The Nose or Conspiracy of Mavericks

Could that really be: Marlen Khutsiev’s 1960s banned milestone llych’s Gate screening as in-flight entertainment?! Mark the moment one gets to see Andrei Tarkovsky being slapped for sardonically wondering about the praise-worthiness of turnips. A moment to remember in this gorgeous potpourri that combines animation and opera to chronicle the Russian 20th century. On the plane, classics of Soviet cinema unspool on the monitors, while two gentlemen discuss Gogol’s proto-surrealist 1836 novella The Nose and what it means to be civilized today.

Set to the score of Shostakovich’s eponymous 1920s opera, animation legend Khrzhanovsky brings us on his stridently post-modernist path of narrative anti-drive, all digression with nary a plot, all cheek and panache. Ideas, anecdotes and even some insights into the human heart carefully disguised as jokes, create a gem from the future and the past, a groundbreaking requiem for the Russian avant-garde.

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