Hello. My topic today is fairly complex. I suspect this is the first time that a director in the Soviet Union has ever stepped forward to speak publicly about video direction. Let’s begin by stating that this is a non-existent concept. First, the very topic of my talk reveals a certain boundary that must be drawn between video films and films as such. I will try to devote the first (introductory) part of my message to this.

Unlike film, video is a non-discrete art form. Video thinks in a single continuous line. Different authors, including those who are strictly semiotically minded, have considered the frame, the mid-range shot, or, at least, some kind of picture, to be the measuring unit for film. Unlike cinema, video does not think in pictures. I will now try to speak from the experience that I have practically and (following practice) theoretically acquired over the course of a three-year period of actual interaction with primitive video film, that is, with a VHS or Super 8 camera, mainly of Japanese or European production. Huge cassettes make it possible to interact continuously with the world for three or even four hours, while the very principle of audiovisual equality, located in the space of a video film, completely changes everything on which the author bases his work.

The fact of the matter is, when I speak about directing in video, I must first speak of a video author, because — and this is an essential feature of video production and video creation — the video director basically combines, or seeks to combine, the cameraman and director into a guiding force that determines the layout and development of the process of creating a video. One might also mention that this synthetic act of combining many into one (something you could even define as totalitarian), this act that is inherent in the video process of creating a video film, is also manifested in the desire of the camera to become one with the video author.

I distinguish three levels in this combining of many into one. Let’s give the object I will talk about now the name of “video centaur,” and let’s highlight three variants of this object: a video eye, a video body, and a video hand. In general, they comprise completely different principles of interaction with the world and the camera. When someone holds the camera up to their eye and begins working, never taking their eye from the camera’s viewfinder, at that moment they so become one, essentially becoming a living organism, that this camera hears and sees just like a person. The rather cocky phrase, “You have your head in your hands,” is, in fact, true in that moment when the camera is held to my head. This is unlike the kino-eye of Dziga Vertov, which is actually the eye of traditional film and in no way refers to an individual. We speak in our case of the eye of a centaur who possesses a single head plus an attachment in the form of a camera. As such, the video eye is the first principle of our interaction with the world.

A video hand implies a completely different relationship. With my video actors, I play a humorous, perhaps even silly game that is actually essential to my practice of “hatching” a work, if I may put it that way. I call it video karate. I imagine that my hand holds a video camera. (Basically, this is what I have done since the early ’70s, for a camera appeared in my hands as a private possession only a few weeks ago. A few years ago I was able to hold a camera in my hands and periodically feel what it was like to grip it. But in fact, the reality of our domestic Russian video output is a kind of video karate, that is, a hand liberated from the video camera . . . [laughter]. As such, I could do nothing but imagine holding a camera in my hand). This kind of creative activity is, primarily, deeply and essentially dynamic: I enter into a strange dynamic interaction with the world — in this case, with an audience — and I begin reading it, as if biologically becoming a video camera. This is an extremely useful prime element of my training. In a practical sense it determines all the foundations of the relationship we have discussed, all the diverse, often specific relationships that the video author, video actor, and world enter into. This world is omnipresent, sometimes cutting through, or separating the video actor from, the video author.

The video hand, the camera hand, is completely different from the video eye or the camera eye. The video hand implies an enhanced dynamic reading of the world, a higher energetic trust in the world. Moreover, it is during the shooting, the work of video karate, that the greatest amount of so-called dirt appears. But this is merely so-called dirt, for this notion refers to another manner of thinking and, accordingly, gives rise to completely different evaluative criteria. I could say that video allows the author to become one with the work itself, a process we sometimes observe in Picasso’s later drawings done prior to the invention of video film, but which predicted its emergence in the form of mythological characters.

I would now like to speak about the next element, also significant, the third stage of the author’s relationship with the camera and, as it were, the third version of that video centaur with which I began my rather shambolic talk. This is that the camera belongs to the body. I participate with my whole body, it’s as if I let this machine feed off of me. The camera may lie on my knee engaging in completely static relations with the world. I can put this camera to my forehead on one side and to a window on the other, hoping my head will not shake and that the window will not break; I can attach the camera to my shoulder, my backside, and so on. One way or another, it must belong to the entire body. This is very reminiscent of Grotowski’s relationship with the space of the stage, and the space of the place where he holds his training. Precisely at this moment all the elements of human psychophysics converge at a point in the body and, as it were, seek to break through all together, as if through the small door of a large room. This greatly enhances the dynamic energy of video film. The law is very simple: the tape reads and stores even the slightest details of our energetic state. You must trust the video camera, which essentially means you trust yourself, and, by extension, the viewer who will encounter your work on a TV screen, a projection screen, or some other place . . . for the time being there is no other. If you trust all that, then you will agree that the so-called dirt — whether that be a blurry image, noise stored on the tape, or the camera’s long wandering that shakes our eyes, in other words, let’s call it a drunken camera, or a drunken picture — all this dirt is quite important, for, as I see it (although I don’t insist upon it), this is where the material ripens and fills with energy. The material’s struggle with the author will later manifest itself as a sufficiently distinct composition — in the form of sufficiently distinct acting, or a brief manifestation of acting, or some concentrated event, or some emphasis that the actor adopts. But in fact the actor is no longer an actor, for an actor never exists independently as an image on tape, just as a video author does not exist independently on tape: they are always a derivative of their interaction. This is a crucial topic that relates directly to an aspect of video directing such as the work of the video author with the video actor. […]

The fact of the matter is that, in principle, video film cannot tell stories. Stories, plots, and narratives are not accessible to it. Only when video film is similar to traditional film and simply changes its technical means, and only when video film does not think of itself as a separate, special, completely different kind of art, does the precise moment arise when, employing the tools of traditional film (i.e., discrete thinking, the work of the cameraman, etc.), video film becomes capable of narrating one or another story. But as soon as we demand from this type of art that which belongs to it, once we ask the dolphin to swim, so to speak, and not to cough or bark on shore, at that moment the dolphin heads into open waters and refuses to send back to us a real, detailed, plot-based and simultaneously discrete world. It wants to swim and inform us how the water runs across its eyes, how the waves slide over its back, and to give us a feel for speed, continuous speed and going deeper — forgive me for this detailed description. […]

And so, the actor and the director. The video actor and the video director outline the proposed space of what is to be playacted. They outline this proposed space of playacting not only as regards behavior, which is something that theater is most often concerned with, but also as regards text, with which theater is not as concerned because most of the time (as is natural for theater) it has access to the text when entering rehearsals. In our case, no text can be presented to the video actor. The video actor’s text must be birthed. For only an individual who is birthing text is as sufficiently convincing, natural, and self-adequate as the video camera . . . which, shall we say, anticipates the actor. This is one of the most critical notions, related not only to video film, but also generally in regards to the principles of modern thought and youth culture, and the adequacy and desire of youth culture to correspond in full measure to the times . . . Now, this actor, in the moment that he gives rise to a word, essentially takes on the role of the author. This need for a contemporary feeling begins to be fulfilled in every second of the video playacting of which I speak. As well as every second of the video director’s work that defines the performance.

These rules of which I speak are determined by something else that I will call post-structuring. I’ll tell you briefly what that is. In principle, post-structuring is a fairly precise phenomenon that is particularly characteristic of video film. This is the method of layering a work, rather like piling up and generating a relatively free matrix (it’s not purely spontaneous, but defined in concentrated fragments, as often happens in jazz), from which the structure is further determined. The matrix is the total sum of material that the camera reads during the video author’s work. And this matrix, generated by the free, playful spirit of the actor and, as it were, harboring not only the result, but also the process of its creation, this matrix, as it were, goes on a journey. We can call this journey video editing. It is quite variable. Essentially, later on we have the opportunity to make an incredibly wide variety of films from this matrix. We can turn utterly tragic material into a video clip. We can change its sign and right there, inside the video clip, find the contours of some plot. We can compare, etc. But at the same time, the matrix itself will always remain. Variations may be added, and yet we will continue to have the same opportunity to create still another variation, and another, to manage the space and time, the chronotope, to manage everything that, in principle, is decided once and for all by an artist working in another art form. At the same time, in contrast to traditional film, where once we cut the film strip we never again take possession of the whole mass of material we have collected, here we never cut anything, we cut the air, as it were, while new options constantly present themselves, even as we still have access to the old ones. Thus, life seems to be in synch with its variations . . . Let’s recall Pasternak, and Andrei Levkin’s definition of the whole “fan,” that the fan is born of segments and moves in a circle that then produces a ball. In this we recognize the enormous opportunities that subjective video film possesses in reflecting and perceiving the world. In principle, directing must necessarily tune in to this strange, lofty manner of interacting with Being, for this camera was attuned to such lofty interaction from the very beginning.

As such, post-structuring lies at the basis of the very data of the video film. When I create most of my work in film precisely in this way, I do nothing new or special. I simply comply with the natural law that is inherent in this art form.

Boris Yukhananov, “A Theory of Video Direction,” excerpted from the Russian Samzidat publication Mitin Zhurnal, no 25 (1989), reprinted in Teatral’naja zhizn, no. 12 (Moscow, 1989), transl. for the present publication by John Freedman.

Dieter Daniels, Jan Thoben, eds. Video Theories: A Transdisciplinary Reader, published in 2021 by Bloomsbury Academic as part of their International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics series.