Video animations, live music and expressionist pantomimes highlight the relations between Soviet communism, the frenzy of scientism and artistic modernity, with humour and cruelty.

These three motifs gather round the figure of the New Man and its flip side – Man accused and sacrificed. An abundance of musical, visual and textual material intertwines with speed, metaphysical absurdity and montage conceived as the Art of Shock, in a reinterpretation of 1920s modernism. Concealing neither its fascination nor its turmoil, this tribute is both vibrant and intensely melancholic – when it doesn’t cower in terror…

Man’s relationship with technical prowess takes centre stage, as seen through the eyes of Russian revolutionaries of the 1920s and 30s. Images “in the style of” constructivist or futurist art… scientific ravings about women… propaganda and minutes of the Stalinist show trials… sexual fantaisies about an animated and anthropomorphic megaphone, seducing Leon Trotsky’s secretary… all these vignettes alternate with exquisite poems by Daniil Harms. A master of linguistic derision, Harms starved to death in 1942, interned in a psychiatric hospital for “defeatism”.

François Sarhan brings together a small motley group of five musicians playing classical instruments and beggar’s instruments (“stroh” string instruments amplified by a horn) — but also, at times, playing an hilarious collection of retrofuturistic MIDI instruments build by Matthieu Metzger. In this way, Sarhan has built a unique sound, both seductive and miserable, both utopic and vintage, a ferocious style that seems to evoke the nightmares of the young Shostakovich.

As opening and closing sequences, Sarhan offers an original score to the film Interplanetary Revolution, a hallucinating and authentic proletarian science-fiction cartoon produced in the USSR in 1924, presenting the Red Army cosmonauts conquering space.