moon_custafer | “The films are both exhilarating and boring"

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“The films are both exhilarating and boring"

This article on Dau, the extremely weird movie set/social experiment/cult? which from 2005-2008 apparently had a population of at least a thousand actors and extras living full time in character in a fake Soviet town where time moved forward from the late 1930s to the 1960s, is both really weird (and creepy—a fair bit of what’s described sounds like abuse, or at least very dubcon, given that while the actors can theoretically stop a scene at any time, they’re so deep “in character” they may be uncertain of what choices they have in the matter)—and also weirdly familiar. The Wikipedia entry for Synedoche, New York (2008), doesn’t mention Dau at all, but I can’t help wondering if it was the inspiration for its premise of a director building a New York City set inside a warehouse in the real NYC and living there until his death with his actors, while the boundaries between reality and acting get blurrier and blurrier.

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Oh WOW. (Poor actors!)

Something I don’t think the article brought up – I assume (and really, really hope) that child labour laws would prevent any kid actors from living on the Dau set like the adults did; yet a complete absence of children would be a major hole in the project’s “realism.” Then again, the director might be the kind of narcissist who’s mostly oblivious to children and childcare anyway.

Also, how’d they handle wartime?

the extremely weird movie set/social experiment/cult? which from 2005-2008 apparently had a population of at least a thousand actors and extras living full time in character in a fake Soviet town where time moved forward from the late 1930s to the 1960s

I had no ide this had even happened.