Visions du Réel 2022: Nuclear Power Plants and Lacanian Robots
With no conscious motivation, I was repeatedly drawn to films about Russia and the USSR’s former satellite states while sifting through this year’s Visions du Réel. The most formidable, Emilija Škarnulytė’s Burial, visually maximalizes the inherently spectacular structures of nuclear power plants. A sparse clutch of title cards contextualize the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP)—built as an equally large sister to Chernobyl, its decommissioning and dismantling now a requirement for Lithuania’s entrance into the EU. The cavernous interiors slowly being broken down include, most captivatingly, a control room wall scanned in a three-minute, smoothly sustained right-to-left dolly, its nodes, buttons, meters and […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 11, 2022