Director: Practice is a very important moment. There is also a psychological side to it: it is as if you had your head in your hands. You see, what a pleasure!

Photographer: I know what pleasure is.

D: Stop! Now, let’s examine it. My first postulate is theoretical: you must not think of a frame, but of a line instead. I mean, one single, uninterrupted movement of the camera through space, an audiovisual space. Reality can produce not only images; it also generates sound. It cannot stop making sounds; its silence is sound.

You know, a long time ago I tried to make videos, even if I had not heard that word. I used to take a piece of paper and write on it. I wanted to fix my impressions and my life in this world, my fantasy about this world. From it I came up with some very strange novels. Following the same principle of fixing reality I made magneto-films. For ten days I went wandering in the provincial town of Voronezh trying to record this life. I wanted to fix the town itself on a tape recorder and make a commentary on it. After that I edited the recorded material, added something to it and novels came from that. In a very rough way, I was making videos.

I have a video camera now. Look at how many possibilities I have! I can move a hand holding the camera. It is absolutely a new technique of learning. It is this way that cameramen and authors must be taught. The difference between cameraman and director exists no more.

P: So you are already playing another role, aren’t you?

D: With my hand I can move the camera, through which I see the reflection of objective reality, for the camera sees everything. Nevertheless, there is one nuance that must be explained.

The camera sees everything, and while I am filming I can immediately make comments on the images. Hence, the camera will fix on a tape what I think and what I feel in that very moment. At the same time, the camera always interacts with reality. Counting on an already familiar psychological level of methodology, I can disturb this reality by flinging an actor who is listening to how I live with this camera into its midst. After that we can do jazz riffs, and put ourselves in a situation of swing: that is, mutual improvisation. The actor can play his own music in accordance to how I capture him on the tape, or to how the video author is working at that moment. We are making our own music saving it on the videotape as both sound and image.

In my opinion Pavel Florensky’s pivotal essay on reversed perspective placed a boundary between illusionism and artistry itself in culture. Cinema was always left behind: it made and still makes illusionism. With a video camera we can “distort” reality, that is to say we can utter our thoughts and emotions about it. We don’t utter reality, but ourselves. We don’t construct reality as cinema does.

It is possible to say “reflect” instead of “distort,” but is it reflecting reality or ourselves?

P: Reality.

D: No, never ever. Who is interested in reality?! What is interesting are man and the Lord Almighty.

In my film Reverse Perspective I give these words of Florensky as a preamble: “When the perception of reality is vivid, we find uninterrupted stream, flow, change and struggle; this perception constantly plays, sparkles, and pulses; its internal contemplation never stops as it does in dead models of things. Just so, with its internal beating, shining, and playfulness the House ('World' would be a better word for it) exists in our perception. The artist must and can show his perception of the House, but not move the House itself to the canvas.”

So what did I do then? In Moscow I shot a women’s toilet. Here the ideas of a theatre with a moving structure, the idea of Theatre Theatre could be realized in a grandiose manner. I toss a girl in there. A women’s toilet – it is... it is like a place of free speech in England...

P: Hyde Park!

D: Hyde Park, but in Moscow. What only don't they say! And how only don't they behave! It is an incredible zone of free manifestation. It is anti-world coming from a woman.

Only video can save this zone on a tape connecting it with the personality of the perceiver. The camera reads this zone as if penetrating through it towards the author of the film, trying to get from the author’s personality his emotions and thoughts about the material entering the camera. It is fantastic! In the camera there is a reflection of the filmmaker’s worries, the trembling of his hands, somebody cries to the camera, somebody tries to hide himself from the camera. Darkness and dim light, figures, and again darkness, but the camera can also hear and nobody can close its ears. The camera’s adventures become what counts most in this subject...

After that we filmed fights: Biryulovo, Biryulovo-Tovarnoe, Khimki-Khovrino [Districts in the outskirts of Moscow]. Real terrible fights. We could go into the crowd and fight with the camera, but that was a pity for the camera.

We tried to make a cinema-painting from the lights on the Nevsky Prospects in Petersburg during the celebrations of 7th November. In other words, we were trying through the reading of one reality to give back our reverse emotions in the same second. That is the “reverse perspective” that video provides.

What is accessible to cinema is accessible to video. But now I want to speak about what is accessible only to video.

If you are interested only in reality, just place the camera somewhere. Andy Warhol was the first to cross the boundary between old and new cinema. He placed his camera opposite the [Empire State] Building in New York and left it there for a few hours. This way the building existed before the camera during all this time. This same existence became the subject of the film. It was a revolution. He didn’t know yet what would follow, but he had already rejected everything done before.

For the viewer this rejection was considered excess. This film seemed boring, lengthy, but the culture of perception is gradually changing and the nuances not noticed earlier become very clear to the viewer of the future.  A new aesthetic canon shows itself here: the rhythm is heard in all its details and curves. Those episodes that earlier seemed dead become alive now.

The unit of the video is not the frame; it is the cassette. In the process of filming I only used the pause button. The entire tape, the original tape is the matrix. Afterwards we can make copies and do our editing the way we want. This way video can exists as theme with variations. The variation is any tape made subsequently from the matrix. You can do the editing endlessly. This is a grand moment. It is like a clan, a tribe. Following Darwin, it is like developing a species, with principles of survival laws. All the same, it is true that is possible to degenerate into kitsch; to make a farce from tragic material; to make marionettes from people. Nevertheless, it is always possible to buy another cassette and do the editing once again.

A new language is born in the realm of video. It is close to the language of poetry with all that harshness which it can be capable of. Harshness in the subject and in the presentation of the material.

P: And what about Aristotle?

D: Why on Earth Aristotle? We are now in the 20th century.

P: But progress is not possible in art.

D: “There is no progress” – these are just words. Luckily, there is progress, because techniques progress. It is generally a very questionable term, very bookish and pedantic. More precisely it is a questionable thought. Why are we talking about progress? Now we are talking not about progress, but about changes. There are changes, and they are evident.

P: Well, are they positive or negative?

D: In a cultured mind the notion of “bad or good” for what concerns art was annihilated a long time ago. A moral approach cannot exist here, we are in a domain beyond morality. And it is a domain beyond aim. That is why if we want to talk about it, it is necessary to speak openly. Morality exists only in matters that often have a reverse side of immorality, politics, and something else. Where there is morality, there is immorality...

I have a secret thought that reality is cleverer than me. And what seems to be of little interest to me today, becomes fabulous tomorrow. This is very paradoxical, but the most careful relation to culture belongs to the avant-gardists. It is they who scrutinized drafts and sketches. We condemn the avant-gardists for destroying, but they were collectors and keepers. They were the most scrupulous artists. They scrutinized even the tiniest details. They didn’t refuse what seemed dirty and empty. In the 20th century this became absolutely evident. It is they who noted that just a line or a stroke, or a gesture of the artist were emotionally charged and retained the author’s personality. They might belong to a genius, or be banal, may be revolutionary, or may be senseless.

After my adventures in the domain of academic culture I have understood that professionalism is only fiction. I mean the kind of professionalism that is learned in institutes, particularly at the Cinema Directors Faculty. It is not enough to say that this notion is chaotic, it simply does not exist. Turning to “the underground,” I see that the most timely ideas of academic culture have existed here for a long time and have been cultivated without wasted words.

On the other hand, being involved in small or particular things, the avant-gardists lost universality, for it is an endless process, an endless voyage amongst diversities. You may not come back from it. Academic culture is occupied with making itself a tradition. Ultimately, only the coupling of tradition with the avant-garde provides the possibility of creating a universe.