A VISITOR TO A MUSEUM

If you’re familiar with this blog then it’s no mystery that I’m a big Andrei Tarkovsky fan. I’m such a fan that I even like most of Tarkovsky's students, knock-offs and copycats. I’ve dedicated quite a few blog entries to the work of Tarkovsky and his direct influence on others (early Lars Von Trier, Carlos Reygadas, Alexander Sokurov, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Bi Gan, Elem Klimov, Nina Menkes and more).

Tarkovsky’s influence is so prolific that his “students” sometimes feed off of and imitate each other without even meaning to…

The Element Of Crime / A Visitor To A Museum

I say all this because up until a few days ago I hadn’t seen any films by Konstantin Lopushansky. I’ve only seen three of his films so far but the influence of Tarkovsky is all over his work (or at least what I’ve seen so far). I know it comes off as lazy to compare slow “artsy” contemplative Russian films to Andrei Tarkovsky but Lopushansky actually worked on Stalker. He also never seems to shy away from his mentor’s influence while dismissing the types of comparisons I make all throughout this post.

The Mirror / A Visitor To A Museum

Figuratively speaking, the great master’s shadow, as people used to say, hangs over every all of us – directors of the 20th century, his influence was enormous. Many critics ask Lars von Trier, Alexander Sokurov, me about his influence. It is inevitable, as he is the greatest representative of auteur cinema, his quintessence of auteur cinema ideology has been absorbed by many, including me. But if we speak about style, some critics who do not like auteur cinema attempt to pick things apart; they say that in my films the water is flowing just like in his films. I respond that water flows in millions of other films. This argument is very weak.

And so on. In fact his influence is spiritual, it is the understanding of art. I was lucky to make a first draft of his lecture. He lectured film direction, later he took me as an apprentice for Stalker, we had an opportunity to socialize and one day he asked me to systemize his lectures - Konstantin Lopushansky, indie-cinema.com

Lopushansky’s time working on Stalker had to have made an impact on his own filmmaking. The basic premise and/or keywords that one would use to describe A Visitor To A Museum sounds an awful lot like Stalker; a long contemplative dreary quest through dirt, rain and sewage in a seemingly post-apocalyptic world to find a mythical forbidden place. In Stalker, our protagonists are out to find “the zone”. In A Visitor To A Museum, our lone protagonist is on a quest to find the ruins of a lost museum and the city that once housed it (the movie is set after a vague global/apocalyptic disaster).

Stalker / A Visitor To A Museum

It's true that water flows in a million films and it's easy to oversimplify visual comparisons in that way but when you place the two above scenes next to each other combined with the history between the two filmmakers - it does take on a slightly deeper meaning than simply two scenes of water.

Stalker / A Visitor To A Museum

Stalker / A Visitor To A Museum

Stalker / A Visitor To A Museum

The “message”, metaphors and symbolisms within the film are sort of worn on it's sleeve. Not to give too much away but the discovery of the lost museum/city brings up issues concerning classism and eugenics. For me, this movie really touches on the importance of knowledge and how far some will go to find rare artifacts. I was once a lightweight collector or records, videotapes and DVDs so I can kind of relate. I’ve never taken the type of journey that the film’s protagonist took to seek out lost artifacts but I have driven across multiple state lines to purchase a rare VHS or piece of vinyl just to have it or further my knowledge of an artist's entire body of work. As cliche as this may sound, at a certain point it’s less about the thing you’re trying to obtain and more about the journey and the folks you meet along the way.

The discovery of the film’s protagonist is a bit more depressing than my journeys and discoveries but there’s still love and dedication. In order to go through what he goes through to find what he’s looking for there’s clearly love, curiosity and dedication to seeking out lost artifacts. That kind of stuff is important. Besides building character, it continues the art of preservation. No matter how much technology pushes away things like the need for physical media, books, libraries, video stores and liner notes - these things all play a part in persevering history. Preservation of history is important for a multitude of reasons but it’s most important to me because, now more than ever, history is easy to rewrite and/or bury (like in A Visitor To A Museum). 

Very few things irritate me more than not only rewritten history, but people’s acceptance of said rewritten history and/or incorrect information when all they have to do is take 60 fucking seconds to open their smart phones and find the correct information without the use of AI. And if the information they find on the internet is incorrect or only partially true, they can cross-reference what they find with more accurate information from a book or newspaper or PDF scan found in a library or some kind of archive.

I worry that both young and older people have become lazy and are relying heavily on not just AI (which I find to be wrong often), but misinformation that panders to or caters to what they want to hear. People aren’t even reading entire articles. They’re just going off of a clickbait headline or a poor description of an article told to them by another likeminded friend.

A Visitor To A Museum matches my energy when it comes to all of this even though it was made in the late 80s and couldn’t predict where we’d be today.