I filmed some material at the gatehouse of the ruined church monument on Baumanskaya Ulitsa. It will fit well with the animated material I am working on at the moment.
I have been calling this small monument in the centre of Moscow the gatehouse but it is in fact a bell tower
A dilapidated, neglected and seemingly, in my eyes, a fallen relative of the Ivan the Great Bell tower in the Kremlin. Why it is left in this state I don’t know but in some ways I am glad because it retains a broken or ruined character which resists and persists through the centuries and time. It remains only what it is, nothing more and nothing less, an old weathered survivor form past times, from the times of the old believers in Russia with whom it is associated.
Of course it doesn’t look like the Ivan the Great Bell Tower but there is in my mind a closeness or imagined kinship between the two towers. The pomp and power of the white bell tower in the Kremlin on the one hand and this diminutive downtrodden and forgotten relic to another age which has survived tucked away in a quiet part of Moscow, a faded echo of its taller cousin.
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