Mikhail Lylov
2021Two Excursions into the Mountains
Mikhail Lylov
I was asked to make a short film about the ecology of mountain rivers in a particular place in Japan. After I started to edit the material, the idea to use Kafka’s short fiction story “Excursion into the Mountains” gradually took over. In the result, in the film one actually goes on two different excursions. First excursion has a responsible attitude to it, we investigate the problems and search for solutions in order to learn something useful. The second excursion unsettles that “learning”, perhaps makes one forget what has just been learned. Kafka’s “Excursion into the mountains” suddenly emerged in a strange light, when I stopped to think about the “mountains” as an allegory. After placing words of the story over the images to which they could rather literally refer, an unexpected environmental reading of the story appeared. The mountain started to talk and not being talked about: the insects, the river, the sand and the plants read Kafka aloud.
Two Excursions into the Mountains
Soils-Habit-Plants
Elke Marhöfer, Mikhail Lylov
In the Soils-Habit-Plants the camera attempts a transformation, which will enable the viewer to observe details of three vegetative protagonists and their environments. The objective is to discover the plants’ habits and document how they contract themselves with the elements of soil, water and air. This intimate and immediate observation is interrupted by the two reference-images: a historical photograph and results of the soils conditions’ laboratory test. This interstice insists on a narrative dimension of the observed environments.
Soils-Habit-Plants
Shape Shifting
Elke Marhöfer, Mikhail Lylov
We shot the film last year in Japan. It is a cartography of a particular landscape. This landscape can be found in many parts of Asia, in Japan it is called “satoyama”, literally meaning space between village and mountain. Satoyama is a membrane constructed by exchanges and encounters between non-human and human life. The agricultural and forestry productivity of this landscape is based on the increase of biodiversity. The more collaborations between species and cycles of materials are created — the more stable ecosystems and films can be formed.
Shape Shifting
