Flight Of The May Fly

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Dedicated to the flies. Buzz buzz

The music is a re-interpretation of “Fight of the Bumble-Bee” by Rimsky Korsakov.
In “The Tale of Tsar Sultan, The Great Bogatyr, and the Swan-Princess” the Bogatyr Gvidon is turned into sometimes a fly, then mosquito, then bumble-bee, and surely other countless variations on a series of insects, but a famous opera song has only been written for the bumble-bee sequence.

We all know „Flight of the Bumble Bee“ but what most of us don’t know is it’s not a composition about a bumble bee, it’s a composition about a magical being „neither male nor female“ according to Pushkin’s version, who turns into a bumble bee to go fly from their liminal land of wonders to the kingdom of their birth to spy on their dad who is being held prisoner by an evil witch. The bumble-bee is their third transformation, the first or second one was a mosquito (and the other a fly). There’s an amazing rendition of the space the flies fly through through in the movies Night Watch and Day Watch. Though unlike director Timur Bekmambetov I was always taken with the mosquitoes.

Flies carry disease, pestilence, dysentery, plague. In “The Tale of Tsar Sultan, The Great Bogatyr, and the Swan-Princess”, transformation into insects is used to travel between the three and thirty kingdoms. It is said that birds are the ones who travel between the realms, but I like this insect strain, they feel more other-worldy. Opening a rift through liminal space.

This video combines the May Flies of Bangalore, nameless the cities in the US that I saw on my way here, and microscopic video footage of bread that was lived in by the many, many, flies that plagued our lives in Bombay Beach in the Spring of 22.