Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

by Peter Pomerantsev

I am at the airport, getting ready to catch the Moscow flight. My daughter is with me. Her mother, my wife, is a Muscovite; we met during the almost decade I spent in Russia. My daughter was born while I still worked in Moscow. Now we all live together in London. When I travel to Russia it is less often on TV projects and more frequently as a father. I don’t travel with a camera anymore. I find I do less of those sorts of TV projects, the ones where you push your way into people’s lives, try to get as close to things as possible. For all our claims to capture the real, a factual director is always a manipulator, a miniature vizier, seducing, framing, spinning his subjects, asking one question but waiting for another slip up, always thinking how every action we’re shooting relates not to its direct environment but to the final cut. And when we begin to edit, our subject’s video representation takes on a life of its own, a hologram cross-faded, saturated, flipped, squeezed, and cut in different ways for US, UK, Internet, and promotional edits. So almost no person is ever happy with themself on screen, even when we’ve done everything to make them “positive,” because it’s never the “him” or “her” they think they are. Yet here’s the rub. Those holograms we have created then pursue us. The emotions our subjects once poured out to us stay with us. And we begin to live in a parallel reality of video ghosts. The parents of the dead models in their deep grief, the gold diggers, the ...