Nikita Baranov

​EB: Nikita, first of all, could you introduce yourself to the Brazilian audience? Who are you as a director and how did your creative path begin?

 

My full name is Nikita Gennadievich Baranov, I am 30 years old. I became interested in cinema when I was 12. At 14, I entered my first film school. At 18, I got a job as an assistant editor at a large film studio. Then I went to get additional education at the Moscow School of New Cinema. After that, I worked as an editor on full-length and documentary projects.

 

EB: You studied editing in Moscow and worked in the genres of fiction and documentary literature.

 

At the Moscow School of New Cinema, my teacher Ilya had once studied at FAMU in Prague, where he developed a deep passion for experimental cinema and built a large library of it. Every Wednesday, we would spend hours watching avant-garde films back-to-back, and it quickly became my favorite day of the week. Later, I moved into large commercial projects, editing about five feature films and numerous shorts, both fiction and documentary. It was valuable experience, but I soon realized that traditional feature films felt very distant from my own abilities and artistic interests.

 

EB: The Soot uses 80mm thermal paper as a cinematic medium. What first attracted you to thermal printing and how did it evolve into what you call thermal cinema?

 

I used to call it “receipt cinema,” but when I began writing about it for my website, I realized that “thermo” fit much better. It not only reflects the essence of the technology, but also carries a rich cultural resonance. Black dots appear as a result of heat burning the white paper — everything we see is evidence of heat made visible. Just as light is captured on film, paper captures heat. And of course, the sun is the source of both. The discovery itself was accidental: in 2020, my then-girlfriend (now wife) received a small thermal printer for phone photos. I was fascinated by the images it produced, and since I already had experience with film, it struck me that a roll of receipt paper was not unlike a strip of film — nothing prevented me from printing a sequence of frames. Then lockdown arrived, giving me time for the tedious manual work of printing just a second of video. I loved the result, though the manual labor was enormous. So in 2021, I built a device for digitization. That allowed me to create much longer works and to see the full potential of the medium. It seemed clear to me that this could become a new artistic direction, so I decided to give it a name: thermocinema.

 

EB: You described the grainy noise in the image as a kind of protagonist. What role does the grainy noise play in the image?

 

The play of textures in your narrative, and what did you hope to convey with this in "Soot"?

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I was trying to explore the personality of the image itself — the unique qualities of thermal printing — and let the story emerge from that rather than the other way around. For me, the essence lies in the collision of black dots on white paper, and the shifting balance that gradually forms something recognizable. In Soot, I deliberately broke down these clear images so they could be sensed, but not fully defined. That distortion creates a wide spectrum of perception — each frame becomes a kind of Rorschach test, where a blurred blot invites every viewer to see something different.

 

EB: The film traces a fine line between imagery and abstraction, narrative and atmosphere. How do you find a balance between control and giving the viewer the opportunity to transfer their own experience to the film?

 

That’s a very interesting question. The simplest answer is that it largely depends on the scale of the screen. When I first watched it on my laptop, the images felt very clear, almost too clear, so I thought they needed more abstraction. But on a big screen I could hardly recognize a single image, and I had to rework it again. The smaller the screen — or the farther the viewer sits from it — the more legible the images become. The closer you are, the easier it is to get lost in the abstraction. In other words, your seat in the theater directly affects how abstract the film will feel.

 

EB: The Soot resembles a dream or a nightmare, a feeling that begins with a light breeze and ends with a plunge into something darker. What emotional or conceptual path did you imagine for the audience?

 

The storyline is quite simple: a drunk man falls asleep in bed with a cigarette, and a fire breaks out. Under the influence of alcohol and carbon monoxide, he drifts into hazy childhood memories, where a female figure — perhaps a mother, wife, or sister — calls him to wake up. With each scene, the images grow darker and more unsettling, until finally firefighters burst in and save him. But since much of what I had planned didn’t translate directly to the screen, most viewers don’t actually perceive this plot. At first I was disappointed, but later, hearing the audience’s many different interpretations, I realized that this openness — the chance for people to create their own meaning — is even more valuable than the story I originally intended.

 

EB: You've worked with traditional formats before. What's it like to work with fragile, unpredictable materials like thermal paper, do they open up something in you that digital or traditional film doesn't?

 

On one hand, there’s the controlled digital aesthetic of dithering — something game designers mastered long ago. In that sense, thermal printing is a fairly predictable, obedient tool. But because imperfect printers work on imperfect paper, unexpected effects constantly emerge. This breaks the monotony of digital precision and keeps the results surprising. I often buy leftover rolls of paper from people whose small businesses have shut down. They usually store them in unheated garages, exposed to extreme temperature shifts (from +30°C to –25°C) or even moisture. These “flaws” in storage often produce the most expressive images. Even printers of the same brand yield different outcomes. There are so many stages where things can go wrong — and that unpredictability is exactly what excites me.

 

EB: How much is planned in your process and what is discovered along the way, especially when working with such unconventional techniques?

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I should say that Soot is the first project I truly see as a complete film made with this technique. Everything before it was more like raw experimentation. So in many ways, the result was almost unpredictable — it was really an exercise in mastering the process. I began with hardly any plan at all, and was genuinely surprised when I finally assembled the fragments and watched the film in its entirety for the first time.I should say that Soot is the first project I truly see as a complete film made with this technique. Everything before it was more like raw experimentation. So in many ways, the result was almost unpredictable — it was really an exercise in mastering the process. I began with hardly any plan at all, and was genuinely surprised when I finally assembled the fragments and watched the film in its entirety for the first time.

 

EB: Which artists, directors or even inventors inspired you to create the visual or technical aspects of your work?

 

I wouldn’t say Soot has a direct reference point. But right now I’m very drawn to experimenting with the materiality of thermal paper itself. In this sense, I’m inspired by Peter Kubelka, who compared the digestion of film to metabolism and cooking. Paper is far more receptive than celluloid — it absorbs so much more. So I want to stain it with all kinds of substances, especially food products, as a way of bringing color into a monochrome image. I’d love to work with beets, carrots, and various colorful berries.

 

EB: Some of your works have no or minimal sound. In Soot, the silence or sonic restraint feels tense. How do you approach sound when making films that already say so much through the image alone?

 

Maybe I have ADHD or something, but it’s very hard for me to watch a video longer than a minute without sound. I once heard that in haute cuisine chefs sometimes don’t add salt so you can taste the “pure” product. But to me, if something can be salted, why not salt it? It tastes better that way. I feel the same about film: I love salt — and I love sound.

 

EB: Your work is now included in the Light Cone catalog. How do you see your place in the global experimental film community and what dialogue do you hope to provoke with your work?

 

For me, the most important thing is to establish thermocinema as a new cinematic medium. If you think about it, celluloid still holds a monopoly as the material carrier of cinema. I believe it’s worth turning our attention to something as ordinary as thermal paper, reimagined as film stock. Its simplicity and accessibility could open the door to an entirely new field of film practice. What fascinates me is that the infinite digital noise surrounding us can suddenly gain meaning when fixed on a finite roll of thermal paper. That makes me believe thermocinema has a future as a countercultural form in our digital age, when videos are generated from text prompts. I have nothing against generative video, but for me, tactility and materiality may be the best answers to the expansion of neural networks.

 

EB: What awaits you next? Do you continue to develop Thermo Cinema, or have new directions or obsessions appeared?

 

It’s summer in Russia now, which means I can safely experiment outdoors with various chemical substances. Recently I discovered that poppers (the inhalant sold in sex shops) create a striking color reaction with thermal paper. I think erotic cinema has always accompanied the birth of new visual technologies — and with such a unique reaction between the thermal layer and poppers, the idea of a color erotic film on receipt tape almost suggests itself, where the chemical burns serve as both censorship and metaphor.

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On a more serious note, I’m currently focused on completing a device for scanning receipt tape — what I call a thermokinescope. While building it, I realized that if the tape spins fast enough, you can actually watch films directly from the paper itself without digitization. This completely changes the concept: thermocinema can now be experienced not digitally, but analog. The effect is reminiscent of a mutoscope, though my design makes it possible to show much longer stories — like reading a film from paper. Without the usual projection medium, the static image suddenly comes alive, and the act of viewing becomes immediate and intimate. This realization allowed me to bring together many different ideas I had about cinema on receipt tape — and to believe that thermocinema might truly have a future. After all, almost all the necessary technologies already exist. The only thing missing is the thermokinescope.