The Mad Prince: The Japanese
1988 | USSR | video novel, arthouse | 01:21:52 min.
Director: Boris Yukhananov
Scenario: Boris Yukhananov
Cameraman: Boris Yukhananov
Cast: Yevgeny Chorba

Critics of parallel cinema may classify this single chapter from a 1000-part video novel as extremist and shocking. It is one of the most complex, densely populated chapters of the video novel, immersed completely in the context of the so-called “new” or “youth culture” that developed in the underground in the mid-1980s. Using video to reconsider the basic thinking of “new artists” “on culture,” and “on life after death,” the question is posed: Will the former underground culture survive after it leaves the underground? Will it not be a stillborn child when it finds itself in common society?

The basis for the making of this film was a TV show to which many figures of the "youth culture" were invited. Boris Yukhananov turned this into a video project. This plot recurs twice in the film, forming a compositional counterbalance, at the beginning in the guise of a black-and-white television set, and at the end by means of the video action itself. Throughout the entire film we follow a Japanese man who is a kind of medium, a superhero, a bloated ghost of life after death, thus emphasizing the speculative spirit of the huge interest then being paid to "youth culture." His adventures begin at a lecture podium that is replaced by an autopsy table in a morgue, and they gradually move on to an endless ritual dance with death in its various forms.

The tragic inevitability contained in the film's main theme required a special tension in the narrative fabric, making it necessary to introduce a new video language. The video film is executed entirely in the technology of "fatal editing."

The film contains numerous secret layers that imitate classic and new wave cinema.

Dialogues seek to discover a post-conceptual linguistic environment.

The film is replete with autopsy scenes and nude episodes. Due to its contextual nature, its experimental language, the real-life nature of many characters, and the polemic nature that it takes toward the “youth culture” movement itself, to say nothing of the abundance of audacious scenes, the film has rarely been shown in public.