Michael Craig - Copernicus Films

I filmed some material at the gatehouse of the ruined church monument on Baumanskaya Ulitsa. It will fit well with the animated material I am working on at the moment. I have been calling this small monument in the centre of Moscow the gatehouse but it is in fact a bell tower The Old Belivers' belltower  A dilapidated, neglected and seemingly, in my eyes, a fallen relative of the Ivan the Great Bell tower in the Kremlin. Why it is left in this state I don't know but in some ways I am glad because it retains a broken or ruined character which resists and persists through the centuries and time. It remains only what it is, nothing more and nothing less, an old weathered survivor form past times, from the times of the old believers in Russia with whom it is associated.  Of course it doesn't look like the Ivan the Great Bell Tower but there is in my mind a closeness or imagined kinship between the two  towers. The pomp and power of the white bell towe...

A good day - I have  got  to grips with editing the first part of  The Fairground Booth   film which has been dogging me for some time now. Managed to re edit the script and add in new material to flesh out some of the weak parts of the beginning. It means I should be able to assign the graphics and other material  to where it should go rather than things slipping away from me as I try and make things work.  Working a bit with T's material for his book. He asked me to read the article he wrote for a journal and tell him what I thought about it. Just jotting down some notes now as I go through it. Last night attended a concert and film of a Japanese composer  Yonekawa Toshiko I , who played and composed for the Koto. Magnificent musician, full of sensitivity and richness of expression, tasteful and emotional. Her daughter is now leading the ensemble which played for us at the Moscow conservatory last night. It is a warm up for the bigger co...