The Restless Garden

The Restless Garden
Directed by	Victor Ginzburg
Distributed by	Heartland Films
Release date	January 15, 1993
Running time	1 hour 26 minutes
Country	Russia

The Restless Garden is a 1993 film directed by Victor Ginzburg.

Premise

The Restless Garden is a documentary film portrait of the nascent sexual revolution that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union, directed by Los Angeles-based Russian-American film maker Victor Ginzburg (director). In 1991, Los Angeles-based Russian-American film maker Victor Ginzburg returned to Moscow to capture a city in transition. He found that for many young people previously forbidden sexual freedoms were both an opportunity for personal expression and tangible evidence of liberation from the strictures of the Soviet system.

Performance artists, heavy metal musicians, professional and amateur dancers, an experimental theatre director, a feted choreographer, a ballerina-turned-stripper, and a would-be Russian Hugh Hefner all shared the same view: that the Soviet system had fundamentally de-sexed men and women and that Russia was far behind the times compared with the freedoms enjoyed in the West. The film balances the thoughtful and deeply considered opinions of Ginzburg's, mostly young, subjects with multiple scenes of nudity as they act on their new found freedoms. In their own words:

"How can you separate the life of the body from the life of the spirit? We may have forgotten what eroticism is. In our country, women don’t look like women anymore, men don’t look like men anymore, because so many have been deprived of an opportunity and ability to love, to feel, to let go." Irina Kznetsova, 19, performer in Theater of the Absurd

"We have wild flowers from the forest and every one is a miracle… (But) a men’s magazine is not just about erotica. A men’s magazine is first of all politics… (There is) Nothing more erotic than Dark Avenues by Bunin." Alexey Weitzler photographer/editor, ANDREI magazine,the Russian equivalent of Playboy magazine.

"For over 70 years in our country… there has been the so-called sexless art. In other words, on stage there was no man or woman: there was a chairman of a collective farm, a manager of a huge factory, and a worker. And there was no Man and Woman — the principle beings on Earth." Valery Nikolayevich Baglay, artistic director, Theater of the Absurd

"Sex is not developed in this country. The period of ‘Stagnation’ left its mark...I think one has to be free, without complexes... In the future I want to be a porn star." Masha, erotic dancer for heavy metal band, Metal Corrosion

"Russian women, so to speak, I believe, during these times, must make the biggest contribution to the develpoment of porn business, sex and art. Word!" Sergey Troitsky, Bass and Vocals for Metal Corrosion and Organiser of the first "sex festival" The Iron March.

"When people ask me how I get my ideas I quote Akhmatova: “If you only knew from what filth poems grow, not knowing a trace of shame." Choreographer Alla Sigalova, quoting Anna Akhmatova.

Context

The Restless Garden may be seen as the first episode in a series of personal movies that chart director Victor Ginzburg's relationship with his motherland after the fall of the Soviet Union. A decade after completing this documentary, Ginzburg produced and directed the feature Generation P (2012), based on the novel by Victor Pelevin. Set in the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union it imagines a fable-like reality in which a former poetry teacher turned advertising man helps promote an empty shell as the new leader for the country. In 2019 Ginzburg completed work on Empire V (2022), a fantastical satire of the Russian elite, that portrays them as an ancient tribe of vampires who feed on humanity's desire for wealth. Also based on a Pelevin novel, the film was banned by the Kremlin in 2022 as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine.

Production

In 1991, Ginzburg was commissioned by HBO and Playboy to film a series of TV episodes for the Real Sex documentary series about the sexual revolution in Russia. This experience served as an impetus for a deeper portrait which became The Restless Garden (1993).

"In the summer of 1991, I landed in Moscow to shoot an underground film about counterculture and erotic art in the Soviet Union. A year prior, I returned to the city of my birth for the first time since immigrating to USA as a kid. It was on that first trip that I discovered the underground culture of performance and erotic art boiling beneath the rigid surface of the decaying Soviet system. I came back a year later with a load of Kodak film stock, determined to make a film about these amazing people. The Russian economy was in shambles, there was a lack of everything and there was lawlessness as local mafias began to take over. The air was thick with discontent and fear of the government crack down.

"We shot without permits and processed film at night in Soviet labs with the help of like-minded Russians. The film negative had to be smuggled out of the country. A month after we finished shooting the Soviet regime collapsed due to the failed KGB coup in August, 1991, served as an epic finale of the film." Victor Ginzburg

Release

The film never aired on broadcast TV or mainstream cable at the time and wound up languishing on a shelf for over 25 years after a successful festival run and limited theatrical release in the US.

Critical response

When the film was briefly released in the pre-internet America of 1993 audiences and critics were unused to seeing so much naked flesh on screen and were understandably distracted by it. Nevetherless, Jay Boyar for the Orlando Sentinel found the film "often-astonishing" but asked, somewhat prophetically, “The wall is down and the lid is off. Now what?” Daniel Kimmel writing for Variety, however, noted that “the film is not endorsing the rationalizations and banalities of the creators of Soviet erotica, but simply recording a moment when everything seemed possible and no-one knew how long it would last…. Ginzburg makes his clearest point when he interviews a young Moscow prostitute who plies her trade because she wants to afford the makeup and clothes she sees on other women."

Anton Dolin commented "Ginzburg's film creates a grandiose impression just as a document of the era... It's a reminder that if there was never a free Russia, then a Russia that truly thirsted for freedom was once a possibility - and even a reality."

Accolades

The film was screened at many international film festivals, receiving special recognition at IDFA in Amsterdam and Mostra in São Paulo. In March 2021 a restored version was premiered at the Artdocfest festival in Moscow's biggest movie theater "October" as part of the "Artdocfest" documentary film festival.

External links

• The Restless Garden at IMDb