Set to the score of Shostakovich's eponymous 1920s opera, animation legend Khrzhanovsky brings us on his stridently post-modernist path of narrative anti-drive, all digression with nary a plot, all cheek and panache. Ideas, anecdotes and even some insights into the human heart carefully disguised as jokes, create a gem from the future and the past, a ground-breaking requiem for the Russian avant-garde.
An honoured art worker and two-time winner of the Russian State Prize, Andrey Khrzhanovsky is also one of the founders and professors of the School-studio of animation SHAR in Moscow. His work is characterised by a constant interest for the history of Russian and world culture, as well as by a delicacy and expressiveness of plastic forms.
The film is based on the two greatest creations of the Russian genius: the short story "The Nose" by Nikolai Gogol, and the opera “The Nose” that the composer Dmitri Shostakovich made Gogol’s story into in 1930. The film is dedicated to pioneers, innovators in art. People who are ahead of their time. And, most importantly, who have no fear to go against the tide. At the cost of personal well-being, and often life. The main characters of the film are writers Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, director Vsevolod Meyerhold and composer Dmitry Shostakovich.