The Kiev Pinchuk Art Center periodically screens the film by artist Vasily Tsagolov “Milk Sausages” (1994).
This film became iconic both for Ukrainian art of those years and for the artist himself, who thanks to it mastered a new genre for himself – cinema – and also received an invitation to a prestigious exhibition at the Stockholm museum.
The film tells about a maniac psychiatrist who fancies himself a god and decides human destinies. The film is filled with dull 90s romance, crime and mysticism.
“Milk Sausages” echoes Stanislav Klimenko’s masterpiece “Who’s Up, Who’s Down” (1991). Both films diagnose the stupefaction of our society at the turn of the era in the early 90s.
Vasily Tsagolov talks about how adventurously this film was created and what a maniac and an art critic have in common, as well as the fact that everything around us is cinematic.
In 1994, it was extremely difficult to make a movie in Ukraine. It was impossible to edit the video, add sound, process the image – all this was impossible to do at home. How was the process of working on the film structured?
The director of the Blank Art gallery suggested that I do an exhibition. But I was not interested in exhibiting my old paintings, and I did not want to rush to paint new paintings. So I suggested making a film. Although I had not been involved in cinematography before. Filming took about 10 days. The gallery director gave me $500 for the film. All this money went to the operator.
The script was written on the fly. Initially, I had an idea, but I specifically painted each scene the day before filming. Almost all the dialogue in the film is improvised. In some places they turned out to be very successful, because it is complete nonsense (smiling – ed.)
Most of our artists who filmed something in those years were engaged in video art. But I wanted to make a storyline.
When I made this film, I admired Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alan Parker.
The main character, a maniac, was played in the film by art critic Oleg Sidor-Gibelinda. The task of an art critic, among other things, is to organize the art world and establish an alignment of forces in it. And in your film it is elevated to a higher level, when it influences not only artists, but the entire society in general. An interesting allusion emerges that people are manipulated, say, not by a businessman or politician, which is usual, but by an art critic…
Well, we can talk about this. But I made this film, focusing on the average viewer, who would not know who exactly plays the main role. I invited Oleg to play the role of a maniac, because he is like that in real life… (smiling – ed.) Besides, we studied together and talked a lot about literature and cinema.
The Pinchuk Art Center is showing not the best copy of the film. It is impossible to make out all the dialogues, and the image is confused in places. Isn’t there a better copy?
We shot on film, and then the film was transferred to digital. The copy shown in the exhibition was taken from the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art. I may still have a cassette with the film somewhere – I’ll have to look for it. Although over all these years the film has most likely already deteriorated.
How did the film end up in the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm?
His curator was in Kyiv and actively looked at the works of Ukrainian artists. In addition to “Milk Sausages,” he eventually selected photographs of Savadov and Mikhailov for the large-scale exhibition After The Wall. After my film got there, the attitude towards it changed.
Besides the Stockholm museum and the Kyiv gallery “Blank Art”, has the film been shown anywhere else in 21 years?
Some of its fragments were shown at various exhibitions. Well, there was a full-fledged screening at the Kiev Dream catcher festival, which artists held in one of the courtyards of Andreevsky Descent to show their films. The screenings lasted all night. Since there were few films made specifically by artists, we also invited directors who make ordinary films. Shapiro, the Alyoshechkin brothers and others. Among the artists then engaged in video art were Savadov, Gnilitsky, Podolchak, Roitburd, Girich…
A couple of years later, Mikhail Ilyenko took over this festival and now it is known as “Open Night”.
Today’s technology has made filmmaking much easier. But you don’t film anything. Why?
I don’t want to do it for $500. And what you want to do requires a team and a budget. It’s just that then I wanted to do more and try myself in different genres. And now you look back and realize that half of it could not have been done at all.
I specifically did not want to establish myself in one genre. Previously, I wanted to be unpredictable: when they expected me to make a film, I brought a film, and when they thought that I would make a film again, I brought out something else.
In Galina Sklyarenko’s book “Contemporary Art of Ukraine. Portraits of Artists” the following is said about your work: “Tsagolov’s paintings grow out of cinema and television. But not from arthouse cinema with its emphatically authorial, individual vision and visual language, but from “B-class film production” – soap
nal series and action films.” Is there really such a direct relationship between popular cinema and your films?
The very vision of a person is cinematic. After all, everything in the world is constantly in motion and wherever you look, everything changes.
As for Galina Sklyarenko’s article, in my opinion, this is a very superficial text. She cites many far-fetched theses. In this article, she almost blames me for what is happening in Ukraine today.
In addition to “Milk Sausages,” you also made the film “News,” in which your artist friends appear.
It was a video work in the format of a news release. There was an announcer sitting in the frame who was telling something, and in between they showed staged reports about how a drug lord was caught in Mexico or how Khreshchatyk was being reconstructed… All the news was made up.
The film featured Gnilitsky, Solovyov, Tsyupka, Osoeva, Golets, Bratkov, Podolchak and Dyurich.
Video of Vasily Tsagolov’s work:
“Karl Marx – Père Lachaise” (1993) performance documentation
“Milk sausages” (1994) fiction film (36 min)
“Crime Week” photo film (1994)
“The end” (1995) documentation of performance in intensive care
“News” (1997) staged news broadcast (30 min.)