Issue 8: Winter 2011
In The Mouth Of The Volcano: Lithuanian Independent Film Screenings in Dublin
One of the most exciting screening events to have taken place in Ireland this year was ‘In The Mouth of The Volcano', a selection of Lithuanian experimental films and documentaries that the Solus collective organized in Dublin at the start of December in collaboration with the Tinklai Film Festival. Curated by Arturas Jevdokimovas and Alan Lambert, this eye-opening crash course in thirty years of independent Lithuanian filmmaking was held in two sessions, the first at the IFI, the second a marathon four-hour projection at Filmbase.
The highlight of the first evening was artist Laura Garbstiene's Film About an Unknown Artist (2009). Of value less for its rather indifferent post modern, self-referential concept than for its almost overwhelmingly assured use of the Super-8 medium, it boasts images of an exceptionally sensuous intensity. Shots of the artist visiting a shrine at dusk, scuttling across the countryside on her knees like a limbless phantom, are particularly memorable. Irish-based Julius Ziz's (1) single-frame The Moment proved a very amusing Fluxus-style gag. Two experimental essay films by Deimantas Narkevicius also stood out. His Revisiting Solaris (2007) sees an aged, wonderfully melancholic Donatis Banionis reprise the role of astronaut Chris Kelvin that he had played forty-five years previously in Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). Narkevicius' film is an exploration of the final chapter of Stanislaw Lem's original science fiction novel, which Tarkovsky omitted from his film adaptation, in which Kelvin visits the surface of the planet Solaris. Countryman (2002) is a meditation on leaving ones homeland, distinguished mainly by Narkevicius' sequence of vivid, brooding long takes of the city that is being abandoned at the films' end.
Impressive as this work was, it only hinted at the extraordinary power of much of the second programme. The poetic, observational approach of the last minutes of Countryman was echoed and amplified in a number of documentaries subsequently screened, suggesting an identifiable national style. Valdas Navasaitis' The Spring (1997) is a masterful, wordless immersion in a flooded rural landscape. Arunas Matelis' Ten Minutes Before The Flight of Icarus (1991) provides a surprising and often surreal snapshot of an old part of Vilnius that is rich in atmosphere and amusing incident. Algimantas Maceina's magnificent The Black Box (1994) examines the phenomenon of Lithuanians travelling to Siberia to illegally exhume the remains of relatives who died there in exile and to bring them back to Lithuania for a traditional burial in their homeland. It follows the retrieval of the director's grandfather's body and its final funeral. The film is assembled in episodes, each headed by a title card: preparing for the journey to Siberia, the journey, the exhumation, the reassembling of the body parts that are smuggled home in a specially prepared suitcase, the village wake, the burial. Shot on grainy Super-8 transferred to VHS, the footage has the rawness of a home movie. Yet the images are played slightly sped up, and occasionally interrupted by an abrupt freeze frame. This subtle technique upsets the natural flow of time to unsettling effect, especially as the film lingers at great length to survey, in particular, the exhumation and the extraordinary wake scene in which the whole village gathers to sing prayers. The voiceover is sparse and to the point, leaving long stretches of silent observation. The result is nothing if not haunting.
The revelation of the programme was Audrius Stonys' masterpiece Earth of the Blind (1992). This bleak, black-and-white film links images of a cow being taken to the slaughter, the lives of several blind people, and a person in a wheelchair tortuously ascending a mud track up a hill. Its stark images of damaged people inhabiting an imposingly muddy wilderness, which is dominated by an abattoir, builds into a singularly intense vision of abjection.
Unfortunately, the more recent examples of Lithuanian documentary presented didn't live up to the example of these outstanding older films. Anastasia Pirozhenko's Temporarily, a grim portrait of her parents, draws to a strong conclusion but stumbles along the way there. Gintaras Makarevicius' Vaskici (2004), a verité account of some boys playing at gun battles, soon runs out of steam. But the biggest disappointment was a fiction short by the great Sarunas Bartas, Children Lose Nothing (2004), a series of visual platitudes drowned in chocolate box sepia.
Julius Ziz was back with two witty found footage films made in collaboration with Louis Benassi: Ecce Homo (2009) and Memories From An Un-Beaten Childhood (2009). An even more humorous found footage work was programmer Arturas Jevdokimovas' One Question (1995) which was drawn from clips of Lithuanian feature films dating back at least as far as the ‘60s. These often intriguing extracts also served as a tantalizing hint of the history of Lithuanian narrative film...
The final treat in this screening was a dazzling half-hour compilation of abstract, mainly scratched-on-celluloid films by August Varkalis, a superb ending to an exceptional programme. It is only a pity that an event as important as this retrospective didn't receive more attention in Ireland.
1) For a review of Ziz's recent Dublin solo screening, follow this link.
-Maximilian Le Cain