mere subjects, though this was very much about hierarchy and conforming to the shared dream. Those offices were a different kind of reality. I can’t wait to see these films.

There’s a school of critical thought that believes no contextual details or backstory to a film — be they to do with its source material, the circumstances of its production, or its makers’ motivation — should be examined or factored into a review of it, that the final product up on the screen is the only thing that counts. In many cases, that’s correct. It’s an all but impossible approach to take, however, to “DAU. Natasha,” the first theatrical feature to emerge from the mammoth, multidisciplinary DAU art project — equal parts long-term film shoot, performance installation and “Truman Show”-esque anthropological experiment — intended to recreate the experience of everyday life under Stalinist oppression in a vast, fictitious Soviet research institution in the 1950s.

Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel's impressively punishing chamber piece is ostensibly self-contained, yet to view it with no knowledge of the DAU project feels tantamount to framing a single square inch of a large-canvas painting. As a sample of endeavor’s uniquely ambitious aims and eccentric execution, “DAU. Natasha” is thoroughly persuasive. A close-up character study of an institutional canteen waitress alternately seduced and abused by the scientists and officers she serves, it’s atmospherically vivid and emotionally agitating, and much of the suffering on screen feels duly lived rather than merely performed: an über-highbrow reality show of mindbogglingly elaborate conception yielding an experience of utterly authentic artifice, or vice versa.

https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/dau-natasha-film-review-1203516151/

and the first two features are now available to screen for 3 bucks a pop, the other 12 to be added down the line. they all have synopses and a hilarious number mention illicit affairs

https://www.dau.movie/en

From their login page:

DAU PROJECT is at the intersection of film, science, performance, spirituality, social and artistic experimentation, literature and architecture

sounds impressive but, uh, that's gotta be one helluva tangled, messy, confused intersection. in fact, I'm not even sure that it could be located in any known reality.

There has probably never been a better time to release a gonzo 30+ hour film project