Angels of (Queer) Histories:

Synaesthetic Films by Anatoly Belov and Oksana Kazmina

Author

Olena Syaivo Dmytryk

Abstract

This article studies the interconnection between senses, affect and (queer) histories and politics in the films of Anatoly Belov and Oksana Kazmina. It does so by addressing the ‘synaesthetic’ quality of these works: the aesthetics foregrounding the symbiosis of different senses. I argue that by constructing a sensory cinematic experience, the films aim to move and re-orient the audience, altering consciousness and fostering solidarities. Through a close reading of selected titles, I examine the entanglement of sound, visuality, and touch in Seks, likuval’ne, rok-n-rol/ Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll (2013, Ukraine) and Sviato zhyttia / The Feast of Life (2015, Ukraine) within the context of broader historical shifts in Ukraine. Drawing on the concepts of Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams, I consider films by Belov and Kazmina as works that capture emerging structures of feeling and experiment with multiple temporalities.

Keywords

Anatoly Belov; Oksana Kazmina; Lyudska Podoba; synaesthesia; haptic aesthetics; queer cinema; structures of feeling; Ukrainian cinema; Ukrainian contemporary art; electronic music; Russia-Ukraine war.

Introduction

In the 1930s, philosopher Walter Benjamin noted that “the survival of artworks should be represented from the standpoint of their struggle for existence” (Benjamin 2008: 56). In dialogue with Benjamin, in this article I will direct my attention to the artworks that often have to struggle for their literal existence and survival in memory, but are important for changing the future. Namely, I will focus on the films made by non-normative cultural producers – Seks, likuval’ne, rok-n-rol / Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll (2013, Ukraine) and Sviato zhyttia / The Feast of Life (2015, Ukraine), the two unfinished films made in the 2010s by Ukrainian artists Anatoly Belov (Anatolii Bielov)¹ and Oksana Kazmina (Oksana Kaz’mina). While analysing these films in their fragmentary state, I pay attention to the queer politics that reveals itself through their struggle for existence. I argue that these works by Belov and Kazmina create specific sensory cinematic experiences with the aim to move and re-orient the audience, alter consciousness, and foster solidarities.

My article continues the conversation on the role of the aesthetic and political engagement of senses and emotions. I align with the cultural and media theorist Raymond Williams, who emphasises that culture is never “in the past tense”, fixed, nor is it “objective”, separate from the individual and subjective lived experience. To understand social processes in their fluidity, we need to turn to the “structure of feeling”: “a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or a period” (Williams 1977: 131). It is through the shifts in the structures of feeling that we can grasp culture not as a unified whole, but as a multitude. Attention to the different structures of feeling that can be traced and mediated through artworks can reveal the presence of residual culture (cultural components formed in the past but still incorporated by the dominant culture), and of emergent culture (new meanings, relationships or values that are often in opposition to the dominant culture) (Williams 1977: 123-125).

Some researchers actively embrace Williams’s concept of the structures of feeling, connecting it to studies of affect embodiment in art (see Sharma and Tygstrup 2015), with some even going as far as describing these as “queer structures of feeling” – the “articulation of presence forged through resistance to heterosexist society” (Bordowitz 2004: 49). These scholars and activists mostly align with the recent “affective turn” in cultural theory (Eve Kossowsky Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed) that is grounded in attention to the cultural and political functions of affects, emotion and senses. This article is an attempt to think about the structures of feeling through the analysis of the sensory, in particular, through addressing the role of synaesthesia. Philosopher Susan Buck-Morss (1992: 17) highlights the role of synaesthesia as a “mimetic synchrony between outer stimulus (perception) and inner stimulus (bodily sensations, including sense-memories) – “the crucial element of aesthetic cognition”. Some theorists specifically refer to “synaesthetic aesthetics”, or “synaesthetics”, to highlight an importance of synaesthetic approach to understanding art (Gordon 2020: 7).

I argue that attention to the films by Belov and Kazmina can help grasp a structure of feeling, particular to the emergent local cultures and queer communities in Ukraine. One can do it by engaging with the synaesthetics of Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll and The Feast of Life. In this article, I address how a synaesthetic cinematic experience is created – an experience that foregrounds a symbiosis of different senses. To do this, I will perform a close reading of both films, turning to my own phenomenological experiences – feelings and sensations provoked by the works. I will furthermore argue that this aesthetic experience is accompanied by a particular state of consciousness through which we can trace both residual and emergent structures of (queer) feeling. I will focus in particular on the feelings of melancholy and being ‘in high spirits’,² and how the films engage narrative, touch, sound, visuality, and movement to elicit these feelings.

Melancholy as a mood is often understood as part of the structure of feeling within non-normative communities: the weight and trauma of being born into and living in a hostile environment, the pressures of inner and outer hatred, distributed over one’s lifetime, can induce a melancholic perception of the world. The role of melancholy as opposition to dominant heteronormative social formations has been previously explored by various theorists, primarily as part of the anti-social turn in queer studies (see, for example, Ahmed 2010; Edelman 2004). Robin James (2015) argues that neoliberal regimes appropriate discourses of resilience and expect marginalised subjects to perform resilience and overcome the damage done to them. Such performance of damage and its overcoming individualises suffering and recovery; however, it leaves intact and reinforces systemic inequalities. Melancholy, on the contrary, opposes normative happiness or resilience. As will be demonstrated here, melancholy has a powerful political function when mediated through films.

The feeling of being ‘in high spirits’ is mediated through the unique synaesthetic cinematic experience created by Belov and Kazmina. My analysis of the symbiosis of senses foregrounds the connection between the body and its environment, where queering is the “pleasure and potentiality of forms of corporeal communing” (Luciano and Chen 2015, 185), and, through it, collective hope, i.e., the healing connections between communities.

Both Belov and Kazmina, as filmmakers, have been embedded in a polyphony of communities. Belov is a rare example of a cultural producer in Ukraine who is consistently devoted to embracing nonnormativity and experimenting with the crossing of artistic forms and genres. Since the early 2000s, he has produced graphic artworks (such as his artbook Naipornohrafichnisha knyha v sviti / The Most Pornographic Book in the World 2008 and The Most Pornographic Book in the World-2, 2012) that opposed anti-gender mobilisation and far-right violence, and explored various aspects of non-normative sexualities. Activists adopted some of Belov’s works and posters for use at the protests. He is also a co-founder and a singer-songwriter of the Lyudska Podoba queer music collective. Finally, although not formally trained in filmmaking, as a lifelong cinephile, Belov has long been interested in experimenting with it, and this is how his collaboration with Oksana Kazmina started.

Oksana Kazmina is a documentary filmmaker, media artist and performer who co-founded the Serviz Propav music band. Exploring the themes of embodiment, gender and sexuality in her works, Kazmina’s art often makes explicit political statements: for example, her Nadzvychaina Skvirt / Fabulous Squirt (2017, Ukraine) short film is “a story about super heroine who opposes far-right radicals by turning them into a happy pony”.³ She is also a member of the Freefilmers “cinemovement” collective aimed at “making films as alert and sensitive to the reality as possible and whose main focus is the human life and struggle for equality and freedom”.⁴ When working with Belov, Kazmina noted that it was a radically different experience compared to commercial, TV or state-sponsored film projects she had worked on before: it was an experience of true creative freedom (Trebunia 2013). Kazmina and Belov have developed a long-term friendship (Kazmina and Rusetska 2022), producing several art and cinematic projects together, two of which will be analysed in this article.

Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll

Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll is a 10-minute-long film that Belov co-created with Kazmina as part of the competition organised by the PinchukArtCentre. This short film was envisioned as a part of a future full-length, philosophical gay musical. In the musical, various social strata in Ukraine would be shown through the eyes of a foreigner exploring “spiritual, sexual and other experiences” (Trebunia 2013; see also PinchukArtCentre 2013). In this section, I will address the sensory and affective realms of the work and how they relate to (queer) politics.

The opening scene of the film presents a conversation among three young white people: the protagonist Rudolf, his friend Vitalik and Vitalik’s girlfriend (whose name is not mentioned in the film or the film credits). Soon after the film begins, the audience is taken to a different realm – the realm of the song that the film is built around. “Prestupit’ sakral’noe” / “To Transgress the Sacred” song is the crucial element and the soundtrack to the Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll, and the short film can be said to be a visual interpretation of the song. The song was first featured as a poem in Belov’s The Most Pornographic Book in the World-2 art project and then performed in 2012 by Lyudska Podoba. In the song’s verses, the narrator addresses his lover, recounting their complicated relationship. The narrator’s lover has “brute sex” with him, yet does not let the narrator kiss him or give him love and emotional warmth. In the chorus, the narrator switches to addressing the audience, explaining why his lover does not kiss: it is because the lover has “a girlfriend and principles”, and because it is punishable to “transgress the sacred”. So, what is “transgressing the sacred” within the narrative of the song?

Belov’s song explores the complexities of emotional trauma: the state of vulnerability caused by societal homophobia. In the conservative interpretations of the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, “transgressing the sacred” is related to homosexual sexual acts; in the song, the lyrical narrative claims that the “sacred” is not sex, but rather the public heterosexual status that would be lost if the narrator’s lover allowed for homoerotic romantic intimacy. The juxtaposition of “my lover” and “does not kiss” in the chorus establishes the relationship between the two men as existing, yet at the same time as non-existent: the lover has a girlfriend, but not a boyfriend. Lyudska Podoba’s song, through its language, constructs and deconstructs the experience of the “closeted” relationship as a relation between secrecy and disclosure, private and public (see Sedgwick 1990). The closet in the lyrical narrative exists on the level of verbal prohibition and secrecy, but also on the physical level, as the narrator is “allowed a lot” but forbidden specific romantic bodily expressions, such as kissing. Thus, touching the lips becomes an unspoken act of crossing a physical and symbolic boundary, as a kiss represents the “sacred” zone that distinguishes “brute sex” from a loving relationship (and implicitly, heterosexual from homosexual behaviour) to the lover. The narrator in such a relationship suffers from unrequited love, realising his loneliness, “kissing other young men”, yet coming back to his lover.

While the song’s lyrics are relatively straightforward, the music of the Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll is dazzling. This song is strange. Belov’s voice is low with occasional growling. He sings in a slow tempo as if the vocal is being played back at half speed. Belov’s vocals are a low (narcotic) drawl, often deliberately slightly off beat and out of tune. Like in other Lyudska Podoba songs, this voice is “inhuman”, denaturalised and distorted. The music surrounding Belov’s voice is similar: a combination of different electronic sounds and beats that sometimes coincide with the voice and at other times fall slightly out of rhythm. The rhythmical beat appears only during the chorus. Otherwise, the song is built around a synth chord progression combined with high-pitched electronic noise.

One could say that the song’s strangeness is meant to convey a sense of apathy and the “dragging”, even melancholy, temporality of the narrator’s life. The reduced tempo and the echo effects, coupled with Belov’s deep voice in the second part of the song, add to the sense of melancholic loneliness manifested in the lyrics. Melancholy permeates the authorial and audial voices alike in Belov’s song. On a narrative level, melancholy relates not just to disillusionment with a lover (and the narrator’s inability to let him go). In a broader sense, melancholy refers to the disappointment with a society that disallows any heterogeneity of sexual and romantic expression. The song describes and affectively conveys the damage done to the narrator but does not provide either a peaceful resolution or an outcome of heroic resilience (“my dreams are doomed”), nor does it try to ‘please’ the audience sonically.

The song, in my opinion, mediates melancholy as part of the structure of feeling of queer communities in 2010s Ukraine. The song was written and performed at the time of the slow conservative legislative turn in Ukraine, aiming at banning abortions and the “propaganda of homosexuality”, the activity of the Committee for the Protection of Public Morals censoring art works; and the rise of “anti-gender” groups and the far-right violence, all targeting nonnormative people (see more in Dmytryk 2022). Pointing in interviews to far-right attacks in Ukraine and the court case against Pussy Riot (Russian feminist activists), Belov considered the song to be a response to homophobia and discrimination taking place transnationally (Bazdyreva 2014).

As a political statement, the song thus directly evokes the strangeness of sonic melancholy, and its power is precisely in its otherworldly, trance-inducing qualities that engage the bodies of the audience. I believe this strangeness is connected to experimenting with aesthetics that welcomes synaesthesia. The dazzling, dizzying, hypnotising effect of the “To Transgress the Sacred” song can be perceived on the auditory level. And it is indeed through the music that, in Belov’s words, “a sad gay slow dance turns into a political manifestation” (Belov 2012). But it is the synaesthetic symbiosis of the video and sound that amplifies it in Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll.

As the song starts, Rudolf is walking in a dark park and singing while facing the camera. Other people whom I read as men are walking around him: they are silent and exchange long glances. The men’s clothing points to them as belonging to different social groups: for example, one is wearing a sea captain’s uniform, and some wear suits or jackets. Yet another is in a long black raincoat and black hat, etc. The characters can find each other without talking, through coded signs: colourful stripy socks on a skater boy, long glances, “checking the person out”, looks over the shoulder.

At the beginning of the film, melancholy is the key feeling induced by the film's visual devices. The darkness of the park, and the diversity of the characters make this scene into an artistic representation of “pleshka” (literally: ‘bald or bare patch’): a known informal cruising place where non-heterosexual people would gather to communicate, find partners and friends or have anonymous sex. The dark park “pleshka” in the film appears to be a “closeted space”: the characters in the park are not talking or even smiling; they seem to be very serious, staring only at each other as if mesmerised by their own and their partners’ movements. Thus, melancholy points not just to the 2010s present, but also to other residual Soviet cultures, with closely-knit underground communities of sexually and gender non-conforming people gathering on “pleshki”. While nowadays queer men have more varied spaces and opportunities to meet, the “traces” of the Soviet modes of non-normative behaviour are still found in the present.

Rudolf sings and walks towards the camera; in the background, the characters form couples and begin dancing slowly with one another (Fig. 1). Their dancing involves little bodily contact, yet it foregrounds a homoerotic charge through careful caressing and eye contact. The slow-motion singing and dancing create the scene’s immersive, dreamlike atmosphere; low-key lighting and cold blue colours add to its melancholic feel. And the camera movement aids the embodied perception of the film. It moves backwards while Rudolf moves forward, or slowly pans from side to side – it appears as if the camera both mimics the flow of the music and dances in unison with the dancing couples. This slowly dancing camera is part of “haptic aesthetics” (Dmytryk 2017): an aesthetic that operates on the levels of visuality, kinesthetics/proprioception and temporality, engaging the spectator’s entire body to function and react as an organ of touch. The camera movement that accompanies the characters' dancing and the slow polyphony of electronic music captivates me. I may think of myself as an autonomous observer on the other side of the screen. Yet it is the caresses of the dancing characters and the camera’s gliding movement that slowly “lure” me into identification with the protagonist.

In the second verse, new characters appear from the wood and approach the clearing: a (trans)feminine character wearing BDSM accessories, a person in a black mask (played by Belov himself), and a young man with pierced ears. They and other characters dance in couples around Rudolf. The couples’ dancing becomes more and more ecstatic: it is as if they are drunk or “medicated” (under the influence of drugs). Another character closes Rudolf’s eyes with his hands, while standing behind him; the others surround him, dancing and touching him. Rudolf himself remains still and does not react to them. Dancing bodies create one collective body of intimacy that moves around the still protagonist (Fig. 2). The scene is a manifestation of the sensation of touch, and the characters’ movement reminds of the fluctuation of seaweed under water, or perhaps, of the slow movement of the octopus tentacles. The light becomes warmer, yet in this trance-like ‘orgiastic’ scene, it begins to flicker as if multiple flashlights were searching through the park. This type of lighting is a literal reminder of the dangers the characters are facing: police arrests at “pleshki”, the possibility of criminalisation of homosexuality as “transgressing of the sacred”, and just being under constant surveillance within the “heteronormative panopticon” (Kuhar 2011).

During the final verse, the light stops flickering, and Rudolf opens his eyes. The next cut shows the previously dancing characters standing in a queue and kissing Rudolf one by one, mostly on the left cheek (the “kissing other lads” line plays on the soundtrack). This scene resembles many Eastern Orthodox rituals: kissing of the icons/relics by churchgoers or kissing the dead person during the funeral ceremony, as well as Judas’s infamous kissing of Jesus Christ. The scene encourages the perception of nonnormative sexuality and unrequited love as martyrdom, thus challenging ideas of what is sacred and what is not. Yet in the final part of the chorus, the last man in the queue – a young man with a piercing – kisses Rudolf on the lips. Rudolf responds to the kiss: the closeup features the long kiss between the two men while the soundtrack sings the line “Breaking sacred rules can be criminal” (Fig. 3).

After long shots, a close-up of a long kiss between the two men in the public space of a park is more than a zoom in. It is a political and tactile shift, a sudden cinematic turn away from the dreamlike caresses to an affirmative, embodied, and sexual nonheteronormative reality. By this time, I (the spectator) have already been invited to live through the sensations and feelings of the characters, by experiencing the flow of music, (unconsciously) responding to their caresses and engaging in the dance-like camera movements. The kiss is a culmination of the haptic, cinematic, and auditory “preparation” aimed at transforming my consciousness. The trance-like dance of merging senses connects me to the protagonist and establishes embodied aesthetic experience as the experience of solidarity. And it is the embodied synaesthetic experience of feeling connected that I believe is another part of the queer structure of feeling in the 2010s that goes beyond melancholy: a state of being in high spirits.

This feeling, I believe, is akin to a broader social shift, suggesting the consolidation of intersectional dissent against both the heteronormative national ideology and anti-gender mobilisation of the 2000s and early 2010s. Local left, feminist and queer activisms were all still relatively new social formations developing at the time, but nevertheless actively engaged in queer dissent (and some even volunteered to be amateur actors in the Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll). On the other hand, a certain sense of “progress” was facilitated by the transnational import of globalised gay and lesbian identities, the rise of identity politics within the mainstream LGBT activism in Ukraine, and the boom in knowledge on gender and sexuality, aided by internet development. Whether the new feeling correlated with national and transnational capitalism or with local traditions and cultures, the ‘in high spirits’ encompassed the collective character of hope and intuited the shifts taking place in Ukrainian society.

At the same time, such a feeling of elation carries the dreamlike and spiritual connotation that hope involves – and Belov and Kazmina’s film entices. I remember seeing the film in the PinchukArtCentre, projected onto a big white gallery wall. The film’s title is a reference to the song “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” by Ian Dury from 1977, but Belov and Kazmina replaced “drugs” with the slightly incorrect English to Ukrainian translation – “likuval’ne” – which means “medicated” or “healing”. Telling the story of inner homophobia and screening two men kissing in the public space of a gallery, Belov and Kazmina had indeed queered the space and ‘transgressed the sacred’ for normative audiences. I am trying to imagine what heteronormative spectators might have felt watching the film and seeing the close-up of the kiss on a big screen. Did they let that kiss touch them? Did the synaesthetics of the film shift their perception and consciousness? Did it connect them to the film characters? Did the phenomenological closeness transform into an ideological one? Did healing take place?

This section has addressed the ways in which synaesthesics of the film is connected to specific feelings – melancholy and the feeling of ‘in high spirits’. While I have argued that melancholy in the film can be read as connected to experiences of living in a homophobic world and queer dissent, I have also suggested that through melancholy one can trace specific meanings and lived experiences of being in the “closet” and in other segregated queer spaces, such as “pleshki”, as well as living under heteronormative state pressure – feelings and modes of life familiar to non-heteronormative people in Ukraine. At the same time, the elation that “transgresses the sacred” also signifies the collective feeling of the new future-in-the-making that the film projects. Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll was displayed at the PinchukArtCentre and received the Public Choice Prize in December 2013. Coincidentally or not, this became a time of broader dissent and future-in-the-making, when over a million protesters gathered near PinchukArtCentre, on the Independence Square, to oppose the Russian-backed Yanukovych regime – in what was later called the Revolution of Dignity. Several months afterwards, Russia started its invasion of Ukraine. In the next section, I will explore the shifts taking place after this 2014 Russian invasion, turning to Belov and Kazmina’s 2015 film The Feast of Life, focusing on the senses and feelings mediated through it.

The Feast of Life

If Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll has an aura of strangeness to it despite its following narrative cinematic norms, The Feast of Life is the very embodiment of strangeness. A work-in-progress excerpt from a film that is yet unfinished, the 30-minute The Feast of Life is more an experience than a narrative. It is purposefully non-linear and surreal. The film is inspired by the idea of vampires inviting unsuspecting mortals to a club party. These vampires feed on drug-induced human hallucinations (something that we can only guess as an audience, as there is no exposition in the film). The film presents a constant flow between documentary scenes shot in a party mansion and the garden surrounding it and surreal dreams and hallucinations (of the characters, or perhaps of the film itself).

Like Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll, but even more radically so, the Feast of Life is an experiment in synaesthetics. It is a feast for all senses. First, the film is an erotic experiment. The visual depiction of sexuality, and queer sexuality in particular, is not a metaphor in The Feast of Life, but documentation, as the directors included erotic scenes shot during the making of the film (Bitiutskiĭ 2017). Yet it is evident that (erotic) touch is a key element of the film: from the shots of hands touching the leaves of a green bush to the scenes of kissing and dancing (Fig. 4). Haptic visuality enhances the feeling of touch: many scenes are shot with lenses that blur the image in soft distortion, so that the eye is “touching” the surface of the screen. As a spectator, I am constantly shifting from seeing the image to perceiving it, which adds to the feeling of the film being an experience to live through, rather than watch from a distance.

Synaesthetics sts at the levels of proprioception and temporality. The film portrays and encourages shifts and expansions in perception. These shifts are quite literal: one of the opening scenes features a (vampire) drug dealer surrounded by the party audience in the garden. The drug dealer is giving away different drugs for free, in a ‘medicating’ gentle way, selecting the best drug for each person and advising on its use. The camera then follows the characters, moving from one space to another on a hallucinatory trip. There are no protagonists in the film’s first half: instead, I, as a spectator, join different characters who reveal different experiences. I join people in the garden talking about their surreal dreams and whether it is at all possible to turn a dream into a film. I hear someone telling a story of being in a dark forest: the person reaches their hand out, feels something soft, and then suddenly realises that it is an encounter with a fox. I then end up in a room full of glowing flowers in glass jars, with same-sex couples or thrupples kissing and petting each other. Next, I find myself in a different dark room, where a person whom I read as a woman is expressing her breast milk so that her baby would not get drugs with the milk. With their clothes glowing in fluorescent light, she and her friend are talking about the shame connected with expressing milk in public. Ordinary conversations dissolve into scenes of dancing, with close-ups of DJs and mixing decks and dancers in eccentric attire, sometimes semi-nude, on the dance floor; and close-ups of a hand caressing the leaves on a green bush in the garden.

While these scenes are seemingly disconnected, they are oddly coherent, united by the same cinematic flow. Like in Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll, this flow is created by electronic music that defines the scenes and their rhythm. Montage follows the music: rapid and fast with coarse glitch beats and slow with ambient melodies. Both the music and the montage define the temporality of the film, placing the audience into shape-shifting defamiliarised timescales and converting auditory soundscapes into surreal imagery. In one of the scenes, Belov’s character feels that he is dying after taking drugs, but is told by a stranger to relax and accept his hallucinations. The following scene portrays altered consciousness both sonically and visually. As Belov’s character watches people around him, and then walks into a different room, both music and image become distorted, ‘stretched’ and ‘contracted’. ‘Bendy’ unnatural camera angles, blurred imagery and atonal noise patterns create feelings of dizziness and disorientation. While this character is watching the dancer in front of him, at some point both the music and image slow down and almost stop – and then speed up as the character stops hallucinating.

In one of the following scenes, Belov’s character is suddenly outside, in a warmly lit green garden. This scene is a breath of fresh air – a return to more conventional film aesthetics and a temporal break from the fast beat and psychedelic imagery of the previous party scenes. Belov’s character joins the group of people. One of them is his boyfriend, who has just turned eighteen. Holding hands, Belov’s character tells the boyfriend that nobody treats him as well as the boyfriend does. Moved by these words, the boyfriend answers: “Tolia, I feel the same. Well, ok, there will be tears now, man. We need to control ourselves”. “Nobody told me before that they loved me”, – reiterates the protagonist, “Usually I loved somebody and was turned down”. Like the kissing scene in Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll, this scene displays a glimpse of ‘in high spirits’ – a rare embrace of vulnerability, love and happiness in queer lives.

In turning to sensations, feelings, and emotions, the film poetically records the dissolution of the old senses and the emergence of new communities and alternative structures of feeling developing during the war. The Feast of Life incorporates its own environment, and, in its archival desire, it captures the feeling of being ‘in high spirits’. Belov aimed to connect people from different milieus (filmmakers, artists, electronic musicians) through the film and to document “a cultural juncture” (Bitiutskiĭ 2017), “the voice of the young Ukrainian generation” (Karpan’ 2016). The music in the film is therefore not merely a soundtrack intended to enhance sensory experiences: local musicians (such as Lyudska Podoba, Cobra-Chupacabra, Gnatenko, KOMITET, Mokri Dereva, Leo Cardigan) are documented performing live as part of the film.

The Feast of Life was made at a time when foreign musicians abandoned Ukrainian clubs, fearing revolution and the subsequent war; as a result, the local Ukrainian electronic scene rapidly developed by adopting the ‘do-it-together’ spirit in the face of economic crisis. Raves and secret parties in the factories and forests, new clubs that aimed to cultivate new audiences rather than to create profit, the proliferation of different music genres led to a sense of high spirits for both local cultural producers and their audiences. This new scene was more open to non-normativity and queer presence. On the one hand, nightclubs and raves were organic cruising and socialising spaces. Yet the new “wave” of the electronic music scene was different from the previous as it participated in the globalised commercialisation of queerness that included non-normative people as a new target audience (see Whorrall-Campbell 2023). For example, queer Veselka / Rainbow party series was established in Kyiv in 2018, a couple of years after The Feast of Life was shot, when some gay clubs in Ukraine had to close because of the economic crisis or far-right attacks. The party united “ravers, music geeks, freaks, the queer community, and everyone else who wants to express themselves” (Fedorova 2019). The ‘high spirits’ of The Feast of Life thus capture and intuit the shifts in both electronic music and queer cultures and sense a new community appearing. On the other hand, this new community also suffered from far-right attacks and the raves and parties were constantly raided by police under the pretence of “fight against drugs” (Konakov 2016). The Feast of Life and its dazzling synaesthetics is thus an aesthetic and political gesture of solidarity with all those at the intersection of non-normativity who faced criminalisation, discrimination and police brutality: (queer) musicians, audiences, and drug users.

Entering the journeys/trips of the film characters, I am joining multiple temporalities. Lyudska Podoba’s song “Moi Rany Plachut” / “My Wounds Are Crying”, played at the end of the film, is key to understanding it. In the song, the protagonist describes the emotions caused by “being caught” by the “strange music”. The lyrics describe the hypersensitive affective state caused by the music, both melancholic and elated. The “strange music” that the protagonist hears causes not just physical and emotional pain to him; this pain is embodied: the music opens the old wounds and makes them “cry” – and “sing”.

While the gendered adjective endings point to the protagonist as “male”, the song suggests an antithesis to hegemonic types of normative masculinity: it is a vulnerable, “broken and quiet”, crying body. This body transcends gender and human status through its suffering; however, this suffering is presented as full of love and eroticism: the body is open to the world through its wounds, which are both crying and singing. This combination of suffering and singing is strangely life-affirming and spiritual in its ‘high spirits’. It conveys the feeling of “vital materiality” (Bennett 2010: 112) that “captures an ‘alien’ quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman”.

The acoustic dimension intensifies the feelings of the protagonist’s body and the spiritual connotations of the myrrh-pouring wounds. A gentle, high-pitched gender-neutral voice (Belov sings in soft falsetto) creates the acoustic version of ‘inhumanness’. The voice is further amplified by the special effects (reverb or glitchy delay) and ambient ‘immersive’ arrangement combining an electronic beat with a variety of sounds and instruments. As a spectator and listener, I am myself ‘caught’ and transformed by this strange music, which alters the feeling of time and space. It is not unsurprising perhaps that, closer to the end of the film, it manifests itself both as a strange chronicle and as an atemporal vision. One gets lost in the film just as one gets lost in music. The visual effects make the dancing scenes appear as if they were recorded in the 1980s or the 1990s, with progressively more visual noise, grain, glitches and distortion (Fig. 5). The film is literally deteriorating while I am watching it, and I am thrown into feeling multiple temporalities: the present moment that is always the future and the past. Does the film touch on the others’ wounds in the same way as it opened mine? Do they feel undone by The Feast of Life? And why would it matter? This question brings us back to the present moment and to thinking about history through synaesthetics.

In 1940, soon after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the early stages of the occupation of Europe, Walter Benjamin, in his famous theses “On the Concept of History” (1940), melancholically reflected on the dark side of progress by turning to the image of Angelus Novus (Paul Klee 1920). This angel of history is driven into the future by the storm of progress. Looking into the past, he sees one single catastrophe, “which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” (Benjamin 2003: 392). Benjamin believed that to change the world, the shifts in mass consciousness needed to happen – including the radical changes in the synaesthetic system, in the embodied ways of perceiving the world.

Decades later, the storm of progress continues, and it seems that the pile of debris has already covered the sky, occupied land, killed hundreds of thousands of living beings and polluted the rivers and seas. The Feast of Life may seem to some to be strange apolitical cinematic escapism at the time of the catastrophic 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet in my reading, The Feast of Life does not try to escape the war, but responds to it in its own, queer way. In one particularly telling scene, a stranger (whom I read as a man) approaches Belov’s character: “Wow! I know you! I have seen your project in the Pinchuk! The video [a reference to the Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll shown in the PinchukArtCentre]! […] By the way, I was also doing something for Pinchuk, but unfortunately didn’t pass [the competition selection]. A year ago, I couldn’t even imagine that soon I would be making art on some social issues I don’t care about”. When Belov’s character asks the artist what he is working on, the artist responds: “Well, photography… It is my self-reflection on war… it is death, violence… But I really like the things you do, all those videos with fur coats. All this stuff, you got it?”

This scene reveals an important commentary on the role of both films and the structures of feeling as mediated through Ukrainian art. On the one hand, the war engendered immense and intense traumatic feelings, which many artists began to express and reflect on. Yet in this scene, Belov and Kazmina critique those artists who do not view queer artworks as political (reducing them to “fur coats”), while quite cynically turning to the traumas of the war and death as a way to add “surplus value” to their work on the global contemporary art market (see Gonzaga 2017 on slum voyeurism in cinema). While The Feast of Life is not about the war in the most direct sense, as a synaesthetic experiment, it aims at shifting human perceptions of the world, which is a political task at the time of the war. It aims to convey the embodied experience of the complex structure of feeling of the generation witnessing major political shifts and simultaneously experiencing queer pain and pleasure, melancholy and elation. It is the film’s synaesthetics that help to bring this simultaneity to the foreground. These synaesthetics ‘mess up’ the audience’s (normative) feelings of time, space, and bodily sensations to induce powerful embodied states and emotions, and by doing it, to re-orient the audience towards a different political reality. In conclusion, I will explore this re-orientation in more depth.

Conclusion

As in Walter Benjamin’s work, where the angel is witnessing history, angels are also present in Belov and Kazmina’s The Feast of Life; yet they are different angels. At the beginning of the film, Belov’s character recounts a dream he experienced. It is a dream of glowing angels who, like fireflies, fill in the space and then slowly fall down like snow. Once they touch something, they immediately turn into red dust. Belov’s character then sees people around sniffing this red dust, and then is told to hurry up and try to sniff as well. The last frames of The Feast of Life show Belov’s character performing in the basement of the old building that looks abandoned. The cracks in the white walls provide a stark contrast to the dark club scenes in the beautiful, surreal mansion. The next shot shows the corner of a white wall, with two colourful sunbeams dancing on the wall and on the character's face, as if he is dancing next to the ray of light. The speckles of dust are moving within the ray of light as if falling snow. Through the camera, I am looking straight into a projector emitting bright light, with the speckles of dust flowing in the ray of light. The camera zooms in on a hand that enters the light, playing with the dust speckles, as if touching the light itself, and then on the tiny flowing particles lit by the light (Fig. 6). For me, this ending is a metaphor of the solidarities and connections that stretch beyond bodily borders, space or time.

I am writing this article in 2025, long after the films I discuss were created, and the present moment ‘leaks’ into my analysis of Belov and Kazmina’s works. In this essay, I addressed the use of the intricate symbiotic interconnections between the auditory, visual, haptic, and narrative elements of queer cinema. I argued that the turn to synaesthetics in Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll and The Feast of Life is not an accidental aesthetic choice, but rather a political strategy of capturing alternative structures of feeling and altering consciousness. I traced the role of both melancholy and ‘in high spirits’ in films as part of a broader structure of feeling related to the shifts in Ukrainian society, and particularly in queer cultures. These feelings are grounded in local contexts, but I believe that both films perform political work that is important transnationally.

Throughout the essay, I have argued that cinematic synaesthetics and different feelings are used by directors to alter consciousness and re-orient the audience; it is now time to specify what this re-orientation is ‘towards’. Where Benjamin explored hashish as a way to achieve trance states, to “loosen the objects, and lure them from their accustomed world” (Benjamin 2005: 88), Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll and The Feast of Life immerse the audience in cinematic psychedelic experiences to remake reality through exploring interconnections. Like Benjamin, Belov and Kazmina are committed to the belief that it is not only drugs that can alter human consciousness – art and music do it as well. A vulnerable queer subjectivity that blurs categorisations and perceives the world differently is ‘altered consciousness’, and tuning into this consciousness may heal the damage done by historical and contemporary oppression, as well as to allow connections to new ways of worldbuilding. My analysis and perception of both films is that their queer political ‘action’ lies in re-orienting both queer and non-queer audiences towards this form of healing.

Instead of Benjamin’s helpless angel of history, lonely in its separation from humanity and looking back in horror at what humanity has done while being carried into the future, the angels in The Feast of Life are inseparable from the world and our bodies. As humans, we always play an active part in history and are literally breathing in histories in their multitude of particles, with all the melancholy and being ‘in high spirits’, pain and happiness in each and every moment. This radical idea-feeling of multitudes and interconnectedness is what one can breathe in when watching films by Belov and Kazmina. Their films foster the embodied understanding of the multiple temporalities of vibrating life that exist in every moment. They make us realise the entanglement of death and life, and the fact that our wounds can be both crying and singing while we exist in a violent world. To create the future world without violence, a symbiosis of the senses is needed as a prerequisite of a political symbiosis where humans co-exist peacefully with each other and with non-human beings, elements and forces.

The feelings engendered by these films are much more intense when watching them in 2025. Some members of the queer community appearing in The Feast of Life have died in the war. Since 2022, electronic music nights have sometimes been dedicated to their memory, turning the dance floor into a space of collective grief and remembrance. Although I have analysed the strange sensations and feelings engendered by Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll and The Feast of Life, I haven’t fully addressed the fact that neither is a complete work; rather they are just excerpts from proposed full-length films that were never completed. By giving attention to them, I am paying tribute to the many films and artworks that could not be made: either because their creators died, or because they were not able to continue with their art due to precarious working conditions under capitalism or, because of discrimination, or being pushed to the margins of a liveable life, wiped out of history because of their non-normativity. Even more important now, at a time of (information) wars, commercial “emotional extractivism” and the weaponisation of users’ emotions in the digital age (see fantastic little splash 2024) is to acknowledge and cherish queer ways of feeling and sensing. Through so doing, we can connect to a multitude of partial and stubborn histories within and outside of us that may resist conventional narration but are nevertheless vital for survival and co-existence.

Olena Syaivo Dmytryk
University of Cambridge
od241@cam.ac.uk

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers, the special issue editors, and to Anatoly Belov and Oksana Kazmina for their support in producing this article.

Bio

Dr Olena Syaivo Dmytryk is a researcher from Ukraine based at the University of Cambridge. Their work focuses on Ukraine and Eastern Europe and is located at the intersections of the social movements studies, the histories and theories of sexuality and gender, visual culture studies and digital humanities.

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Filmography

Belov, Anatolii, and Oksana Kaz’mina. 2013. Seks, lekarstvennoe, rok-n-roll / Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll. Available at https://vimeo.com/88882032 (accessed May 1, 2025).

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Suggested citation

Dmytryk, Olena Syaivo. 2025. “Angels of (Queer) Histories: Synaesthetic Films by Anatoly Belov and Oksana”. Queer Memories (ed. Katja Čičigoj and Jasmina Šepetavc). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 21. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00021.413.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This license does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms.