For the month of November, Vtape is pleased to present a video by recently added Vtape artist Mikhail Zhelezniikov, whose work has been exhibited everywhere from Helsinki to Tokyo, from St. Petersburg to New York. The Death of an Extra (2023) is described as “a brief study of the unusual history of one old film frame.”
Director’s Note: While watching Stalingrad (1943), by Leonid Varlamov, I noticed this shot right away and it stayed in my memory until I got the idea for this video. This is the story of an unknown man caught in the endless circle of cinematic death, artistic ambitions and entertainment, where an image of killing is no longer entertaining enough.
The Death of an Extra
Mikhail Zheleznikov (Russia, 2023, 9:55)
Mikhail Zheleznikov was born in Leningrad in 1972. He has made episodes for ARTE and YLE, films for St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studio, and has been a participant and jury member of various international film festivals. His video works have been exhibited at the Modern Art Museum Kiasma (Helsinki, Finland), the Museum of the Moving Image (New York, USA), the National Art Center (Tokyo, Japan), the Kunst Museum Bonn (Germany), and the Museum of Modern Art Erarta (St. Petersburg, Russia). In 2012, he co-created the My America exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image, produced by CEC ArtsLink. Since 2011, he has curated the experimental short film competition in Silico at the Message To Man film festival. Within the frameworks of Message to Man, he curated and organized numerous special programs, screenings and events, e.g. John Smith retrospective in 2012, Helena Třeštíková retrospective in 2017, Nordic Avant-Garde program and video art exhibition Memories of Landscape curated by Martin Grennberger in 2019, and KIBERGLAZ neural film laboratory dedicated to Dziga Vertov with a practical workshop curated by Andrea Gatopoulos in 2024. In 2012–2020, he co-curated the experimental film festival Kinodot. In 2019, he was one of the curators of the experimental project Per Forma 2 Stage at the Big Drama Theatre. In 2015–2019, he taught at St. Petersburg State Institute of Culture, in 2016–2021 at St. Petersburg New Cinema School, and in 2019–2024 taught documentary filmmaking at St. Petersburg State University of Film and Television.
Image credit: The Death of an Extra, by Mikhail Zheleznikov (2023)