Phenomenon

Directed by

Anna Tsyrlina

Made from surviving early 1990s 'hi8' videotape of "schwimmen," a teenage industrial/noise band from the (then-Soviet) city of Novosibirsk, and comprising footage shot entirely within and/or from the seventh-floor apartment where they lived and worked communally, "phenomenon" radiates a sense of cinematic immediacy, capturing the lost world of immanence of being and ultimately tapping into vital, uncertain energy of the ephemeral “paranormal” space - both historical and metaphorical - where the only metaphor is optical. The camera pans along frozen squares and zooms into details of the immediate surroundings - innocently reinventing tropes from video-art of the preceding two decades: the unit of “what happens” not an event, but an experience, as it falls oblivion together with the anonymous dreaming collective to which it occurred.