The Nose or Conspiracy of Mavericks

The film is animated. It was made over a very long stretch of years. Andrey Khrzhanovsky had been working on it since the seventies. The account is built as three dreams. The first acts out Gogol’s story The Nose. In it a man loses his nose. The nose becomes a character of its own. The music comes from Shostakovich’s opera of the same name, written in 1928. From there the film opens onto Russia in the twentieth century. Its subject is the repression of the Stalin years. What happened to artists and writers is what it follows. Meyerhold and Bulgakov are among the names in it, and drawing, cut-out figures and live footage are used side by side. The eighty nine minute film took the jury prize at Annecy, a Russian production Andrey Khrzhanovsky released in 2021.