User Reviews

Expecting "Out of the present" to be a documentary about the MIR station or about the power transition in Soviet Union, just because the movie is composed out of archive materials, would be vain and frustrating. What speaks immediately against such an approach is the voice-over - the diary of the cosmonaut Anatoli Arzebarski read by himself - in fact a pure fiction: the text is a fake diary, written by the author of the movie. Still, there is not enough ground to consider "Out of the present" a fiction: the archive footage is ordered chronologically, the historical events are presented in the most matter- of-fact understanding: a history book about the disaggregation of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War would offer the same perspective and would certainly focus on the same major historical events. The content of the diary doesn't appear to manipulate the images or the understanding of the historical reality. It only sounds as a possible cosmonaut diary. There is no revelation, no secret plot, nothing that one doesn't already know. One can find in the movie some outstanding images of the Earth, as captured by a real film camera. Although unique, this technical achievement will not be enough to satisfy the "space freaks". Besides, the beauty of the images adds very little to the already hallucinating view of the Earth in "God mode". On a conceptual level, it would have worked the same, no matter the camera used. And the fact that the camera belongs to Yusov, the D.o.P. of Tarkovsky in Solyaris, adds little relevance to the nature of the images captured through its lenses. "Out..." is a one-of-a-kind piece of cinema belonging to those elevated art forms where the mind of the author can be felt in all along, in every choice: the fake diary doesn't belong to the main character, but to his colleague and friend, and this narrative voice substitution makes a subtle reference to Odyssey (Homer's, Joyce's and Kubrick's). The footage assembly mimics the dramaturgic rules of a "comedie de moeurs", as a reverence to the way Balzac or Tolstoi were using their documentation in order to meaningfully reshape historical background and present reality. The role of the diary is not to give a psychological insight in the life and deeds of a cosmonaut, but to balance the discourse about power, time, knowledge, beliefs, end of history, perceptions of proximity and distance, as resulted from the continuous clash between the reality viewed from space and reality in its historical sense. Finally, Yousov's camera is there to postulate the fictional condition of the interpretation. As any uncompromising auctorial discourse, "Out of the present" has its opacities that make the film hard to place. They come from the process of shaping a meditation over epistemological thresholds into a film that takes 92 minutes without the credits (the exact time of MIR's revolution) and which can be screened in cinemas. Ujica fulfills the form of his expression both as a necessity and as a given and, by doing so, conditions his movie to contain an intrinseque discourse about cinema as an art.