Production, camera, editing: Marge Monko
Original score and sound design: Janek Murd
Text editing and translation of English subtitles: Maris Karjatse
Graphic Design: Indrek Sirkel
The film Man of Gold I draws inspiration from the advertising face of the Soviet-era cologne ‘Sasha’, whose appearance was far from that of the typical Russian man. The autofictional text, read by the author, touches upon personal memories related to ‘Sasha’, as well as cultural and sociological aspects such as masculinity, power relations between communism and capitalism, the physiology of smell and colour photography. The visuals consist of still images, including advertisements and photos from the 1970s and ’80s in both communist and capitalist contexts, as well as images from my family archive.
Man of Gold II is an allusion to the myth of Pygmalion, in which the gender roles are reversed. It is inspired by the fantasy of the inanimate coming to life. Using an AI image generator, a body was generated for the portrait of a man featured on the packaging of the Soviet-era cologne “Sasha,” which was then animated and made to assume various poses. The animation is presented in the exhibition space as a life-size hologram.