coulisses1

During my first visit to Moscow I had a lot of time to experience the city beyond the tourist attractions. One spring evening I was strolling aimlessly from Turgenevskaya, down towards the old parts of town together with a friend. The sun had sunken out of sight when we suddenly found ourselves walking straight onto the Red Square. The sky looked unreal in its parisian blue and the facades of the historical buildings were bathing in an orange glow created by the numerous spotlights aimed at the buildings. The Red Square is one of the few places in Moscow where there are no cars allowed, and the sudden silence took us with surprise. It was almost like walking unto an empty stage. The warmly lit buildings looked 2-dimensional against the deep blue sky, like coulisses on a theatre or movie set. This was not real. It was quite strange to be standing on the actual place with the feeling that the memory of Soviet era manifestations on the Red Square seen through TV was more real and true than this. Although we only spent a couple minutes on the square that time, the memory of it kept haunting me, and when I was asked to do a work for the Swedish art and literature magazine “Ord och Bild” for an issue with Moscow theme (an issue which kept lingering in limbo from 2003 until it’s final release in 2007), I decided to work with this experience. The piece “Kulisser” (Coulisses) consists of a couple of text fragments and three images based on stills from cold war era movies where other cities, available for western film crews, are used to portray Moscow. The text fragments mix my experiences as told above with stories from the making of these movies. For example I tell about an incident during the making of David Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago” (Turner Entertainment Co 1965), surprisingly shot in Franco’s Spain, or more specifically in Madrid, in the early 60’s. They mostly filmed during nights and early mornings to avoid Madrid people moving in the streets and thus spoiling the illusion of winter time Moscow, but when they were shooting a scene were a large group of actors were required to parade trough the streets chanting Marxist hymns, the citizens woke up hearing the tunes of hymns that had not been allowed since the civil war, and many people rushed out in the street thinking Franco’s regime had finally been overthrown. This in turn resulting in the police showing up to make sure that these new thoughts of freedom were repressed. Here fiction intervened with reality in a way that would be unequalled until the election of B-movie actor Ronald Reagan as the president of the United States. Hollywood finally conquered Moscow in 1988 when Walter Hill as the first western director was allowed into the Soviet Union and the Red Square to shoot a scene with the future governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The name of the movie was “Red Heat” (Artisan/Momentum Pictures Inc 1988), and in most senses it is a very insignificant and stupid piece of film, but on the other hand it is quite interesting as a first and incredibly naïve gesture of reaching across the iron curtain to create a border crossing buddy-cop-movie.






During my first visit to Moscow I had a lot of time to experience the city beyond the tourist attractions. One spring evening I was strolling aimlessly from Turgenevskaya, down towards the old parts of town together with a friend. The sun had sunken out of sight when we suddenly found ourselves walking straight onto the Red Square. The sky looked unreal in its parisian blue and the facades of the historical buildings were bathing in an orange glow created by the numerous spotlights aimed at the buildings. The Red Square is one of the few places in Moscow where there are no cars allowed, and the sudden silence took us with surprise. It was almost like walking unto an empty stage. The warmly lit buildings looked 2-dimensional against the deep blue sky, like coulisses on a theatre or movie set. This was not real. It was quite strange to be standing on the actual place with the feeling that the memory of Soviet era manifestations on the Red Square seen through TV was more real and true than this. Although we only spent a couple minutes on the square that time, the memory of it kept haunting me, and when I was asked to do a work for the Swedish art and literature magazine “Ord och Bild” for an issue with Moscow theme (an issue which kept lingering in limbo from 2003 until it’s final release in 2007), I decided to work with this experience. The piece “Kulisser” (Coulisses) consists of a couple of text fragments and three images based on stills from cold war era movies where other cities, available for western film crews, are used to portray Moscow. The text fragments mix my experiences as told above with stories from the making of these movies. For example I tell about an incident during the making of David Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago” (Turner Entertainment Co 1965), surprisingly shot in Franco’s Spain, or more specifically in Madrid, in the early 60’s. They mostly filmed during nights and early mornings to avoid Madrid people moving in the streets and thus spoiling the illusion of winter time Moscow, but when they were shooting a scene were a large group of actors were required to parade trough the streets chanting Marxist hymns, the citizens woke up hearing the tunes of hymns that had not been allowed since the civil war, and many people rushed out in the street thinking Franco’s regime had finally been overthrown. This in turn resulting in the police showing up to make sure that these new thoughts of freedom were repressed. Here fiction intervened with reality in a way that would be unequalled until the election of B-movie actor Ronald Reagan as the president of the United States. Hollywood finally conquered Moscow in 1988 when Walter Hill as the first western director was allowed into the Soviet Union and the Red Square to shoot a scene with the future governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The name of the movie was “Red Heat” (Artisan/Momentum Pictures Inc 1988), and in most senses it is a very insignificant and stupid piece of film, but on the other hand it is quite interesting as a first and incredibly naïve gesture of reaching across the iron curtain to create a border crossing buddy-cop-movie.


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