THE DANGEROUS VISIONS OF ANDREY ISKANOV
PART I : NAILS and VISIONS OF SUFFERINGReview by Rogan Marshall
It’s not often as a film critic that one has the opportunity to announce the arrival of a new cinematic voice worth listening to. Andrey Iskanov is just such a fresh and fascinating new voice, a unique Russian underground filmmaker whose first two raw but powerful features have arrived among us from the Unearthed Films label almost simultaneously: NAILS (Gvozdi, 2003, released on DVD in August of last year) and VISIONS OF SUFFERING (released in September, following expansion to epic length with American completion funds from an unavailable first version titled ANGST). These disturbing gory experimental horror movies are among the darker and stranger things I’ve ever seen, and while Iskanov, like many American underground auteurs, does everything himself (Iskanov wrote, produced and directed both movies, which he shot himself; he also acted in them, designed the practical effects and composed some of the music), his work, unlike most of his States-side counterparts, is ferociously creative, energetic and accomplished.
Director Andrey Iskanov
Part of the reason these first two Iskanov pictures (soon to be followed by a third, the forthcoming PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE) are so striking is the extent to which the word “underground” genuinely applies. There used to be several terms under which one could umbrella productions on this scale, but “underground” is all we really have left: the word “amateur” automatically belittles (unless one is applying it to pornography); the Hollywood studios have hijacked the word “independent” for mainstream marketing purposes; and “regional” filmmaking, once a valid concept, now no longer exists in any actual sense (an overwhelming majority of Iskanov’s audience is watching these discs with the subtitles turned on—discs I used the very computer I’m typing these words on, to have delivered in the mail, which is, again, how the vast majority of their audience has been and will be exposed to them—and nothing is “regional” about a world in which an interested critic can contact and correspond with an up-and-coming foreign filmmaker, without even getting up from his desk (hi Andrey).
This narrowing of semantic possibility parallels the sad truth that our grassroots auteurs aren’t making much worth watching lately; and both shifts have occurred as reactions to the new and theoretically improved shape and size of the cinematic playing field (in theory, nothing substantial prevents Mr. Iskanov and his distributors at Unearthed Films from moving enough units of Iskanov movies, to place them on mainstream bestseller lists). There’s no reason, no tangible reason that is, anyone reading this can’t stop reading right now to go pick up a cheap digital camcorder and set about making a masterpiece on the highest level, in the broadest sense; it is quite possible, for anyone gifted with native talent and willing/able to put in hard work and long hours, to craft a picture that plays against the big kids on almost their own level, right now, right in your own neighborhood, with supplies you can probably gather within 10 miles of your home. It’s a complex quandary, and one I haven’t entirely worked out yet, but somehow this auspicious set of circumstances seems to ensure that no one is capable of following through and actually making the masterpiece. (What? Not me—I’m busy.) It reminds me of how grand scale psychic phenomena in public, which frequently occurred before reliable witnesses during the 19th century, seemed to stop happening right about when the photographic and recording equipment first got reliable, to begin with.
Iskanov, however, who does make good movies, is also genuinely underground, more underground than any filmmaker can get, anywhere within the United States, anyway. Where Iskanov lives, and makes his movies—Khabarovsk—his movies have never played and possibly never will. In private correspondence he tells me that where once a Soviet government strongly disapproved of genre horror for ideological reasons, now the prejudice lingers as a social atavism; according to Iskanov, only three definite genre horror movies have ever been shot in Russian. (He had the list ready with details when I asked, so I believe him.) The impression I get from his emails is that Iskanov is making his movies in a place where even the social climate is against him; the average person on the street where he lives wouldn’t be unlikely to perceive these ugly and disturbing explorations of visionary psychosis as anything more nor other than mere perversion. (When I asked if he’d had the traditional semi-public cast and crew premiere-cum-screenings for his movies, Iskanov replied, “It would be impossible.”)
Once upon a time, there were three Russian horror movies; now, we also have Andrey Iskanov, of whose wildly experimental work, about the only thing immediately clear, is that it is indeed genre horror. Both his first two features, which complement one another and fit together in such a way that they essentially comprise one bipartite work or opus—are intricate hyperactive explorations of madness, informed by careful research, extreme and heavy style, claustrophobic production “value” (almost all of both these movies were shot inside one apartment, presumably Iskanov’s own), and huge overloaded helpings of crazy special effects, both practical and digital. They are difficult, frustrating movies, combining frantic, assaultive technique with deliberate pacing and fragmented structure. They are violent, both on a visceral level and on a psychological level, disturbing in the broadest possible sense; Iskanov creates and maintains an atmosphere, both nauseating and mesmerizing, of utter unpredictability, of something frighteningly close to a pure cinematic realization of the ugliest kind of insanity.
The first, NAILS, is the shorter, less ambitious, less polished of the two; it’s also more focused, easier to follow and get into. It concerns a KGB hitman whose soulless world and violent work are introduced against a black-and-white urban backdrop as cold, futuristic and heavily designed as that of Lang’s METROPOLIS. After the cyberpunk-tinged opening reel, we follow the nameless hitman to his shabby nearly featureless apartment, where a series of flat quiet scenes depicting meaningless household activities both lulls us and agitates us. Gradually we learn that he’s got a problem: escalating aberrant mental activity, the worst part of which is the headaches... He stays home, he gets worse, he researches trepanning and decides that the thing to do is release some of the pressure in his skull, by putting a nail through it with an electric drill.
This is a quintessential Iskanov moment. There’s the sickening gore-unit showpiece of a scene that I don’t even have to describe—it’s great work, but self-mutilation aside perhaps, many a filmmaker has put a power tool through a character’s head... the visionary moment, the flash of shocking genius, follows: when the nail breaks through, Iskanov cuts to an odd inside the head shot—we see the brain floating in fluid, the curve of the skull from within—the point of the nail comes through with a jolt, entering the braincase, and the shot—and, WIZARD OF OZ style, black-and-white suddenly, transcendently, becomes color.
NAILS
The rest of NAILS is an ever-escalating, over-the-top psychedelic assault, as the protagonist combats the increasingly aggressive hallucinations that eventually transform his apartment into a Bosch-tinged hellscape, by means of gradually more invasive self-mutilation. Toward the end of the movie, he’s managed to hack out and remove what looks like better than half of his own head, which is a solid metaphor for what Iskanov seems to have done in making this movie; there just isn’t any way to capture in words, how dense, rich and assaultive NAILS gets to be. While it’s a raw movie, technically grungy and unschooled, NAILS already exhibits a unique quality of imagination and a remarkable intensity and assurance in execution, along with fierce originality, unremitting grimness and a dogged will to keep an audience utterly unsettled in every possible way.
If NAILS is the kind of movie that pushes the envelope—that steps outside the box—VISIONS OF SUFFERING is the work of a filmmaker who’s made it a personal mandate to destroy all boxes and envelopes. VISIONS is essentially the “same movie” as NAILS; Iskanov is a songwriter using the same chords again, exploring and expanding upon the same themes, using, at least on a basic level, the same structure. But VISIONS takes several huge steps forward in terms of technique, in every sense and on every level; to disparage it by calling it the “same movie” is as inaccurately dismissive, as it would be to say such a thing of Sam Raimi’s EVIL DEAD 2. Iskanov has a bigger budget here, a sharper eye, a steadier voice, a firmer grip on how to most thoroughly fuck with and damage the audience. VISIONS is oppressively long, a minute or two over two hours, and Iskanov uses the vast narrative space (vast indeed for an underground gore movie) to play advanced games with pace, and perception of pace; long slow sequences sometimes hover around and explore the synthetic extension of one violent narrative moment, through jaggedly cut excessively shot coverage which creates an impression of frantic activity—a formal juxtaposition that accurately captures the “accelerated thinking” which characterizes schizophrenia.
VISIONS OF SUFFERING
And like NAILS, VISIONS is essentially a movie about schizophrenia, though it never directly says so: this time, Iskanov’s oppressed protagonist is a young man tormented by recurrent nightmares in which he is pursued through strangely tinted forest by genuinely indescribable digital creatures. These things, a wise telephone repairman (whose advice may be hallucinated? who may be hallucinated entirely?) explains, are “vampires,” the spirits of people who were unlucky enough to die during the day while it was raining. The creatures, which change into many distinctive and hideous forms--including the most hideous of all, the human form—pursue the protagonist more and more closely, soon escaping from his dreams into his waking “reality”; and, again, like NAILS, VISIONS rapidly fractures and distorts itself so thoroughly, that its story, which begins as something akin to much mainstream dark fantasy, quickly becomes a study in the subjective exploration of insanity itself.
Both NAILS and VISIONS OF SUFFERING are difficult and dangerous movies in the deepest and darkest senses of those words. Mr. Iskanov, however, true to the adventurous visionary quality of intellect his work so strikingly captures, is not content to continue exploring the same territory. His forthcoming third feature, currently in “post production” (a phrase Iskanov, who lives far, far away from Hollywood, would probably never use) is called PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE. As of this writing, it’s only been about a week since Iskanov posted an advance promotional reel of several minutes’ length, featuring scenes from POAK—but please, please pay attention when I say, this is extremely disturbing material, and not to be viewed lightly or casually, in any sense. PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE is based on the awful and amazing true story of the infamous Japanese WWII-era secret superscience death camp Unit 731, a place where the most extreme physical tortures ever devised were carried out on human “subjects” in the cause of perverting scientific inquiry itself, to put it mildly. Iskanov has told me, again in private correspondence, that in researching his script he’s conducted first-person interviews with living witnesses, containing previously unknown factual material; and the promo reel is the most electrifying and horrifying five minutes of anything cinematic I’ve seen in a number of years (at least since Jim Van Bebber’s THE MANSON FAMILY, which, strangely enough, was the last significant underground feature that I know of and is also a heavy ambitious historical drama, treated at least in part as genre horror). I intend to cover Andrey Iskanov’s PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE right here at this very Website as soon as it’s possible; Iskanov says—am I telling tales out of class, now?—that Unearthed Films, his worldwide distributor, is considering a fall release date.
