Thursday, February 11, 2010

Never Forget

4 comments:

Laila Fares said...

This is really amazing.
And my question is perhaps naive, but is she really doing this or is it some kind of montage by the film?

arturo said...

No montage, this is the real deal! Just an overhead projector to show what she is doing with the sand on the light-box. She is simply amazing and the story is very compelling and gripping, as you can see by the reaction of the audience. Anton was supposed to comment on this piece, since he speaks Russian and understands some of the context, although the subject matter is pretty clear.

Brittany said...

Truly astonishing to watch. I love this type of visualization... compelling and rare. Watching the intensity that she has when creating the pictures makes the piece even more captivating.

toha said...

It is difficult to comment on this because it is so great. So I will just try to translate the message...
This is about WWII. The speech the you hear after the first musical piece is the announcement of the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in 1941. This is a very famous speech and the voice and the words are very important. It says that Germany has invaded the Soviet Union without announcing the war.
After the sounds of the war you can hear a very famous song "Dark night". You can find the lyrics here.
After the next musical piece you can see that the woman becomes older very quickly. In Russian/Soviet post-war culture a woman as a mother of a soldier or a wife of a solder plays very important role. We have a lot of books and movies that try to express this idea. For example, in my city in Ukraine we have a monument. It is a monument of a woman. The monument is very tall and made from granite. The face of the woman is disparate so you can fill the pain of a mother that lost her son in the war. In the war that was not started by her homeland. In the war that nobody wanted in her country. When you enter the park where this monument is located, you start walking towards the monument. And it takes about 10 minutes to reach it. The monument visually becomes bigger while you are walking. And you start to hear slow music and the heart beat in a very low sound. I believe that this monument is a successful try to deliver the message.
The next scene is a grave of a solider. And it is important how quickly the picture transforms into the grave. It shows how quickly mothers lose their sons during the war.
I cannot find the lyrics in English of the next song, but it is about soldier how are dying in the war.
During the final scene you can see the mother with the son who are looking through the window and see a soldier. It seems like this is the memory of her husband and son's father.
The final text says "You are always here".
It is important to look at this image to understand how important this was is for the people of the countries that were the Soviet Union at that time.