How azure is dying is set in the majestic mountains of the Caucasus. Why did you place your camera there? What is special about this location?
I happened to be in this place more or less “by chance”, whatever we know about this phenomenon…I participated in a different project as an actor but when I had free time I was wandering around the village just observing the people and the stones and the houses and the trees and the birds and water and sky. Once in the evening, when I was coming back to the house where I lived, I decided to stop somewhere high in the mountains to see how the color of the sky was changing. So I was standing alone looking at the sky changing its colors and it was exactly the time when I felt the materiality of them. I came home and wrote a short non-narrative story describing the space around me where the central part was devoted to the dance of colors.
You show a few characters in a rather enigmatic way: an old man, his wife and perhaps his children, a crippled man. Who are these people? What do they represent?
All these people are inhabitants of the village in the mountains where I lived. They cultivate the land, they love, they look at you, they smile, they move in the same manner as their ancestors did. And in this sense they have these inner sincerity or purity or virginity – they have some substance left from our origins. The exact substance that is extremely difficult to find in people now, but that you can find in nature if you are open to it. Fortunately, still there are some spaces where people and nature are filled with the same ancient substance. And there is no difference between the wind and the hair of the old woman there. It is neither allegory nor metaphor but it is more like two different phenomena of the same order. Physically speaking, people and nature are different functions described in the same space-time but when you measure the parameter of your interest you happen to obtain the values of the same amplitudes from the different functions.
Water also plays an important role: it pervades the film with its sound presence, and appears in different forms – a river, a trickle of water on the ground, rain, mist. Why did you insist on this element?
I think that initially I did it partly intuitively partly based on my notes and my story written on the day when I felt the colors. That day, I was thinking about the water wandering from the top of the mountain down to the river. On its way it is feeding up everything around and all in all it transforms from the powerful flux to almost nothing: to just a sound of barely noticed streamlet. From the top to the bottom, running water is the skeleton of the mountain and ground of the film. And when I experienced this perspective of water, it granted me some new knowledge that I could not pass by: water is omnipresent and it speaks so loud on its own that everything else must be silent for some time.
The film seems to respond to the idea of a cycle, from night to night, with a reversal of perspective shortly before the end. How did you work out its structure? Did you come up with it at the start of shooting, or was it written in the editing process?
While I was writing the story I could not see the end in the manner of what it is right now. It was not the strict cycle from the very beginning and…all in all, the film has become something that is different from what it is in the text. I was shooting and recording sound separately, experimenting a lot with these two dimensions. I was editing the material right in the house in the mountains when I could not go shooting either because of the tiredness or the weather. So the structure was very fluent and very alive: in a sense, the film was gathering itself by itself using my hands and telling me what else should we search and hunt for.
« How azure is dying ». Could you tell us more about the film’s title? How do you read it?
Azure is a certain tone of blue that I could not comprehend then and I guess that still I can not comprehend it completely. As I said, once in the mountains, I was observing how the colors were changing and the image in the sky was the following: it was a strip of azure color between the dark glow in the bottom and the dark deep blue in the top of the sky. So the azure was clamped between the blue and the reddish orange. And then it (azure) was slowly being eaten by the reddish orange and the dark blue was gradually covering everything that was left behind. I was watching that dance and all this phenomena was exactly “How azure is dying”. So for me it was a sacral knowledge and I refer to it in this way.
What, if any, were your sources of inspiration?
Before the shooting, I was translating poetry of Georg Trakl from German to Russian. While being in the mountains, I could comprehend the infinitesimal amount of phenomena that he was experiencing in life and recreating in his lyrics. I think Georg Trakl is the greatest painter that ever lived because he wrote in a way that everyone could see the colors. He used blue, purple, green, silver, gold, white, brown, yellow, red, grey, black and their derivatives…Trakl experienced colors so deep that we can notice the correspondance between each, from the first sight, abstract color and the phenomenon of the real material world. And when we notice this genius uniqueness of his poetry we can see that he appeals to a certain color again and again and at the same time he paints the corresponding image of the real material world. Thus Trakl creates an image of colour itself. He has for example such lines:
“Soon by the dilapidated wall
violets blossom,
so silently the lonely one’s temple turns green.”
(Im Frühling)
So he paints how grass will grow out of the dead person and he paints it with green color…And this is exactly how he treats green in his lyrics from one poem to another: green gives life but it demands death.
And he experienced all the colors in the same manner:
“The man’s blue shape would pass through his legend,
Blood run purple from the wound beneath his heart.
O how softly the Cross rose up in the dark of his soul”
(Sebastian in Traum)
Trakl paints the Jesus silhouette by blue color because this is exactly the color that encompasses absolutely everything: pain and happiness, love and death, life and grief, laugh and tears – everything. The blue color is a mist that is omnipresent. So I think that being shocked by Trakl paintings while physically being in the mountains I could see the colors in their pure presence in the way that they were created. And once I became in a certain touch with the space via its colors I started gathering the film around the azure that I was resonating with that time.
Almost silent, with only a few male voices, the film nonetheless seems very inhabited, and the sound treatment creates a particularly rich world of sensations through the amplification of certain sounds. How did you go about constructing the soundtrack? Is the sound treatment also linked in some way to Trakl’s poetry and expressionism? Where do these distant songs of prayer come from?
I was experimenting with sounds while collecting a library of various natural sources – any stone, any tree, any stream and any leaf sounds in its own way depending on time of day and the angle of the hearing. While editing, I was trying to make the images sound in a way they sound in my head and simultaneously create a narrative through the film. I was searching for constant interaction between the people and nature, no matter whether people are outside or inside their houses, because the connection with nature is about something else.
I am thinking about such phenomena like “texurality”: when we are looking at an object for a long time we start perceiving life via this object, i.e. from the inside of it. The object sucks us inside via its surface and texture, via its surroundings and the past and the present. And sound can texturally enrich each pixel of the image and create a direct interaction between the viewers and what is on the screen.
The territory of the village is located in the Region of Adjara in Georgia. The main religions there are Christianity and Islam and the people practice these confessions in peace with each other. I lived in the village where the majority of people are muslims. Muezzin calls for prayer five times per day and the blissful voice and music cover the space ten kilometers away and when jackals hear it they always start howling in response – at this exact moment the whole space is shouting about its past and its future…this is like the connection point where the present, the past and the future meet.
Interview by Louise Martin Papasian
