Friday 24.02.
19:30
Sands Films
a.k.a. KEEP MY WORDS FOREVER
get your Tickets here
2015, Russia
Director Roma Liberov is present
rated 12 y. +
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvXXb7jyhfo
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Осип Мандельштам – высший образец жизни и работы Поэта в России.
Государство целилось убить и забыть его стихотворения.
Первое удалось: оголодавший, замёрзший, обезумевший поэт погиб в лагере. А стихи остались. Их сохранила жена, Надежда Мандельштам, запомнив всё написанное и дождавшись “вегетарианских времён”.
Благодаря ей мы знаем ни на что не похожее: “Сохрани мою речь навсегда за привкус несчастья и дыма…”
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Osip Mandelstam’s story epitomises an experience of Russian poets.
The Soviet state strove to kill him and to obliterate his poems.
They succeeded in extinguishing his life, but not his work: cold, starvation and torture drove him to madness and death in the camps, yet his poems lived on. His wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, saved them by memorising everything he had written and keeping them until less Siberian times.
Thanks to her, we know the incomparable ‘Keep my words forever, because of their taste of unhappiness and smoke..’
This is the story of the poet, remade at the intersection of different arts and genres: puppet theatre, design, computer graphics, and documentary.
* The movie exists under two different names in translation.
Please don’t be confused -they are used interchangably.
An article from the page of European Design Awards
The documentary ‘Save My Speech Forever’ tells a story of Osip Mandelshtam, one of the most significant Russian poets of the twentieth century. The poet’s rebellious spirit challenged the Soviet authorities and he was arrested for ‘counter-revolutionary activity’.
Mandelshtam was sentenced to deportation to Siberia and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on 27 December 1938, starved, sick, frozen and mentally ill. Witnesses remembered that during the last months of his life Mandelstam was succumbing to insanity. The name of Osip Mandelstam was prohibited for more than 20 years after he passed away. Only in the second half of the 20th century did Mandelstam’s creative work became well known and appreciated.
Mandelshtam’s wife Nadezhda literally saved the poet’s speech memorizing everything he had written. As it was too dangerous and illegal to keep any records containing Mandelshtam’s poetry for more than 20 years Nadezhda spent every night learning, silently reciting his poems and copying by hand in order to save them. Only thanks to her memory we can read these poems today.
‘Osip Mandelshtam is one of the most important poetic events that happened to the Russian language in the twentieth century. At the same time it’s one of the most tragic fates in the history of our literature. His poetry is extremely tied up to the epoch he lived in and its events’. (Roma Liberov, director).
The movie encompasses a wide range of various genres and mediums: documentary, motion graphics, collage, animation, digital art and puppet theatre.
We were extremely excited to take part in this project. We were responsible for the design of 21 animated chapters of the movie, which finally made a promotional trailer, a promotional poster and a series of editorial promotional illustrations.
The movie consists of twenty-one chapters telling about the meaningful events of the poet’s life. Each chapter is preceded by animation sequences using the visual language and symbolism of Orthodox iconography and Russian avant-garde at the same time.
Icon-inspired animation merged with the key images of Mandelshtam’s poetry aims to communicate the poet’s inner states.
Being accompanied by the subtitle ‘For all innocent victims killed by their country’ the movie structure refers to hagiographies of the first Christian martyrs and saints.
Images beholden to traditional iconography with richly tangible craquelure combined with the pioneering techniques of Russian Constructivist artists – collage and photomontage – illustrate that ambivalent state of being between Scylla and Charybdis of the two epochs faced by many liberal-minded people of that time.
As a part of the movie promotional campaign we designed a series of promotional editorial illustrations containing twenty-one Mandelshtam’s poems with illustrations opening each chapter of the movie.
Using most iconic and repetitive images of Mandelshtam’s poetry each illustration is a window into another time that is more real than here and now.
Graphic style of the illustrations embraces artistic methods widely used by the Orthodox icon painters and Russian avant-garde artists such as multidimensionality, reverse perspective, non-objective geometricity and colour symbolism. These techniques were rediscovered and rethought by the avant-garde artists in their effort to break out from the dominating representational art forms of the past.
These combinations of the old and the new, rethinking of old shapes and metaphors from the new perspective, conjunction of history and innovation are distinctive features of Mandelshtam’s poetry.