This is a script for a film we shot last summer in Russia and Kazakhstan. The film is still being edited. The script is comprised of excerpts from poems, philosophical texts, scientific writings, academic papers, and historical studies by and about Cosmo-Immortalists, a surge of thinking that emerged in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It linked the Enlightenment with Russian Orthodox and Eastern philosophical traditions to create an idiosyncratically concrete metaphysics of its own. The script liberally combines these writings with recent news items and various personal details. It includes the poetry of Nikolai Zabolotsky and Maximilian Voloshin, writing by Maria Ender, and quotes from Nikolai Fedorov, Vladimir Solov’ev, and Alexander Chizhevsky. It’s very much indebted to a number of scholars, including Svetlana Semenova, Svetlana Cheloukhina, Vyacheslav Stepin, and other writers whose work influenced my understanding of this complex and paradoxical field of thought. The script contains little punctuation and no footnotes and is broken into simple lines of text for subtitling. Some of the more significant quotes are italicized for emphasis.
—Anton Vidokle
The man in bed is a professional actor
He is not asleep
He will turn on cue and start to speak in Russian
I will translate his words for you
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