CINE FANTOM Film Club presents: a retrospective of the films of Mikhail Maximov

A film by Gordei Petric 

Mikhail Maximov is a graduate from, and teacher at, the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia in Moscow, a director, animator, and creator of numerous performances.

Maximov’s cinema exists in a different, parallel reality. It escapes the video art category, and is not embedded in the usual cinematic conventions. The artist creates hoaxes that are associated with the methodology of media art. His works draw their images from Andrei Platonov and Yury Mamleev, while plumbing the laws of computer games for stylistics. They combine location shoots with 3D modeling. The results are neuro-detectives in railway stations, churches and cemeteries, brazenly taking on the discourse about “Eternal Russia.”

His latest film, My Death, dedicated to the historical breakdown among eras and, in particular, the mysterious death of Alexander Men, was nominated for a Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival, and received the grand Spirit of Fire prize in a short film competition.

But that's not all. There is another Mikhail Maximov, one who experiments with the nature of the media, the mechanisms of social networks and SMM, one who insinuates himself into modernity and seeks its essence as Mamleev might have.

Russia's first retrospective of Maximov's work touches on all incarnations of one of the country's most original artists.