Evgeny Yufit
1961 - 2016Yufit first became famous for his macabre short films, which, like the films of Guy Maddin, often looked as though they had been made during the 1920s or 1930s. In the 1990s, Yufit began making features similar in style to his shorts, with plots often centered on genetic experimentation and pseudoscience. He is often described as a necrorealist. He died on 13 December 2016 in Petergof.
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Деревянная комната
Vladimir Maslov, Evgeny Yufit
Tatyana Verkhovskaya, Vladimir Maslov
The protagonist of The Wooden Room is a director of documentaries, who lives with his wife - who is as stoic as he - in an isolated hut in the woods. The director is obsessed by filming marginal events in life. The closer he can get to these events with his camera, the more he becomes involved with them. In the end he falls victim to them. The film, with no dialogue and hardly any sound, is an experimental meditation on the complex, continually-changing relationship between a film-maker and his subject.
The Wooden Room
Прямохождение
Evgeny Yufit
Aleksandr Anikeyenko, Sergei Chernov
The main character is crazy about about depicting various anomalies in art. Accidentally he finds a cinematography archive which makes him advance a completely new theory on the reasons why humans became bipedal. Yufit proceeds with the plot by describing a scientist struggling against the epidemic wave of anomalies in the physical and mental world thematically started in his other films. This time the struggle takes place on the background of paleoanthropology, psychoanalysis and modern art. As materials of the Museum of Anthropology and other archives are included in the film, it oversteps the boundary between a feature film and documentary.
Bipedalism
Спаси и сохрани
Aleksandr Sokurov
Cécile Zervudacki, Robert Vaab
Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The universality of the theme of eternal struggle between the soul and the flesh is conveyed through the absence of specific reference to time or place: although the film seems to begin in 1840, its surreal mode effortlessly accommodates an automobile and the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” on an off-screen radio. Focusing on passion from a woman’s perspective and downplaying plot, Sokurov explores his subject in exquisite detail, capturing not only the heat of passion but also the quiet moments before and after and the innocent sensuousness of the body.
Save and Protect
Серебряные головы
Evgeny Yufit
Sergei Chernov, Vasili Deryagin
The necrorealist science fiction plot involves a team of scientists attempting to cross a human being with a tree, and a special unit dispatched to hunt down the zombie-like mutants created in a previous, failed experiment
Silver Heads
Рыцари поднебесья
Evgeny Yufit
Sergei Chernov, Igor Bezrukov
A military group of alpinists are selected to carry out a secret mission. The fate of humanity depends on their success. The rules of the mission require the death of each participant once his or her task is accomplished. After killing one of their colleagues and splitting into several groups, the alpinists continue their journey. But the human unconscious doesn’t follow military orders. Having once committed murder, the “knights” can’t control their desire to kill. They forgot their mission… and kill each other instead. —University of Pittsburgh
Knights of Heaven
Daddy, Father Frost Is Dead
Evgeny Yufit
Ivan Ganzha, Anatoliy Egorov
A biologist, obsessed with the idea of writing a treatise on a new kind of mouse, becomes witness to a number of bizarre and horrific events, from his son's suicide, to the S&M engaged in by respectable middle-aged men, to his own family's psychic morbidity.
Daddy, Father Frost Is Dead
Лесоруб
Evgeny Yufit
Violence in the snow! One of the most radical shorts ever made behind the iron curtain, a special document of the Necrorealists' art group, in the former USSR. "Lesorub" (Lumberjack) is a reaction full of energy and morbid rage against the rigid rules of socialist realism - Claus Loeser, Gegenbilder
Lumberjack
Убитые молнией
Evgeny Yufit
Aleksandr Anikeyenko, Aleksandr Maskalin
An anthropologist investigates the origins of human evolution. She had suffered a mental trauma during her childhood when her father, a submarine captain, died during the war. This trauma periodically destabilizes her condition. The ghosts of a prehistoric past and a violent death collide in the subconsciousness of the scientist to give birth to an unexpected theory of the origins of human beings.
Killed by Lightning
Весна
Evgeny Yufit
One of the most structured of Yufit’s reels with an elaborated montage work. This film combines three diverse worlds in an absurd manner to show the author’s passion for black humour: traditions of the avant garde cinematography of 20s, the social motives of contemporary Russia, and forensic medicine. —arsenals.lv
Spring
Санитары-оборотни
Evgeny Yufit
A young sailor descends from a local train. He goes to a nearby forest, which is full of strange men in medical uniforms behaving in an absurd and eccentric manner. The sailor falls under their influence and masochistically gives himself up to them only to be disemboweled by the werewolf orderlies. The sailor’s last unconscious image is a “white ship sailing towards the horizon”—a Soviet symbol for happiness and joy.
Werewolf Orderlies
Сокуров
Viktor Tikhomirov
Aleksandr Sokurov, Igor Bezrukov
Poetic portrait of a filmmaker. The famous director reflects on creativity and love. His friends and associates take part in the film: artist Vladimir Shinkarev, engineer Vladimir Nikolaev, actress Elena Kramer (Spiridonova), director, film critic Oleg Kovalov, necrorealist directors Yevgeny Yufit, Igor Bezrukov.
Sokurov
Вепри суицида
Evgeny Yufit
About Sado-masochism, suicide and the irrational nature of the human spirit. The irrationality of the human psyche, sadomasochism and suicide are the leitmotifs of this film. The documentary footage of airplanes and pilots – symbols of courage and honour – become an unexpected counterpoint to the main structure of the film. The combination of documentary footage and poetic storytelling with the inclement northern setting reinforce the ascetic atmosphere of Suicide Monsters and give its self-destructive characters a heroic and noble appearance. —arsenals.lv
Suicide Warthogs
Мужество
Evgeny Yufit
A three-minute long insight into the life of completely unusual people – a group of pacifists forced into hiding in the cellar of a ruinous house to escape a war tribunal. The difficulties of war are manly endured by the film’s characters. This film, like most of Yufit’s works, shows his love of 1920’s avant garde cinema, which was considered the highest pinnacle in cinematography. The director believes the art of moving pictures was more heartfelt before sound and colour. “The development of technologies is not a particularly positive thing for human existence,” says Yufit. —Arsenals Film Festival
Fortitude
Riba
Moira Tierney
Evgeny Yufit
In 2000, Masha Godovannaya curated a programme entitled Avant-Garde Alternatives: An Evolution of American Experimental Film, which went on tour in Russia, making stops in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. We visited necro-realist film-maker Yevgeny Yufit at his house beside Lake Seliger, helping him repair the house we stayed in and, in exchange, being lavished with the fresh fish that landed in his nets every day. This film is a tribute to Yufit, who died in St. Petersburg in 2016.
Riba
