"This is the cosmos", 2014, 31 min
This is a film about "cosmism", a Russian philosophical movement of the early 20th century, which includes elements of theology, ethics, Russian Orthodoxy, Eastern philosophical traditions and Marxism. Shot in Siberia, Crimea and Kazakhstan, Anton Vidokle's film is based on different materials: poems, philosophical, scientific and historical texts. And, in part, on the works of the "cosmist" Nikolai Fedorov who believed that death is a mistake because "the energy of the cosmos is indestructible". For the Russian "cosmists", the cosmos did not mean the outside world: rather, they wanted to create a "cosmos" on Earth, that is, "a new reality free from hunger, diseases, violence, death, inequality, similar to communism". Vidokle's film renews this utopian project even today, after the end of the Soviet Union.
"The Communist Revolution Was Caused by the Sun", 2015, 34 min
The second film in Anton Vidokle's trilogy on "cosmism" is devoted to the "solar" cosmology of the Soviet biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky. The film was shot in Kazakhstan, where Chizhevsky was arrested and then deported, and acquaints us with his research on the influence of the sun on sociology, psychology, politics and economics during wars, revolutions, epidemics and other disasters.
"Immortality and Resurrection for All!", 2017, 34 min
The last film in Vidokle's trilogy on "cosmism" is a reflection on the museum as a place of resurrection, - a central idea of many "cosmists", scientists and avant-garde artists. Filmed at the Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Zoological Museum, the Lenin Library and the Museum of the Revolution, the film examines museum and archival technologies for collection and preservation from the perspective of the material restoration of life, described by Nikolai Fedorov in the 1880s. The film shows Fedorov's current followers, actors and artists, who, in the mode of acting, represent "scenes from life" on the themes of the resurrection of mummies, Malevich's "Black Square", as well as stuffed mannequins, skeletons, Rodchenko's constructions and symbols of the Russian Revolution, in order to visually recreate the poetics of Fedorov's works.
