In conjunction with the beginning of the “Boris Yukhananov Cinema” online retrospective, streams of which may be watched on our website and Vkontakte, we publish an article about the film that opens the screenings. Boris Nelepo tells us why The Mansion, despite the abundance of historical and documentary elements, should be perceived not as a documentary, but as a ghostly portal to an unknown ghostly world.

A year and a half ago, I was at a festival in Mar del Plata. Heading to my room on the last night, I found myself standing before a door that I previously had not noticed. This was not my first time staying at the Grand Hotel Provincial – a great monument to the unfulfilled hopes associated with this city. Opened ceremoniously in the middle of the last century, the Provincial was the largest hotel in Argentina, and the casino it housed was the largest in the world. A forgotten pavilion stood behind a magic gate. Abandoned rooms full of utensils, dishes, and even plumbing. For ten years, this part of the Provincial was boarded up. "As soon as the bridge was crossed, the ghosts were not slow to appear." The remains of a former life remained intact in the womb. I wandered about the place until morning's first light, the first guest in these corridors for years.

Boris Yukhananov's The Mad Prince: The Mansion (1986/2017) is also a strange, ghostly portal. My story about him can only be akin to my dream tour of that sad imperial hotel. Strictly speaking, we have before us a key artifact in the history of cinema – the first full-length film shot on VHS in the Soviet Union, capturing images of the country's first independent theatre company, Theatre Theatre. Like all names invented by Yukhananov, Theatre Theatre resists the corrector's impulse to edit out errors. The most important thing in this name, written several different ways, is drowned in the gap between the doubling of “theatre.” This gap is the space of B.Yu.'s constant elusiveness, his exotopy.

How does one look at the '80s from today's standpoint? One pole is the film Summer, the other is Cargo 200. Perhaps if you were to superimpose one film on the other with a dissolve, you might get a more or less convincing image. Only you won't find Yukhananov's world on this map. Yes, this is an irresponsible statement, for I am a tourist here – I was born two years after most of the film was shot. I watch and rewatch The Mansion, mesmerized by its beauty; as Jacques Rivette's heroines Celine and Julie “got lost in lies,” I find myself in a mysterious house that is extremely difficult to describe.

Three decades before immersive theatre came to Russia, Yukhananov's spectators wandered around a Leningrad building where action took place in various rooms. For a short time Theatre Theatre occupied a huge collapsing mansion. Here, its first productions were rehearsed and performed several times – The Misanthrope, Monrepos, and possibly Ha-Ha-Funerals. The atmosphere was electrified by the myth of Vyborg's Monrepos Park: “The park opened up to me like a huge message from the 19th century, from a man who was called Baron von Nicolay. He created an artificial park, and we moved along its paths and realized that only in this movement could you know yourself. Monrepos presented me with instantaneous time travel, as it were” (Boris Yukhananov).

The supporting structures of The Mansion, which runs just over an hour, are five large scenes. In “Prologue” the founder of the rock group Obermaneken, Andrzej Zakharishchev Von Brausch, draws the opening captions with lipstick on a car windshield. In the “New Artists” scene, filmed in a riot of black and white, Gustav Guryanov, Timur Novikov, Oleg Kotelnikov, and Ivan Sotnikov play “the first uprising of the intelligentsia.” Then, in an empty room, we see a sketch – "Talk to Me Like Rain and Do Not Bother to Listen" – performed by Larisa Borodina, and based on a Tennessee Williams one-act. Next up is a conflict between Yukhananov and young actress Ada Bulgakova, who came from the world of the rock groups Secret and Alice. Finally, her “Confession of an '80s Girl” is a heartbreaking monologue about what it means to be a woman.

The objective value – the jewel even – of The Mansion is obvious. It is a time capsule that has preserved both scenes from the life of the Soviet underground, and an anthology of theatrical practices innovative for that time: a site-specific performance, a happening with commentary, an improvisational game etude, and finally, paradoxical theatre. But true as that may be, describing the true beauty of The Mansion is not achieved by a mere listing of what this film consisted of when it first appeared. Moreover, the author is far too present for this to be merely a historical document.

This imperceptibly completed film, which appeared suddenly today for no reason, like that portal, is the first chapter of The Mad Prince video novel in 1,000 cassettes. Four films from this cycle – Playing XO, Fassbinder, Esther, and The Japanese – are relatively well known and have long been included in the canon of Russian video. This dream project, filmed in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, was never completed. Yukhananov planned at least sixteen chapters. He calls his 1,000 cassettes the matrix – perhaps this is where Ilya Khrzhanovsky took the word, with which he also defines the complete footage of Dau? As in Dau, the documentation of fiction (fiction and documentary) is transformed by editing footage into finished and very different works. Even the tense scene of the quarrel between the director and the actress, which the eye trained by contemporary censorship seeks to see in the crooked mirror of a discourse about “power,” is also a game. As in the "New Artists" scene where a painter announces that he is now an actor who will play a painter. In The Mansion, playfulness determines everything, although it has not yet become a game structure of “playing XO”... The world around us bewitches and enchants in an almost pataphysical way: “It is evening, 6 o’clock in the morning, the Peruvian Abradacabrists are engaged in a new search.”

Yukhananov took the words “the ha-ha-funerals of a snout” from a telegram in Chekhov's story “The Darling.” You can shout them, you can choke on them, you can cry them out – "you want to get drunk with laughter." Yukhananov plays with the first video camera he ever owned as he does with these words. A completely different world is born of the camera's movements. For me, The Mansion is a journey of light and color. Visions of Orpheus (a journey from male to female?): Yukhananov turns the lighting on and off for his actors, and his camera flickers, mixing green and purple in a way that the finest artists could not achieve. Stop any frame: the resulting image will be a bewitching vision. Yukhananov constantly walks into the frame with a flashlight or spotlight, the light of which overloads the camera, and produces rays like those that drove Philip Dick crazy in Valis, black holes, sharp contrasts in lighting. The video does not keep up with the light: only here can you see how “strings” of light hang in the image (as in a movie house, hair sometimes gets into the projector). Many years later, the symbol of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre would become a light bulb.

Almost the only thing left in The Mansion from The Misanthrope is a portrait of Moliere. Ada Bulgakova shows her photos as she dances the cancan. The Mansion, filmed in long plans that rarely were edited, is a revolutionary video feature. But VHS does not allow for the dissolves that we spoke of earlier. Olga Borodina sits on a couch, a second later she disappears. This shot is the best proof that we are faced with some kind of fictional Rivettean world. Yes, more and more I think this video is not a document.

Those individuals that we see in fading frames with static are no longer Yukhananov, not Bulgakov and Von Brausch, but angels who came to rest in this abandoned video house. And that is how they are filmed. I want to continue visiting them, those who were not expecting the collapse of an empire, who didn't how to spell the word “video,” and thought that the word for “avenue” was of masculine gender. “I'll go to the movies, I'll sit in a dark hall, and listen to what fictitious people say. And so one day, having returned from the movie house at about 11 o'clock, I will look in the mirror and see that my hair has turned completely white, and I will understand that I have lived so long in this hotel.”