The Tower: A Songspiel is a new agitprop production from the fine people at Chto Delat. The film is the final part of a trilogy that includes Perestroika Songspiel: Victory over the Coup (2008) and Partisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story (2009). The theme of this installment:
Filmed in April 2010, The Tower: A Songspiel is based on real documents of Russian social and political life and on an analysis of the conflict that has developed around the planned Okhta Center development in Petersburg, where the Gazprom corporation intends to house the headquarters of its locally-based subsidiaries in a 403-meter-high skyscraper designed by the UK-based architectural firm RMJM. The proposed skyscraper has provoked one of the fiercest confrontations UNESCO World Heritage Site, Gazprom has so far managed to secure all the necessary permissions and has practically begun the first phase of construction. (Although recent oblique signals from the Russian president may have thrown an insurmountable wrench into the works. between the authorities and society in recent Russian political history. Despite resistance on the part of various groups who believe that construction of the building would have a catastrophic impact on the appearance of the city, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Gazprom has so far managed to secure all the necessary permissions and has practically begun the first phase of construction. (Although recent oblique signals from the Russian president may have thrown an insurmountable wrench into the works.)
. . .
The film is structured as a confrontation between two worlds. On the one hand, we see the world of power, which is represented by a group of people working to create the new symbol: a PR manager (the head of the corporation’s branding project for the skyscraper), a local politician, the company’s security chief, a representative of the Orthodox Church, a gallery owner (who is in line to become director of the corporation’s contemporary art museum), and a fashionable artist. On the other hand, we see a chorus comprised of people from various social groups: the intelligentsia, workers, pensioners, unemployed office clerks, migrants, young women, a homeless boy, and a leftist radical.
For more check out Chto Delat.
Watch. Learn. Agitate. Revolt.
Seems like a slightly outdated style of social advocacy. Probably the only people with the aesthetic palette and patience to watch a video like this are listed in the film’s credits.
I like the tower and I actually think it will improve the St.-Petersburg skyline. But I don’t like that it’s Gazprom’s creature.
Russians call the tower kukuruzina, which means corn. Frankly speaking Gazprom could’ve placed its building further from the historical center, but they obviously don’t care what people think.
Hey Sean, I recommend that you take a look at what’s been happening in Russia’s Far Eastern Primorye region for the past couple of days.
In case you’ve missed it, there’s been a spec operation there with hundreds of police sweeping rural areas and the woods for some 5 young locals who ambushed and killed about 2-3 policemen — allegedly having been driven to the edge by police unlawfulness and impunity.
Official reports dub them as regular criminals (‘bandits’), but all over Russia, people overwhelmingly describe them as ‘guerillas’ and ‘people’s fighters’.
This will hardly ever get international media attention, since the authorities will definitely try to keep it low profile, and to this end they’re already making it look like simple gangster shit, omitting any political implications.
But this is exactly the thing to watch if you’re a Russia watcher, for Russians on the Web are cheering this en masse as a first spark of revolution. The popularity of those guerillas is sudden and very telling of the situation in the country.
Here’s one of the original links for those who can read Russian:
http://primamedia.ru/news/09.06.2010/126201/otets-odnogo-iz-chlenov-bandi-prosit-generalov-uvd-i-fsb-primorya-ne-ubivat-sina.html
Thanks for the post, Sean.
A Good Treaty: the film isn’t meant as “social advocacy.” It is meant as a portrait of Petersburg society, as revealed by the controversy around the tower. As such, it isn’t particularly hopeful or flattering. The powers that be are deliberately deaf to the cries of the “grassroots,” who in turn are mostly incapable of forming any kind of consensus. And all parties are more or less prisoners of various cliches and patterns of action.
Taste is an individual matter, of course, but at the house was packed at the film’s premiere in Petersburg, and the reception was enthusiastic albeit not uncritical. And far from everyone in the audience was “listed in the credits.”
Sublime Oblivion: how would the tower “improve” Petersburg’s skyline? This, after all, is the crux of the matter for tower opponents: “improvements” of this sort are both violations of local and federal historic preservation and zoning laws, and the city’s status as a Unesco World Heritage Site. The city’s historic skyline enjoys as much protection as do individual buildings — that is, it is part of the “outstanding value of the property” (to use Unesco-speak). So it is not clear, for instance, how the Petersburg administration could have legally given Okhta Center a building-height “exemption” last fall. That and all the other decisions by the city, the way those decisions have been made (as, for instance, in the two public hearings packed with paid “extras” and featuring a heavy police presence), and the odious propaganda campaign by the city, Gazprom/Okhta Center, and RMJM are what have people up in arms.
I also don’t understand why the fact that the tower is “Gazprom’s creature” is particularly galling. Do you know of any skyscrapers that aren’t such creatures of big money and corporate power? In Russia, the only thing that comes to mind are the Stalinist wedding cakes in Moscow.
The company who has been contracted to build the tower, Arabtec, gained most of its experience in Dubai where it employed an army of near-slave labourers from the Indian sub-continent. I suspect they will find Russian labourers, and Russian employment laws, somewhat different from what they are used to. If construction of this tower isn’t riddled with labour disputes, material procurement problems, and clashes with various authorities I’ll be amazed.