JAZZ ORGIE © Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg
Jazz, mixed media – and abstract on top? When Irina Rubina’s JAZZ ORGY was chosen as the 2016 FMX trailer at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, it was met with widespread astonishment. The FMX, a conference for VFX, games, VR and other technological trends that has been running for more than 20 years and is organised by the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, was more used to slick 3D looks. And then came this bold, yet classic-looking jazz trailer – the pure abstraction that impressed filmmaker and professor Andreas Hykade so much that he immediately chose it as the unconventional FMX trailer – fitting for his inauguration as the new director of the Animationsinstitut. *
She was so busy finishing the film that she hardly noticed this amazement and slight irritation, says Irina Rubina:
“There are also dramaturgical difficulties in abstraction, so I was busy solving those problems all the time. And I don’t think I had much time or inclination to think about other perspectives of perception.”
In any case, she was already “doing her own thing,” often differently from her fellow students – and even more so than was expected at Gobelins in France, one of the world’s top animation schools, which she had visited as an exchange student the year before. There, the focus was on drawing and animation techniques, on execution – students were not allowed to realise their own ideas in the first year.
JAZZ ORGY is Rubina’s defiant response to these experiences. A wild, yet structured and organic jazz tour-de-force of abstract forms and characters that are merely being hinted at, dancing to free jazz and even adapting an actual dance choreography – quite self-confident in its formal composition and consistency. And bold at a time when the stop-motion or analogue renaissance had not yet really begun. But anyone who suspected that she had been a passionate animator with a sense of film nostalgia for many years was wrong: Irina Rubina took a roundabout route to animation. She had first studied fine arts, specialising in photography, but then dropped out
(“I felt that the discourses about art took up so much more space than the activity itself, and that blocked me artistically”).
and then maths
(“It was about absolute beauty, which can only be right or wrong” – the opposite of the previous studies),
which she put aside when she prepared for the entrance exam to the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg. Here she was ready for the great artistic freedom beyond fixed curricula that is characteristic of the studies there.
Irina Rubina’s JAZZ ORGY screened at over 150 festivals and won several awards, including “Best Commissioned Work” at the Ottawa Animation Festival. JAZZ ORGY marks the beginning of Rubina’s filmography – and it could be said that two elements in particular have shaped her style to this day. One element is the look. It could perhaps be described as retro-avant-garde, often using a mixed technique of 2D, 3D and drawing. It is timeless, very picturesque, classical, but there is also something melancholy about it; as a quote or homage to a bygone era – it is no coincidence that she cites the great experimental pioneers Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttmann as her role models, but also Soviet Constructivism. The other element is jazz, which Irina Rubina uses as a rhythm, as a framework and as a partner in dialogue – she repeatedly incorporates it into her films.
MACHTSPIEL © Katrin Schilling
JAZZ ORGY was followed by POWER GAME (2015), which was also a symbiosis of music and animation. This time, however, the stage was added as a new challenge: POWER GAME was created in 2015 as an audiovisual production for the Ensemble Modern at the CRESC Biennale, which was also recorded for posterity in 2019 as a short film about power, the assumption of power and the loss of power. This was the first time that Irina Rubina had tried out what it meant not only to develop a piece in collaboration with a composer, but also to find forms that unfold their effect not only on the screen, but also in three-dimensional space, such as matryoshka dolls that are played on stage as musical instruments, and a steel construction in which the musicians have to be secured while sitting and playing. She had the support of Hannah Ebenau, an experienced set designer and her “partner in crime,” without whom it would not have been possible to realise the project.
For Irina Rubina, who was born in Moscow and emigrated to Germany in 2002, it was originally about the relationship between the individual and the system, the rulers and the people. But when she looks at POWER GAME today, she also sees something else. The red projected onto the matryoshkas looks like blood to her. After all, Crimea has already happened. Not to mention Georgia. Perhaps this is where the internal questions and conflicts begin: How could it come to this? What can be done?
1000 MILES TILL THE NEXT EMBRACE © Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg
However, after graduating from the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg, she turned her attention to the private sphere first: in her feature-length documentary 1000 MILES TILL THE NEXT EMBRACE (2019), Rubina “processed” her difficult relationship with tango, depicting above all the feeling of loneliness that seems to unite all dancers. Isn’t it incredible that as an animation student she was able to graduate with a documentary? Irina Rubina says that she fought hard from the beginning. And it was clear to her that this was the only way to tell this film. The university made it possible, especially because a French co-production partner was already on board. The idea, as Rubina also says in the interview, takes precedence over what is generally considered feasible. And obstacles can be productive. What were the biggest differences and challenges in making a documentary, especially compared to animation? First of all, the shoot itself:
“It’s a different way of thinking, a different way of working. It was a lot about building a relationship of trust with the protagonists, putting ourselves in their shoes. Also, about how a small documentary film crew comes together and communicates with each other without using words.”
What she missed most was the calm and relaxed pace of animation – in other words, the freedom of not having to make decisions on the spot. And so, she has no plans to return to documentaries for the time being. In any case, her roots in animation have been deep since she started her studies in 2011: She regularly works as a curator, mentor, presenter, and also gives lectures. Since 2021, she has been a board member of the AG Animationsfilm. Her main concerns are the support of students and young professionals, equal opportunities for persons from underrepresented communities and people with experiences of discrimination and film policy issues, such as the current amendment of the Film Subsidies Act.
OSIA © iraru.films
After experimenting with stage, documentary, and spatial animation (she also collaborated with the jazz band TRI for an evening of improvisation with live animation at the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film), Rubina returned to the classic animated short – after graduating she began work on her short film OSIA. OSIA was originally intended to be her debut film, a tribute to Ossip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, the custodian of the poems of the great Russian poet who was imprisoned, banned from publication, and eventually died in a Soviet labour camp from the effects of malnutrition and mistreatment. A biography that unfortunately seems more relevant than it has been in years – with the slow murder of Navalny, for example – but which can also be seen as an homage to a certain (formal) language of modernism. The film revolves around the wonderful poem “I was given a body” (written by Mandelstam at the age of 18), quoting, fragmenting, and reassembling it – it can be read allegorically as being broken by a dictatorship, but also as a celebration of the ephemeral. The poem has stuck with her since childhood; her father used to recite it to her. Unfortunately, just as the film suddenly acquired new political layers of meaning during its making, its development was interrupted by world events – specifically, the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
BLACK SNOT AND GOLDEN SQUARES © iraru.films
And so came BLACK SNOT AND GOLDEN SQUARES, which she sees more as a trying something out, “a little something,” as the synopsis states, with which Rubina “wanted to send a little embrace into the world” in the eerie times of Covid. Here, for the first time, Irina Rubina’s abstraction consciously gives way to figuration – or rather, she rhythmically mixes these layers; the limbs of the characters become free-floating forms and then merge again. A crying face becomes two crying figures – who are finally able to embrace each other again (“soon we will hug each other again”). The frame is square, it frames the picture – almost as if you had a canvas in front of you. Where did the figuration suddenly come from?
“In a way, the figure was already there in Jazz Orgy,” says Rubina, “but it was more of a fleeting presence.”
Paul Klee is a role model for her – and you can see a bit of his naivety and unconditionality in the way their characters interact. Despite being a mere exercise, BLACK SNOT AND GOLDEN SQUARES has been screened at many film festivals, often only online, as was unfortunately the norm in 2020. But isn’t she afraid that the very specific contemporary relevance of some of her films could lead to a work losing its relevance at some point? Irina Rubina says that she must deal cinematically with issues or problems when she cannot ignore their urgency.
But in essence, the work on BLACK SNOT AND GOLDEN SQUARES has flowed into OSIA, albeit indirectly: technically, she was already trying out things here that are important to her for the 16-minute OSIA, such as the workflow in 4k. Every film must find its best possible form:
“I have high expectations not only of myself and others, but also of the project itself.”
It is only fitting that she has taken on the role of producer for her company iraru.films in addition to directing since her graduation from the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, so that she has the reins in her hands and can manage the projects well. However, it is precisely because of this dual role that she also values working with others and the friction that arises in the creative process, without which no vision for the film could ever emerge. She regularly has worked and continues to work with people from a wide range of backgrounds (dancers, musicians, camera crew and, of course, animators), but also with a smaller circle of recurring companions such as Sofiia Melnyk, Veronica Solomon, Viktor Stickel, Iris Maier, and her partner Luis Schöffend, who has been responsible for the acoustic subtleties of all of her works as a foley artist and sound designer since MACHTSPIEL.
After BLACK SNOT AND GOLDEN SQUARES there was another detour: Irina Rubina was approached by Sony Music Entertainment to present a concept for Miles Davis’ remastered version of “What’s love got to do with it?” and she won – the result was a groovy music video in which Rubina used her own visual language as well as paintings and drawings by Miles Davis; renowned directors such as Veronica Solomon, Anita Gill, Luca Tòth, and Michelle Brand contributed to the project. With just six weeks of production time, Rubina relied heavily on loops, which allowed her characters to be recomposed in ever-changing ways as they walked. And for the final image, her animation colleague Brand animated an entire painting – parts of which are seen again and again in the chorus. So it was a question of finding an artistic visual language, but also implementing it as efficiently as possible. Another new learning.
CONTRADICTION OF EMPTINESS © iraru.films
One last wonderful detour before the completion of OSIA is Irina Rubina’s current film, which celebrates its German premiere at DOK Leipzig 2024: CONTRADICTION OF EMPTINESS, a reflection on the guilt that can be attached to a language, presented by Irina Rubina in Russian and German. It is the first time that Irina Rubina speaks in one of her films. For her this was inevitable:
“I am addressing my responsibility, my guilt, my role. Therefore, I must speak with my voice, too.”
We see animations that were improvised visual worlds until Rubina combined them with the text: waves of blood that disappear again into the black, swathes, a crushing stone structure that crushes everything again and again. All in a picturesque grey-black-red, with contours that look like poetic soft-focus images. This is the (almost) inimitable pinscreen look.
CONTRADICTION OF EMPTINESS was created in 2023 as part of the first-ever pinscreen residency at one of the few existing pinscreens, Alexandre Noyer’s L’Alpine at La Bande Studio in Quebec. Pinscreen animation is a wonderful, if complicated, form of animation, also known as bed-of-nails animation: Thousands of movable pins are stuck into a wall, with the pins protruding to different lengths – they can be moved and shaped using small tools and objects; when lit from the side, the pins cast shadows – a pin shadow composition corresponds to an animated frame. Creating animations with a pinscreen feels different to working on a computer, says Rubina, and it is easy to see what she means:
“The pinscreen is like an instrument, you build a relationship with it.”
She says she spent more than eight hours a day immersed in the work, and that the physical process helped her to deal with her feelings of powerlessness in the face of Russia’s war of aggression. The film is therefore her very own examination of the war, not a complaisant positioning and not created under the pressure of having to express herself. For her, it is about “questioning one’s own convictions” and seeing through imperialist narratives that we carry around with us, perhaps unconsciously, in our everyday lives.
Irina Rubina is combining the festival run of CONTRADICTION OF EMPTINESS with an aid project for Ukraine: “Pinscreen Prints 4 Ukraine” makes it possible to buy limited riso prints of her pinscreen frames and thus support Ukrainian aid organisations. Since 2022, she has also been interpreting regularly for Ukrainian refugees. And yet she was and still is driven by the question:
“Should I have done more? Can I do more?”
Here they are again, Irina Rubina’s high aspirations. I would like to put the label “activist” on her – meaning that in the most positive sense! – that way too many people claim for themselves with no good reasons. But wouldn’t it be appropriate to use that term for an artist as consistent and political as Irina Rubina? She laughs, no, no! There is no false modesty in her laughter; it’s just a genuine turning-down of a label. She says that the real activists are others, and sometimes she even wonders if you should become an activist instead of a filmmaker? When you see the small, loving animated characters in front of you, so delicate and unique, the beautifully flowing abstractions, and look at the small, gentle waves of blood in the sea of nails, all you want to say is: please don’t do that, no, no. But in the end, of course, only Irina Rubina herself can answer that question, with her sense of when something has reached and found its true, unique, and actual form. Until then, however, we can and must look forward to OSIA.
*Disclaimer: I have known Irina for 10 years and worked as a press officer for the Animationsinstitut and FMX from 2012–2017.
featured image: Portrait of Irina Rubina © Katharina Waisburd