This work was shown in Stockholm, in the exhibition "After the Wall". Necessary equipment: VCR, videoprojector (or screen).
Empire of passion is a sequence of stills from the Nagisha Oshima film of the same name with behind-the-screen Russian translation snatches of phrases in Japanese and English subtitles. Film narrative is reduse to laconic narrative elements, the gist of which is reproduced thrice in different languagees, defining different cultural spaces..The voice of Russian translator dubs this film marking this video copy as a pirated. The original context is tranformed into a certain visual "texbook" on linguistic, in which the dramatic tension and plot conflicts of Oshima's film are completely ignored. However, subtle conceptual games with seemingly clear rules offer a complex of diverse implications and references, continuing and developing the intrigue woven by the authors. The combinations if monosillabic phrases and illustrative images makes an impression on the spectator of presence on the English lesson where the film Empire of Passion is used as a kind of the visual "textbook". By virtue of an editing means the authors succeed in the effect of the other reading of the original film text.