Zvyagintsev claims that the idea for Elena
originated with an invitation from the British producer, Oliver Dungey, to participate in a multinational project in which four directors from different hemispheres would each produce a film about the apocalypse. Zvyagintsev ultimately bowed out of the project, but the film that resulted is certainly eschatological. Russian culture has a long tradition of allusions to the Book of Revelation - Tolstoy's Pierre Bezukhov is obsessed with the idea that Napoleon is the Antichrist and many of Dostoevsky's characters read the last book of the Bible - and Zvyagintsev was a natural fit to take up the theme. [more inside]
posted by smcg
on Apr 15, 2013 -
5 comments
Our Man in Great Neck: 'In June 1982, my grandparents, Murray and Helene Cohen, traveled to the Soviet Union as part of
a secret mission headed by the Great Neck chapter of the long island Committee for Soviet Jewry in order to pass information and contraband goods to Jews attempting to leave Russia.'
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Jun 14, 2012 -
1 comment
Moscow of 1931 is a collection of hand-tinted lantern slides by Branson DeCou, an American photographer and travelogue lecturer who traveled the world for 30 years before his death in 1941. You can view more of the DeCou corpus online at the
Branson Decou Archive at the University of California, Santa Cruz where they've been attempting to sort, preserve, identify and digitize 10,000 DeCou slides received in 1971, a gift referred to the university chancellor by photographer Ansel Adams.
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Apr 14, 2012 -
16 comments
Climate Variability and Climate Change: The New Climate Dice An excerpt from what should be a very incendiary academic paper by
Hansen, J, et al:
Thus there is no need to equivocate about the summer heat waves in Texas in 2011 and Moscow
in 2010, which exceeded 3σ – it is nearly certain that they would not have occurred in the
absence of global warming. If global warming is not slowed from its current pace, by midcentury 3σ events will be the new norm and 5σ events will be common.
posted by Renoroc
on Nov 11, 2011 -
38 comments
"
Howe snapped more than 400
photographs in Moscow and St. Petersburg with his hand held
Graflex camera, a state-of-the-art device that allowed its user to shoot without a tripod. His photographs of pedestrians, street vendors and aristocrats are rare glimpses of everyday life before the upheavals of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution — and sparked huge interest in Russia among history buffs and local museums."
posted by gman
on May 10, 2011 -
20 comments
The Children of Leningradsky. A 20 minute short by two Polish directors, Andrzej Celinski and Hanna Polak, nominated for the
2004 Academy Award for Best Documentary,
Short Subject. 'Since the fall of the Iron Curtain an
estimated four million children have found themselves living on the streets in the former countries of the Soviet Union. In the streets of Moscow alone there are over 30,000 surviving in this manner at the present time. The makers of the documentary film concentrated on a community of homeless children living hand to mouth in the Moscow train station Leningradsky.' Through Liveleak.
posted by VikingSword
on Jan 5, 2011 -
8 comments
"During the 1860s, several photographers based in Moscow and St. Petersburg produced series of cartes-de-visite showing Russian 'types.' These
remarkable portraits provide a fascinating record of working-class townspeople, artisans, street vendors and peasants, some staged performing an activity, such as drinking tea or gaming, and some photographed in the performance of their occupation."
posted by gman
on Aug 23, 2010 -
22 comments
As Moscow changes, so does its population of stray dogs. During Soviet times, Moscow's stray dogs foraged for food and avoided humans, since there wasn't much to be gained from begging. As the city became increasingly affluent, the dogs' behavior changed radically. Some recent adaptations include passive subway begging, observing stoplights, and a food scam called the "come-from-behind ambush." The stray dogs, whose population is estimated at 26,000, have even ceased some of their interpack warfare. Observe the Moscow subway dog
here.
[more inside]
posted by Afroblanco
on May 29, 2008 -
26 comments
Like
Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron (made famous through François Truffaut's film
L'Enfant Sauvage), a modern-day
feral child, known as '
werewolf boy ' "who snarls and bites [has] escaped from a Moscow clinic just a day after being rescued from the wild." "The boy, who looks about ten, moves around with his legs half bent and 'was running with wolves and searching for food with them.' Police, who named him Lyokha, said villagers found him in a lair made of leaves and sticks in freezing temperatures."
* [Feral Children previously on MeFi -
1,
2]
posted by ericb
on Dec 21, 2007 -
15 comments
The
UBS Bank calculated
how long it takes an average worker around the world to earn enough to buy a Big Mac. Workers in Tokyo were the fastest:
Tokyo 10 minutes,
New York 13 minutes,
London 16 minutes,
Hong Kong 17 minutes,
Paris 21 minutes,
Moscow 25 minutes,
Rome 39 minutes,
Beijing 44 minutes,
Manila 81 minutes,
Jakarta 86 minutes.
Is this a fair comparison? Is it something that will change people's perspective about the rest of the world?
posted by PetBoogaloo
on Nov 17, 2006 -
53 comments
Moscow's decadent post-Communism nightclub scene. Stalin's yacht pushes up the Moscow River at eight a.m., and nobody cares if you missed it. The world's longest-running after-party just keeps going.
In a shipboard ballroom, Russia's lucky few tend to their good time. Music like a lot of loud nothing pounds through the girls lathered in Valentino, Gaultier, and Bulgari. Defying you with their eyes, they throw off a kind of heat that has never burned you before. The men with money and new style hang around the edges with satisfied smiles, their low-vibrating calm punching through thousand-dollar sunglasses. They'll kiss you, they'll kill you, you'll know where you stand.
posted by fet
on Jul 25, 2006 -
50 comments
Vlad gives his views on the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. As the anthem of
Phystech promises, "we will disperse, when the time comes, in all the world, from Dolgoprudny"
posted by tellurian
on Feb 28, 2006 -
3 comments
"Russian Oligarachs Want Immortality". Vladimir Bryntsalov has had a course of stem cell injections and feels no older than 20, though his biological age is about 60. Treatment will cost you $10,000-20,000 in Moscow. In many Western countries, such clinics would not even get the opportunity to open their doors. During a recent speech, President Bush denounced stem cell therapy as "godless."
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 19, 2005 -
26 comments
Moscow Life. 49 stories with images of life in and around Moscow, posted between 1995 and 2002. There's an introduction
here.
posted by plep
on Mar 18, 2003 -
6 comments
Diggers of the Underground Planet We've had
similar links posted before, but this one about the subterranean geography of Moscow really caught my attention. Discoveries include a 3,000 seat bunker under a cathedral, deserted chemical warfare labs, ancient stashes of the skulls, a second ring of metro stations that were never used and possibly a mass grave from the Stalin era.
posted by Irontom
on Jun 13, 2002 -
18 comments
TV out in Moscow, due to fire in landmark tower. So, am I just too much of an old Cold Warrior, or is anyone else a bit twitchily nervous that after the TV press hammered Russian President Vladimir Putin over his handling of the
Kursk disaster, now the TV just
happens to be knocked out? Oh, and that Putin is saying how this incident shows that the whole economy needs more "security"? Hmm...
posted by aurelian
on Aug 28, 2000 -
3 comments
