Art & artists on film: Pavlensky #review

She extensively interviews him over months, as well as his actionist-wife, his lawyers, his artist friends, a gutsy judge who quit his job over working one of Pavlenksy's many prosecutions. The gaps left by lack of access to the Russian authorities she deftly fills with shadow play reenactments of court proceedings, Pavlensky reading his letters from jail after the fact, or his own footage including a ridiculous, secretly taped lie-detector test. We are looking into the lion's mouth.

Most importantly, Langemann shows the man and his actions, a Gesamtkunstwerk if there ever was one. She takes time to document his actions (you fear you might get tired but then you don't). Setting the main door of the secret service headquarters on fire only to demand to be tried for "terrorism" (the film's in-medias-res opener), nailing his scrotum to the cobble stone on the Red Square, cutting his ear off while sitting naked on the wall of a mental hospital. The latter is a conscious nod to Van Gogh, as all of Pavlensky's actions have (art) historical references and are meticulously carried out in specific symbolic spaces at specific symbolic times, like the "Day of the Police Officer".

If you think this to be silly agitprop or Abramovic-like self-stylisation, this film will thoroughly disabuse you of that notion. What is outstanding about Pavlensky is that he relentlessly reverses the power struggle and boils it down, providing the audience with an epiphany about the crack in the system: He is fearless. They are afraid. The only reason he is still alive is that he is highly intelligent, intuitive and always "on". Since they cannot nail him for longer sentences based on Russian criminal law, they try to get a psych evaluation to send him to an asylum indefinitely. He boycotts the very idea by refusing to talk to the state doctors during a month-long enforced hospital stay, which happens to fall under a sudden "quarantine" that forbids visitors. They have to let him go.

Asked by a judge what it is that he does --vandalism? terrorism? art?-- he plainly answers: It's a gesture. Asked what he does for work, he answers "I'm an artist." - "For which institution?" - "None." Confused silence. It is astounding to see how entirely baffled and helpless he leaves the seemingly almighty state powers, revealing the chaos and arbitrariness behind the militarized outward control. Why and how? Single-minded, selfless, focused and detached like a Buddhist monk, he beats the system on its own terms. "What should we do?" police officers ask each other, becoming participants in his actions as they get tangled up in his barbed wire. Arrest, jail, release, arrest, jail, release.

About his biography we learn little but what is necessary to relate to the very introspect and stern persona, whose face does light up when he smiles at his supporters from a courtroom cage. His two young daughters have (beautifully) scribbled happy people all over the family's spacious but ascetic apartment. Just as doubtful questions creep up in one's mind --how can he put his two home-schooled children through police raids and secret service surveillance-- Langemann intercuts thoughtful and straightforward responses from Pavlensky and his partner. Once Pavlensky mentions that he quit art school because he didn't want to be turned into a "service provider to manufacture statues of Lenin". Once his wife is asked in a stage interview whether their mothers aren't afraid for them and replies, yes, they don't understand what we do, and Pavlensky, well aware of the scope of his impact and the toll it takes, adds that the family cannot be taken hostage by threats.

As spectacular as Pavlensky's acts --he gets what he wants for Russia: international media attention for restrictions on freedoms--, as unspectular is the man's calm appearance as well as the film's carefully built dramaturgy that also includes spectacular, sweeping aerial views of downtown Moscow and the seductive opulence of a post-Stalinist night-time light show that that has the deceptive lure of Disneyland.

"He's a smart guy," says the ex-judge admiringly. And powerful enough to change (some) people's minds. Pavlensky is very well known across Europe but perhaps less so beyond, following in the footsteps of flashy Pussy Riot (friends and admirers) and a generation of political artists before him and that pay tribute to him on-screen. Let's hope we'll see this doc about art and life under a repressive regime across the international festival circuit soon.

The rare and pensively filmed close-up look behind the scenes of Russia's apparatus of power and its artist enemy #1 ends with a surprising little "action" itself.

by @JuttaBrendemuhl

image: courtesy DOK Leipzig