There Is Still More to Come: The Films of Masha Godovannaya
“In Masha Godovannaya’s experimental films, intimacy is associated with an activist fervour, while a well-targeted irony at the level of editing and gesture nevertheless affords space to an uncompromising empathy with the small and vulnerable. Masha’s overwhelmingly personal view highlights the structural and political place of sensuous imagery and reveals the absurdity and machismo in the self-representation of political ideologies. Her feminist, queer and decolonial methodology is not just an idea that permeates the filmmaker’s work, but a method that forms the basis for editing heterogeneous materials, from film fragments and found video footage to her own material and the films of other filmmakers that have been reinterpreted through editing. Defragmentation, layering, interspersing and analytically separating images as well as collective collaborative labouring with other artists and queer kinfolks comprises a queer strategy where “decolonizing vision means changing the entire order of things.””– Katerina Beloglazova
Masha Godovannaya will be in conversation with Guy Sherwin after the screening.
Programme:
Tomorrow I Failed Completely
Masha Godovannaya, 2020, 6’30 min
Combining 16mm film and digital video, with poetic storytelling, the film is built on mundane actions and narratives of an individual who tries to keep herself alive, safe and sane in the times of the Encounter with the catastrophe (the Covid-19 outbreak, national lock-downs, self-isolation, closed borders and the ensuing economic crisis), while escaping into writing and filming in order to imagine the better future.
I Keep the Greatest Distance from Myself
Masha Godovannaya, 2016, 5’30 min.
A video poetry conjured by one phrase from Charles Pennequin: “je ne m’approche pas tant que ça de moi”.
Who Said There Will Be a Walk in Time
Masha Godovannaya, 2018, 42 min
A visual study conducted in collaboration with “queerANarchive” and together with the local queer community of Split, Croatia, in April 2018. Taking kinship as a living experience of mutuality, the film sketches forms and outlines the margins of queer kinships lived and practiced by the local queer community of post-socialist Split. Through a series of interviews with queer individuals and video observations of the city, the interdependence of political, social, economic and cultural contexts that affect, shape and redefine queer kinship is revealed.
What for?
Masha Godovannaya, 2022, 5 min
“An articulation of what is unexplainable but felt. Touching what touches us and leaves us in a state of confusion, feeling empty, alone and questioning. Touch is an act of orientation.” – Keith Sanborn
The City Bridges Are Open Again
Masha Godovannaya, 2020, 9 min
An experimental short found-footage film based on and constructed from films by Sergei Eisenstein Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927) as well as from two cinematic improvisations based on his unfinished Mexican project (¡Que viva México! (1979) and Sergei Eisenstein. Mexican Fantasy (1998)). It’s an attempt to provide a version of his incomplete Mexican project creating a visual story of a utopic revolution-about-to-happen.
There Is Still More to Come
Masha Godovannaya, 2024, 14 min
There Is Still More to Come is a cinematic wandering through the streets of St. Petersburg in 2022, a city, that is intimate and familiar to the filmmaker. The city lives the reality of a war that is "far away" but nevertheless haunts it and infiltrates the human relations of its dwellers. The bifurcated gaze created by the simultaneous use of two cameras depicts a leaden feeling of the city caught in a state of animated suspension. Through an accentuated encounter of the visual and the sonic, the film-stroll becomes a direct speech of the narrator about what she distinctly heard and listened to in the reality of this walk - the unseen but unescapably sensed hauntings in the urban space.