Evgeny Yufit / The Work of Art Within The Frame: A Letter To My Son by Masha godovannaya
31.10.2026
Evgeny Yufit / The Work of Art Within The Frame: A Letter To My Son (working title) follows the process-oriented path of cinematic errantry developed and guided by my artistic research in several archives: the cinematic and personal archives of Evgeny Yufit and my own compulsively gathered storehouse of film/video/audio traces of daily life.
Evgeny Yufit, or Yufa (1961–2016), was an artist, photographer, and filmmaker born in Leningrad, USSR. He was one of the founders of the “parallel cinema” movement in Russia and the founder and driving force behind Necrorealism – a movement unique to late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture.
Necrorealism was a radical art movement that emerged in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. Embracing an absurdist aesthetics of everyday life and the grotesque tactics of necro-acting, the movement explored the liminal zones between life and death, sanity and insanity, Soviet normalcy and apolitical dissidence, and the potentiality of black humor and artistic idiocy within and outside of the discourses of the political regime. The late USSR and its everyday reality were a place where, after the death of the General Secretary of State Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, the “new” leaders, as Russian philosopher Viktor Mazin writes, “were either already undead or forever dying.” [1]
Film critics and historians have long considered Yufit among the classics of world cinema. He is compared to filmmakers of German Expressionism and French Surrealism, as well as to artists of art-house, independent, and underground cinema. He is celebrated by many film scholars and researchers, in Russia and abroad.
I met Yufit in 1999, when I was putting together a program of experimental Russian cinema for the Anthology Film Archives in New York. We developed a professional and artistic friendship, which quickly grew into a romantic relationship. In 2002, our son Timothy was born, and I moved from New York to St. Petersburg, where I continued to work in experimental film as an artist and teacher, as well as to occasionally participate in Yufa’s film projects. But as often happens in life, our paths began to diverge, and other interests led us in different directions. However, after Yufa passed away suddenly on December 13, 2016, the responsibility for collecting and preserving his creative legacy fell entirely to me and our son.
Since 2017, we’ve been actively working on Yufit’s archive. However, since 2022, Timothy has been unable to participate in the archival work. He has never seen his father’s archive in St. Petersburg, which I have been organizing and cataloguing since 2024 with a research grant from Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. And now Timothy’s personal memories of Yufa have begun to fade.
Film critics and historians have long considered Yufit among the classics of world cinema. He is compared to filmmakers of German Expressionism and French Surrealism, as well as to artists of art-house, independent, and underground cinema. He is celebrated by many film scholars and researchers, in Russia and abroad.
I met Yufit in 1999, when I was putting together a program of experimental Russian cinema for the Anthology Film Archives in New York. We developed a professional and artistic friendship, which quickly grew into a romantic relationship. In 2002, our son Timothy was born, and I moved from New York to St. Petersburg, where I continued to work in experimental film as an artist and teacher, as well as to occasionally participate in Yufa’s film projects. But as often happens in life, our paths began to diverge, and other interests led us in different directions. However, after Yufa passed away suddenly on December 13, 2016, the responsibility for collecting and preserving his creative legacy fell entirely to me and our son.
Since 2017, we’ve been actively working on Yufit’s archive. However, since 2022, Timothy has been unable to participate in the archival work. He has never seen his father’s archive in St. Petersburg, which I have been organizing and cataloguing since 2024 with a research grant from Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. And now Timothy’s personal memories of Yufa have begun to fade.
Evgeny Yufit / The Work of Art Within The Frame: A Letter To My Son (working title) is envisioned as an experimental film essay – a key genre in my filmmaking practice. It will be shaped as a letter to Timothy about his father, where various film, video, and audio elements, media formats, forms of archival documentation, and auto-ethnographic reflections will be interwoven into a dense, affective visual narrative about cinema, artmaking, archiving and personal histories. The phrase “the work of art within the frame” is a free translation of the Russian phrase «произведение в кадре» which refers in archival documents to the appearance of an artist’s artwork in a film or video frame while the artist is personally absent. [2]
After his death, this phrase best describes Yufit's position: while absent from life, he is forever inscribed in the frame and history of art and cinema.
Drawing on the archives, collected interviews, and spontaneous documentation of the process of working with Yufit’s archives, my film letter will unfold within the logic of hauntology. These archives preserve the narratives, legends, and ephemeral traces connected not only to the underground culture of the 1980s-2010s in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities, but also to our personal histories of interaction, parenthood, and daily life. And so, they are haunted by the ghosts and the voices of those now absent.
By listening to these “voices” of the recent past and attempting to preserve their ephemeral states, I will strive in my film to find a cinematic form for the entities and utopias, archival objects and necro-artifacts, processes and encounters that shaped our shared path. Accentuating the very essence of cinematic errantry as a process-oriented path, which will be undertaken in the AIR InSILo residency, this archival compilation film is a tribute to a comrade, artist, and friend who was once close to me in cinematic spirit and in life, and remains a demanding ghost even now.
[1] Mazin, V. (Ed.). (2015). Kabinet Iufit. Ъ. Kartini Mira VII [Cabinet Yufit. Ъ. Pictures of the world VII]. Skifia-print, p. 9.
[2] The official translation would be “featured artwork”. In the occasion, when an artist appears in the film, the archival document will state: ARTIST’S NAME/в кадре (featured people).
After his death, this phrase best describes Yufit's position: while absent from life, he is forever inscribed in the frame and history of art and cinema.
Drawing on the archives, collected interviews, and spontaneous documentation of the process of working with Yufit’s archives, my film letter will unfold within the logic of hauntology. These archives preserve the narratives, legends, and ephemeral traces connected not only to the underground culture of the 1980s-2010s in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities, but also to our personal histories of interaction, parenthood, and daily life. And so, they are haunted by the ghosts and the voices of those now absent.
By listening to these “voices” of the recent past and attempting to preserve their ephemeral states, I will strive in my film to find a cinematic form for the entities and utopias, archival objects and necro-artifacts, processes and encounters that shaped our shared path. Accentuating the very essence of cinematic errantry as a process-oriented path, which will be undertaken in the AIR InSILo residency, this archival compilation film is a tribute to a comrade, artist, and friend who was once close to me in cinematic spirit and in life, and remains a demanding ghost even now.
[1] Mazin, V. (Ed.). (2015). Kabinet Iufit. Ъ. Kartini Mira VII [Cabinet Yufit. Ъ. Pictures of the world VII]. Skifia-print, p. 9.
[2] The official translation would be “featured artwork”. In the occasion, when an artist appears in the film, the archival document will state: ARTIST’S NAME/в кадре (featured people).
