Of Freaks And Men

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Film Description

Balabanov's homage to silent films and daguerrotypes. A darkly handsome and manipulative turn of the century St Petersburg photographer peddles images of bare-bottomed floggings. Filmed in sepia tone with a crackling eerie soundtrack, it lays bare a preoccupation with sexuality welling beneath the austere trappings of the Russian bourgeoisie, as well as documenting the transition from photographs to cinematography.

Film Information

DVD Extras

Includes a trailer, filmographies, stills gallery and a review.

Technical Details

Reviews & Articles

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Review by Andrew Rowe on 23rd March 2001

Technically awesome, intellectually intriguing, difficult to engage with...

Review by Graeme Hobbs on 22nd May 2003

Balabanov’s homage to silent films and daguerrotypes is part black and white and silent with intertitling and the rest tinted the brick red builders’ tea of a daguerrotype. It is also a celebration of faces in true silent style - the malefic Viktor Ivanovich, the impassive and immoral Johannes, the blind and quivering Yekaterina. It all combines into a cohesive and intriguing whole.

The story is of the fledgeling pornography industry in turn of the century St. Petersburg, in which photographs of birch floggings are superseded by short films of birch floggings. In the course of the film underground photography literally comes out of the cellars and becomes cinematography in drawing rooms and subsequently the picture house.

The hidden commerce of the photographs is fascinating. They are taken in cellars and sold in alleys but they infiltrate the bourgeios households where they are hidden in pinafores, bodices, pockets and piles of laundry, the cellars and households linked by the recurrent motif of staircases. The poetics of space vide Bachelard is one of the pleasures of the film and could in fact have been further explored.

Also intriguing are the shots of motion, specifically steam-driven motion of trains and odd steamboats. They fit well into the overall design of the piece even if it feels that they are there for their own sake because they look good – and they do look good. Perhaps they are to show how new forms of transport abetted the shady photographic industry but this connection is slight.

The most remarkable aspect of the film is the lightness of tone it preserves. This is no small feat in a film about pornography that shows both birch whippings and Siamese twins being photographed naked in a cellar. In fact the predominant theme is a kind of Checkovian ennui and melancholia.

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Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Films About Filmmaking

Including: A Star Is Born, Adaptation, Bad Education, Bollywood Hollywood, Boogie Nights, Camera Buff, Celebrity, Day Of The Locust, Ed Wood, Fellinis 8 1/2.

Films About Sexuality

Including: 9 Songs, A Ma Soeur, A Short Film About Love, Anatomy Of Hell, Baise-Moi, Black Narcissus, Boogie Nights, Closer, Crash, Empire Of Passion.

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Films From Room 101 by Alex Davidson

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