Siegfried. Cinema Gamma Movie and Favorite Strangers Photos

Erart Museum presents an exhibition of the famous French director, photographer and multi-instrumentalist Siegfried.

• Hundreds of kilometers and faces on film
• Admiration for the ordinary
• Travel movie offering a reality-based illusion

Siegfried is a universal artist: director, composer and photographer. He has close friendly relations with Russia in the field of auteur cinema and avant-garde jazz. Under the pseudonym Zig, he has been touring with the popular trumpeter Eric Tuffaz with constant success, but seems to be able to assemble experimental jam in any of the European cities. In Moscow and Petersburg, he happened to play with Vladimir Volkov, Sergey Letov and related improvisers.

Exhibition “Film Gamma. The film and selected photographs of strangers ”at the Erart Museum presents Siegfried as a staunch supporter of analog photography and manual development, as well as an underground director. The series of pictures and films presented at the exposition is a visual diary of the author, created, as they say, on the road. Moscow, Orsk, Novotroitsk, Tallinn, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan - wherever Siegfried is, he always accurately captures the essence of the social and cultural processes taking place there.

In black and white photographs, the photographer captured primarily local residents and random passers-by overpopulated cities. The fixation of reality in photography, especially in psychologically capacious portraits, contrasts significantly with the author’s musical and cinematic work, built on dynamic editing and experiments with sound.

But in the photographs and in the film we can feel the author’s special look at a person - enthusiastic admiration for his model, admiration for everyday things, meditative observation of what is happening and a kind of gaiety associated with the absolute acceptance of reality.

It is very important that the Siegfried exhibition is held in Russia. For many years he tactfully observed the realities of our country and shot here the first part of his film "Cinema Gamma." The name of the picture refers to the cult film for cinephiles around the world by Dzigi Vertov’s “Cinema Eye”. Siegfried’s film uses the same principles - it’s the same “attack by reality with a movie camera”, but instead of relying on a word, the author relies on sound. And reality itself is open for thousands of kilometers.

In the film “Traveling Kinogamma”, the director offers the viewer a complex visual-musical illusion created by him along with random satellites and neighbors on the planet.

The characters of the film are practically silent, immersed in work and life. Among them there are no main and secondary heroes, each of them is a “little man”, revealing his everyday world of objects, sounds and actions. The viewer drifts through stories, not separating fiction from reality: he travels through the underground passages of the metro, empathizes with the birth taking place before his eyes, dines with workers in the factory cafeteria, admires the tenacity of little future ballerinas.

All the multifaceted work of Siegfried, unfolding against the backdrop of world military conflicts, the triumph of technology and the supremacy of intelligence, is united by the themes of love and freedom. The author is completely faithful to his ideals, and his international activities, as well as an exhibition in the Erarta Museum, are the best evidence of this.