Dau The most disturbing cultural event of all time?
It set out to be an obsessively faithful depiction of Soviet life, but ‘Dau’ turned into something far more sinister. Albina Kovalyova reports
In the autumn of 2006 I moved to Moscow to work on a young director’s biopic about the Soviet physicist Lev Landau. From the start, the script by Vladimir Sorokin, one of modern Russia’s most famous writers, was kept under lock and key. I was not given a copy. But the walls of the small production office at Mosfilm, the old Soviet Hollywood-style studios in southwest Moscow, were plastered with photographs of the scientist, and it was clear that the director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, would heavily focus on three things: absolute historic accuracy, Landau’s sexual exploits, and his experience of Soviet repression.
Even then, there was something Stalinist in the nature of the project, called Dau (a shortening of “Landau”) – a sense of a grand design, overweening ambition, and a ruthless determination to achieve the project’s ends.
Little did I know that this enterprise would mutate beyond all recognition to become one of the most ambitious, controversial and unprecedented cultural experiments of recent times.
In the end, the shoot lasted nearly three years, involved hundreds of cast members (only one of whom was a professional actor), and entailed the construction of a fully populated Soviet-era city (spanning 30 years from 1938) in which participants lived and worked for months at a time. The cast ate Soviet food, washed with Soviet-era soap and wore Soviet clothes, all the way down to authentic underpants and socks. They were also monitored 24 hours a day by Stalinera hidden microphones.
Yesterday, leading members of the project’s creative team finally went public at an extravagant launch in Paris. The result of their labour, they revealed, amounted to 700 hours of footage, which promises to be the most authentic portrayal of life in the Soviet Union ever created.
Visitors to the installation, based in two theatres and the Centre Pompidou, will watch different parts of this footage depending upon the answers they give to a psychological test, and will then be encouraged to discuss their reactions to what they’ve seen with clergymen of different faiths before taking part in a debate with scientists, artists and intellectuals.
It is a work of art that will challenge visitors emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. But as someone who has been closely involved in Dau – first as a casting assistant and then, 10 years later, as the director of a documentary about the project – I have been left extremely troubled by what I have seen. Dau may have set out to condemn Soviet totalitarianism, but part of me worries that, by operating such an accurate facsimile of the regime for such a long time, Khrzhanovsky may have become a despot himself and overseen behaviour that crossed the line from fictional abuse to the real thing.
Life in Khrzhanovsky’s mini-city – which operated between 2009 and November 2011 – certainly had a strange effect on the participants. Built on the outskirts of Kharkiv, a town in eastern Ukraine, where Landau once worked, The Institute (as Khrzhanovsky insisted on calling it) was roughly the size of two football fields and featured two drab residential buildings, monumental sculptures, science labs and a canteen.
Attention to detail was such that the director even installed waste pipes made to the exact dimensions of Soviet-era pipes to ensure lavatories made the correct flushing sound. In other ways, though, Khrzhanovsky deliberately set out to make participants uneasy, overseeing the construction of uneven staircases and oppressively dark corridors and exteriors to heighten the sense of claustrophobia. He also arranged for oppressive music to play through loudspeakers, in an apparent attempt to make cast members feel tense.
All the “residents”, meanwhile, were real people – from scientists to street-sweepers, cooks, waitresses and former prison guards – who Khrzhanovsky believed would immerse themselves in the experience to a greater degree than actors.
As a casting assistant in 2006,
I was one of a
As someone who’s been closely involved, I worry that fictional abuse turned into the real thing
number of employees sent out into the streets and university campuses of Moscow charged with finding “authentic” characters.
It was a bizarre job. I would wake up before dawn, take the trolley bus across Moscow and try to persuade strangers to audition for a part in a film. At one point we screen-tested every undergraduate in Moscow State University’s physics department. Another grander casting operation took place in Kharkiv three years later. Those who were chosen were then relocated to The Institute, fitted with a period costume and given an apartment, a Soviet passport (with their real names, but with an adjusted date of birth) and a Soviet biography.
The film became a study of the everyday lives of the scientists and “ordinary people”, an accelerated re-run of the Soviet Union’s grand socialist experiment in laboratory conditions, exploring how people behaved in the pressure cooker of a totalitarian system. And this is where I believe the lines between fact and fiction may have become blurred.
Having viewed a large proportion of the footage and interviewed nearly 60 participants, it is clear to me that the menace was not merely atmospheric. Participants were “arrested” by security guards, accused of crimes that they may or may not have committed, subjected to interrogations, rough-handled and placed under psychological pressure.
Vladimir Azhippo, a hard-as-nails former prison director from east Ukraine, told me how, in one scene, he roughed up a woman who had been stripped naked in a cell. He was a man who had been taught not to commit violence against women, but he admitted, for the sake of the project, he had gone ahead with the scene.
“I did it by blocking it out,” he said to me. “I made myself do it.”
Other cast members had been driven to a state of paranoia by the microphones that Khrzhanovsky had placed around the set and in participants’ clothing, and the longer the filming of my documentary went on, the less and less sure I became of where role-playing ended and “reality” began.
Of course, for Khrzhanovsky, this was the point. He wanted to elicit the most “authentic” emotions possible from the cast, in an effort to show the malign effect the Soviet regime had on ordinary people. (Lev Landau was jailed during the Great Terror of the late Thirties; other scientists were stripped of their ability to work, arrested, or executed.)
The blurring of the line between reality and fantasy – and the moral conundrums that go with it – is also one of the recurring themes of the project.
“If we play spin the bottle, and we kiss, then we know it’s a game, but on the other hand, the kiss really did happen,” Khrzhanovsky said to me during our first in-depth conversation after he hired me to chronicle the project in 2016.
An unpredictable man, with a mischievous face, he possesses immense charisma but is also capable of great anger and swift decisions. Many fear him. On set he reportedly insisted on being called the head of The Institute or simply the boss.
But he also inspires admiration, love, even – and perhaps above all – devotion.
It is difficult to imagine how anything as vast as Dau could have happened without him. And like many of the participants I interviewed, my relationship with him has been complex. We both hail from the same quite small crowd of the creative Moscow intelligentsia. And although we had not met before I came to work for him in 2006, our families had known one another for decades.
I believe Dau explores important issues about human nature. As a study of what happens to people when they are stripped of the rules and conventions of their usual environment it is a powerful work of art. It is also an exploration of both a historic national trauma and contemporary power in Putin’s Russia, with all its distortions of reality and truth.
But the fact remains that several scenes in Dau are morally problematic. Some of the footage I viewed and details I learnt from interviews left me unable to sleep. After watching one scene that showed experiments being performed on babies with Down’s syndrome, I had a breakdown and, although Khrzhanovsky insisted the babies had not been ill-treated, I nevertheless felt I had been cruelly manipulated.
My friends and family urged me not to return. My husband, a war correspondent familiar with trauma, was adamant I had to leave. But if I had finished with the project, the project had not finished with me.
Dau members tried to persuade me to come back. Surely, they said, the project had a special meaning for me. And after six months, I did, and embarked on a new film that focused solely on the experience of the scientists, a group of people whose stories did not seem as troubling as some of the others. That way, I decided, I would not have to compromise on the more poignant ethical issues.
Why did I come back? Perhaps because it is the most enticing, complicated, and awe-inspiring project that I have ever been involved in. To chronicle the Dau story, and to see it to its end, is an immense privilege.
Some people will be shocked. Others awed. But whatever you make of it, there is no doubt Dau will go down in history as one of the boldest artistic endeavours ever undertaken.