Never-ending conversation. Mamleyev

A man crosses a dark urban landscape. Words which seem to have been spoken from another dimension transfigure him. Here’s the famous Russian writer Yuri Mamleyev playing himself. Considered as the founder of “metaphysical Realism”, Mamleyev traces in his texts an unsettling, violent, grotesque, and uncanny territory causing outrage and scandal. Often associated to Dostoïevski, whom he is deeply influenced by, as well as Kafka, Gogol and Poe, Mamleyev works with the metaphysical and esoteric energy of language and with the absurd as “fracture” of the real. Valentina Antonova and Dmitry Mamuliya provide the writer’s black, magic universe haunted by death with a cinematographic body. In the sixties, his books, forbidden by the regime, secretly circulated in the Soviet Union, and were recorded on tape as sound material evoked by voice-processing. Just as the photographic approach evokes visions constantly playing with the real whose visible aspect is only the most superficial layer. Mamleyev will pass away only a few months after the shooting and the film carries the troublesome traces of preparation towards the inevitable and impossible escape from his own death. (PM)