336 PEK, (336 Rivers) is a video work installed in a deliberately simple, old-fashioned cinema environment. On screen the narrative is recounted in a long monologue against a landscape backdrop - a park with occasional passers-by or stray dogs. The monologue is recited in sonorous Russian while subtitles translate the narrative into English. The script was published in 1999 in four languages - Russian, English, Portugese and French. F.M. One element I particularly like in the film was the treatment of time and the thought that the repetition and static quality of the 336 rivers might allow viewers to spin off into daydreams. The idea of creating space for viewers. It's a sensation I have often have when I go to listen to music, especially orchestral concerts. Inevitably, I drift out of focus midway through the event and begin to daydream. I used to feel guilty about this and felt I wasn't concentrating enough or should be reading a score but then realised how precious that space was, given that everything in the world seems to be geared to filling time, and eliminating meditative space. The narration of 336 rivers and the lists of rivers in particular does have a musical quality anyway so maybe it is a natural response. I wondered, though, how much that can be consciously planned by an artist or is it a case of discovering that potential during the making process?
J.P. When I started reading about Lake Baikal and found out that 336 rivers flowed into it I immediately saw the potential of this list being read out in the film. A list of 336 names had the potential to create a time for itself inside the film, and consequently its own space. These were early days, though, when the monologue text was barely starting to take shape, and all I knew for sure was that at some point this list would be read. You would think that to get hold of this list wouldn't be all that difficult, but after five months of correspondence with Russian, American and British academic institutions I was still nowhere near it, being told over and over that it had never been published.
In the end I got it only through the kindness and effort of Maxim Timofeyev, a Russian marine biologist working at the Baikal Institute, in Irkutsk, whom I met through the Internet, and who had meanwhile got involved in the project. Maxim is an amateur photographer, has a dacha on the shore of the Baikal, and he had placed some of his photographs of the lake on his Web-page, and they were beautiful. I asked him whether I could use one of them for the poster, offering to pay him for his copyright. He agreed, but refusing payment, saying that he didn't want "to make a hobby for my soul into business for the sake of money". So eventually he got hold of the list, which had been published for the first time in 1986, by the scientist S.A. Gurulev. By this time my text was almost finished and it had become a text where stories are told in several versions, where someone's misunderstanding becomes the definitive version of the account of an event, and the notions of what is true, imagined, misinterpreted and reconstructed are blurred. So it seemed to me perfectly fitting that this list was after all not of 336 rivers but of 277, although the figure of 336 is still the one most commonly referred to, and that there are only 277 names because some of those rivers are in fact streams that were never given a name. But, on the other hand, the names in that list of 277 rivers appear repeated at different times, and this, it seems, is because different people in different parts of the Baikal have used the same names for different rivers. These names are in general descriptive - like the "black" river or the "red" river. But the confusion doesn't end here: the official number is now 460, even if the names on the official list are only 277. And every geography or travel book will tell you that there are 336.
Whether 336 or 277, I knew that this would structure the use of time in the film. I read the transliterated list myself, so that I could get an idea of how many minutes it took to read, and I came to an average of eight minutes. When we were in the recording studio and it came to the list, Yuri Stepanov, the actor in the film, started reading it much too fast. I stopped him and asked him to read slower. His new timing was perfect, but I kept looking at the clock in the studio and getting really anxious, 'my' eight minutes having gone by and him still barely in the middle of the list. The take was fifteen minutes long, and it was the right pace. This part of the film goes on for so long that people just assume that this is it, that there is nothing else but this interminable list And that isn't true; there is something else after the list, and I think of it now as a reward, a gift, for those curious enough to stay on.