FILM PORTFOLIO

PORTFOLIO MISHA FRANTS

JUNE 2022 architect (nivel 3 máster) e: frantsmart@outlook.com t: + 34 674 026 370 25 years old lives and works in Madrid, ES

VIDEO, EXPERIMENTAL

ON CITIES & PEOPLE

FILM PHOTOGRAPHY

SHORT FILM, PUBLICATION

TSEDEKHA + GARAGE FILM FILM FILM

06.1979: TSEDEKHA Building in Central Moscow is built as a large hub to combine artist worshops spaces with exhibition rooms, a library and a cinema. 11,000+ m2

03.2015: GARAGE Museum of Contemporary Art opens as a renovation of the 1960s restaurant but with a drastically different public program. Dutch OMA architects leave the the original heavy concrete carcass and juxtapose it with the new light and translucent tectonic elements. 5,400 m2

12.2021: I find an old, but almost unused double-8mm film camera.

01.2022: The idea is to shoot between two iconic Moscow buildings, making a video experiment in handling the camera.

01.2022: Filming time. 4 hours and 13 minutes spent in the first building and 3 hours and 07 minutes in the second one. 22 minutes inbetween: following the people through the tunnel that connects the two buildings. Total time: 07h 42m.

02.2022: The footage is left completely raw and unedited - exactly the way it came out of the lab. Original sound is carefully added.

OBSERVATION & CONTRAST

These on-going series is where I try to gather and assemble some street photography that I am constantly engaging in.

Some of the images create interesting and unexpected contrasts although having been taken months apart.

The naming of the series comes from my interest in relating the larger urban domain (impersonal, public, chaotic) to the tangible and relatable human size (personal, priavte, idiosyncratic). When some actions are observed for long enough, they give me a much better idea of what they mean on a large scale, and vice versa.

For example, the scaffoldings always mesmerized me because of their abstract composition and almost immaterial presence. Yet, they are very related to a practical and very small scale human activity of assemblage- piece by piece.

Once again, I place the emphasis on the visual aspect rather than a story. Interpretation and suggestion are two main tools for the production of meaning.

KONG

SHORT FILM - 05:03, COLOR. ENG + SUB. GRAPHIC DESIGN HONG KONG, 2019

TOWARDS AN IMAGE-BASED CINEMA

URBAN COMMENTARY + MAGAZINE PUBLICATION

The project starts from refilming a restaurant scene from Peter Greenaway’s ‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’ in the context of Hong Kong. The scene is reimagined in, what is arguably, the most crowded back alley in the city. Spaces, activities, and characters are bound by symbolically assigned colours, while food acts as the allegory for Hong Kong’s built space. The film comments on the greedy urban metabolism, taking Greenawaynian allegorical fiction and merging it with Vertovian documentary about a city. It is also reflecting on rapid development and devouring capacities of dense urban areas, while maintaining interest in such density offsprings as the back alley.

The short then evolves to explore the strengths of a film medium through visual language - as Greenaway said: ¨all film writers should be shot. We do not need a text-based cinema … we need an imagebased cinema¨. With a similar degree of irony the film is strongly color-coded, assigning meanings to various scenes and spaces sequentially: from raw blue static to steaming green preparation, greedy red consumption and finally, the white aftermath.

It is, hence, with the same idea that the short is taken from the moving image medium into the print medium. It is further developed/ adapted into a series of colorful spreads for a publication in Prologue Magazine, which are presented in this portfolio.

Misha (b. Moscow) is an architect and designer with internationally in various studios, from an artist’s in Paris and New York, has allowed him to sharpen spectrum of fields; thus, contributing to a prolonged graphic design, theory and history, among others. certain dichotomies [ physical-virtual, built-unbuilt, exciting realm to work in.

Currently, Misha is running a collaborative practice synthesize spatiovisual arts while maintaining a

with a growing interest in filmmaking. Working artist’s atelier in Moscow to architecture firms sharpen his professional grip over an expanding prolonged fascination with architecture, film, others. For him, operating within the liminal space of built-unbuilt, object-city, image-text ] opens up a truly

practice - ACID - that enables him to further focus in architecture.

THANK

THANK YOU.