Enrique Vila-Matas Interview
This is eerily similar to the basic idea of Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder.
Khrzhanovsky came up with the idea of the Institute not long after preproduction on Dau began in 2006. He wanted a space where he could elicit the needed emotions from his cast in controlled conditions, twenty-four hours a day. The set would be a panopticon. Microphones would hide in lighting fixtures (as they would in many a lamp in Stalin’s USSR), allowing Khrzhanovsky to shoot with multiple film cameras from practically anywhere—through windows, skylights, and two-way mirrors.
The Institute’s ostensible goal was to re-create ’50s and ’60s Moscow, home to Dau’s subject, Lev Landau. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Landau significantly advanced quantum mechanics with his theories of diamagnetism, superfluidity, and superconductivity. He also tapped epic amounts of ass. Landau’s views on sex and marriage anticipated the Summer of Love by decades. (He and his wife, Kora, lived in an open arrangement he called a “spousal nonaggression act.”) His life, ready-made for a biopic, received a nightmarish final act after he crashed his car near Moscow in 1962. The physicist spent two months in a coma. The Nobel Prize ceremony was moved to his bedside.
I’d like to see this movie. If and when it ever actually gets made.
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Maybe it’s not so much a movie, but a cult?
Synecdochsibirsk?
It also reminds me of Synecdoche New York – but mostly it reminds me of a wonderful 80s Greek novel by Andrew Fraghias (The Crowd – I don’t think there’s an English translation around, though). I, too, would very much like to watch this film.