Made from surviving early 1990s 'hi8' videotape of "schwimmen," a teenage industrial/noise band from the (then-Soviet) city of Novosibirsk, and comprising footage shot entirely within and/or from the seventh-floor apartment where they lived and worked communally, "phenomenon" radiates a sense of cinematic immediacy, capturing the lost world of immanence of being and ultimately tapping into vital, uncertain energy of the ephemeral “paranormal” space - both historical and metaphorical - where the only metaphor is optical. The camera pans along frozen squares and zooms into details of the immediate surroundings - innocently reinventing tropes from video-art of the preceding two decades: the unit of “what happens” not an event, but an experience, as it falls oblivion together with the anonymous dreaming collective to which it occurred.
Made from surviving early 1990s 'hi8' videotape of "schwimmen," a teenage industrial/noise band from the (then-Soviet) city of Novosibirsk, and comprising footage shot entirely within and/or from the seventh-floor apartment where they lived and worked communally, "phenomenon" radiates a sense of cinematic immediacy, capturing the lost world of immanence of being and ultimately tapping into vital, uncertain energy of the ephemeral “paranormal” space - both historical and metaphorical - where the only metaphor is optical. The camera pans along frozen squares and zooms into details of the immediate surroundings - innocently reinventing tropes from video-art of the preceding two decades: the unit of “what happens” not an event, but an experience, as it falls oblivion together with the anonymous dreaming collective to which it occurred.
DirectorsAnna Tsyrlina,Sid Iandovka
