Issue 84 (2024) |
Aleksei Fedorchenko: Mitrofan Aksenov’s Sausage (Kolbasa Mitrofana Aksenova, 2023) reviewed by Ellina Sattarova © 2024 |
Aleksei Fedorchenko’s 2023 film Mitrofan Aksenov’s Sausage is yet another of the prolific filmmaker’s fanciful experiments with genre. If Fedorchenko described his debut feature First on the Moon (Pervye na lune, 2005) as well as his more recent effort, The Big Snakes of Ulli-Kalle (Bol'shie zmei Ulli-Kalle, 2022), as docu-fairy-tales (dokskazka), he opted for another hybrid designation for Mitrofan Aksenov’s Sausage—a cine-biblio-mystery (kino-biblio-detektiv). Fedorchenko himself appears here in the role of the lead detective, and the mystery he intends to unravel has to do with the life and work of the mostly forgotten Russian philosopher and scientist Mitrofan Aksenov, who anticipated the discoveries of Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein, specifically, the latter’s theory of relativity, but who remains still largely unknown, even in scientific circles. Fedorchenko is faithful in this project to his long-standing thematic preoccupations: a persistent irreverence towards and determination to destabilize established hierarchies; a related fascination with all kinds of hybrid forms; as well as a playful treatment of history and historical documents.
Funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Fedorchenko’s cine-biblio-mystery could not be farther in its approach to history from that of its sponsor. As Serguei Oushakine pointed out in his discussion of Fedorchenko’s 2010 drama Silent Souls (Ovsianki), the filmmaker’s insistence on blurring the distinction between the imaginary and the real invites us to “move beyond the obsessive (and often parasitic) fascination with forms of the past by inventing new points of origin” (139). Mitrofan Aksenov’s Sausage does not only re-issue this invitation but explicitly shows the violence that Russia’s current regime justifies through its insistence on a certain vision of the past. Fedorchenko’s investigation of Aksenov’s life, which takes him, among other places, to Kliazma, Baku, and Cartagena, is abruptly interrupted. Fedorchenko-the on-screen “detective” tells us that he is unable to take the next logical step in his research efforts—he cannot go Kharkiv, Iziaslav, as well as several other Ukrainian cities where Aksenov lived and worked. The reason why is perfectly clear—the TV in the background is playing Putin’s announcement of the beginning of the “special military operation.”
At the very least nominatively, Fedorchenko’s investigation seeks to fill in the gaps in the biography of a gifted but largely forgotten thinker, whose Wikipedia page is full of blanks: date of birth - unknown, place of birth - unknown, place of death - unknown... Even before Fedorchenko’s efforts are thwarted altogether, however, his search keeps stumbling onto more and more new gaps and failed leads. Even though Aksenov’s books are listed in the catalogue of the Russian State Library in Moscow, the librarian informs Fedorchenko that the books are missing. Fedorchenko-the detective tells us that he spent two years trying to locate Aksenov’s books in libraries across Russia—all in vain. When he goes to see Grigorii Malygin, the only living physicist in Russia who has written on Aksenov, his visit falls through due to Malygin’s illness. When Fedorchenko comes upon a publication on Aksenov that includes a photograph of the philosopher (the only likeness Fedorchenko has been able to discover in his search), a quick image search uncovers the deceit. It is a photo of the Russian philosopher Ernest Radlov, not Mitrofan Aksenov. Even when he tries to summon the spirit of Aksenov with the help of a Ouija board (Fedorchenko does not discriminate in his research methods), he is told that the spirit refuses to speak to him.
The seance is not entirely fruitless, however. Even though it is not explicitly acknowledged by Fedorchenko-the-detective in the film, Fedorchenko-the-director triumphantly uses technology to do what the Ouija board failed to accomplish—conjure Aksenov’s “spirit.” Earlier in the film, Fedorchenko, desperate to find out what Aksenov may have looked like, resorted to the help of a neural network. To test the technology, Fedorchenko asked it to generate images of Leo Tolstoy first; one image, in particular, struck Fedorchenko’s attention—a three-eyed Tolstoy, ironically described by our “detective” as “a handsome fellow.” The AI-generated Aksenov is equally “handsome,” and it is an animated version of this Aksenov that emerges, like a genie, through the screen of Fedorchenko’s phone during the supposedly failed seance and that then continues to appear in and disappear from the frame through the remainder of the film.
Fedorchenko’s fascination with images generated by neural networks stems from the same source as Fedorchenko’s interest in the figure of Aksenov and his interdisciplinary pursuits as a religious thinker, philosopher, and scientist—their inherent embrace of the simultaneous co-existence of seemingly incompatible entities. To produce an image of Tolstoy, Fedorchenko explains, the neural network combines and superimposes a large number of existing depictions of the writer at various stages in his life. The creation of a likeness of Aksenov is only nominally more complicated. While there are no extant images for the neural network to work with, it completes the task by producing an amalgamation of images of prominent male 19th century philosophers. The neural network is equally all-embracing in its choice of sources for representations of Einstein, using, among other “inspirations,” various objects commodifying the scientist’s image using Einstein’s own embrace of the mad-scientist trope. The AI-generated image of Einstein that Fedorchenko chooses speaks volumes about the radical hybridity promoted in his work—this “handsome fellow” is based on the Einstein planters one can easily find for purchase online and is not only sticking out his tongue but also has a glorious succulent growing out of his head.
The principle used by the neural network for the generation of images is an excellent illustration of Aksenov’s main thesis. Challenging the conception of the past and the future as void, absent from the fleeting present moment, Aksenov posits the existence of a fourth dimension. In his view, the present moment is simply an illusion, whereas time is, in its essence, a radical coexistence of the infinite multitudes of various temporal frames. In his own attempt to foster the co-existence of seemingly incompatible categories, Fedorchenko uses a plain old log of salami sausage to demonstrate Aksenov’s heady theorization, where all the separate slices of salami, like the various temporal frames in Aksenov’s conception of time, co-exist at any given moment. Just like the thickness of each slice of salami is determined by us arbitrarily, our perception may fragment time as it pleases but that does not change the fact that all the seemingly different temporal frames are exactly coincident.
Aksenov’s theory is resonant with Fedorchenko’s entire body of work that insists on exposing the arbitrariness of all kinds of boundaries. Mitrofan Aksenov’s Sausage may temporarily fool its spectator into believing that Fedorchenko is doing something radically different here from what he did in a lot of his earlier work. It may appear that he is indeed trying to fill the numerous gaps in Aksenov’s biography rather than invent facts and histories (as he did, for example, in First on the Moon, a mockumentary about a Soviet 1938 mission to the Moon). Towards the very end of the film, we see Fedorchenko edit Aksenov’s Wikipedia page, filling in its numerous blanks: date of birth—June 30, 1848, place of birth—Sudzha, Kursk Governorate, the Russian Empire; place of death—Iziaslav... The image he adds to the Wikipedia page (the AI-generated “handsome-fellow” Aksenov) as well as the design of the final credits quickly disabuse us of the notion, however, that Fedorchenko’s mission is to impose a single determinate version of events. The credits resemble a set of Wikipedia entries; the very first one lists the scriptwriters, reminding us that what we witnessed was, first and foremost, a work of fiction. Anyone who remains gullible enough even after seeing the credits might want to check Aksenov’s Wikipedia page. It is still full of blanks: date of birth—unknown, place of birth—unknown, place of death—unknown... No major edits have been made since the page was created in 2017. Fedorchenko’s engagement with history, unlike that of Russia’s current administration, insists on staying within the realm of the imaginary. Mitrofan Aksenov’s Sausage puts forth a vision of history that, similarly to Aksenov’s conception of time, refuses to declare any particular period as superior to other ones and thus in need of a violent reinstatement.
Ellina Sattarova
University of Southern California
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Works Cited
Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2019. “Imaginary Documents: Inventing Traditions in Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Cinema” in Rimgaila Salys, ed., The Contemporary Russian Cinema Reader. Boston: Academic Studies Press, pp. 137–143.
Mitrofan Aksenov’s Sausage, Russia, 2022
Color, 61 minutes
Director: Aleksei Fedorchenko
Scriptwriters: Lida Kanashova, Aleksei Fedorchenko
Cinematography: Dar'ia Ismagulova, Roman Vazhenin, Vasilii Poliakov
Animation director: Mariia Sediaeva
Editor: Dar'ia Ismagulova
Composer: Andrei Karasev, assisted by the neural network [RIFFUSION]
Cast: Aleksandr Zhigalkin, Argemiro Gamez, Aleksei Isakov, Lida Kanashova, Grigorii Malygin, Dzhabbar Mamedov, Tat'iana Savina, Sergei Travkin, Aleksei Fedorchenko
Producers: Dmitrii Vorob'ev, Aleksei Fedorchenko
Aleksei Fedorchenko: Mitrofan Aksenov’s Sausage (Kolbasa Mitrofana Aksenova, 2023) reviewed by Ellina Sattarova © 2024 |