ŽIURI

Visible Worlds of Invisible People

Renata Šukaitytė

This year, the Baltic film competition program of the Vilnius Documentary Film Festival features a shared unity of aesthetical and ethical culture that is apparently presupposed by film heroes’ social and historical experience closely related with totalitarian regimes and economic reforms. These people (prisoners, chimney-sweeps, the poor of the provinces, freaks and drunkards, the Chechen people suffering from persecutions as well as emeritus artists slowly sinking into oblivion or the youth making their first steps into an adult world) do not participate actively in social and economic processes which is why they are nearly invisible and inaudible in public. Documentary filmmakers, thus, perform a particular political gesture when actualising these fragile and barely visible social groups – by showing them, analysing and providing them with suggestive cinematic language. There, probably, lies a reason why film heroes invite filmmakers into their homes and lives, and reveal their inner thoughts and feelings, and so become cinematic subjects.

In his volume on the philosophy of cinema Cinema 2: Image-time, Gilles Deleuze, one of the most influential contemporary philosophers, wrote about people who no longer exist (or not yet) or the "missing people" as the subjects of political cinema. He maintained that various marginal social groups, as for example, women, children, the disabled, ethnic and sexual minorities, and repressed people of the Third World – they do not have an independent (audible and visible) language because their language is controlled by dominant social groups. According to the philosopher, political cinema manifests itself through the development of certain forms of cinematic narration that differ from the popular ones and also through the open acknowledgement of the differences between social minority and majority groups. Such cinema is, thus, inseparable from ethical principles protecting the diverse nature of unity. G. Deleuze claims that political consciousness is determined by the past elements which at the present moment cannot be revised or changed; the aim of political cinema is, therefore, to develop mechanisms that would help to fall into the “flow of time” and so to form political consciousness of the future.

The filmmakers of the VDFF competition program Mantas Kvedaravičius, Marianna Kaat, Andris Gauja, Andresas Maimikas, Evaldas Jansas and Audrius Stonys aim at producing political cinema that generates sensitive social, political and cultural discourse (i.e. shaping knowledge and collective consciousness) and giving a voice to marginalised social groups. Most of the filmmakers, however, neutralise their own position (by staying off screen or leaving their position rather unarticulated) in order to strengthen the impression of verisimilitude and impartiality of a cinematic utterance. The filmmakers also avoid the characteristics of ideological political cinema that film theoretician Thomas Elsaesser has distinguished, i.e. expansive rhetoric, omniscient voice-over and overuse of the aesthetics of realist cinema. M. Kvedaravičius, for example, in his documentary Barzakh (2010) manages to mutely unveil painful and unstable everyday life of the Chechen people marked with signs of the previous and ongoing political repressions. These people (women, children, disabled men, old people) living outside the playground of important political and economic games seem to be stuck in time – they are still living and feeling close to the ones who have passed away or moved to the transitional stage of barzakh. They speak the language that expresses their pain and ask bothering questions and yet they are unheard either by governmental institutions or international human rights organisations.

The heroes of the films by other previously mentioned directors (M. Kaat’s Pit No. 8 (2010), A. Gaujas’s Family Instinct (2010), A. Stonys’s Through Fire I Went, You Were with Me (2010), E. Jansas’s Freedom to Create (2011)) also live in the areas of social and political instability where time flow brings new existential challenges (the loss of a job, home or health, the threat of violence or poverty) rather than long-awaited progress. Shaped by the universal signs of instability and decay, the geographic and cultural landscape of these films are quite similar: grim and diffuse views, abandoned or destroyed housing or post-industrial spaces, obsolete communication infrastructure, tired people, etc. People’s personalities, their titanic attempts to rise from the ruins and give life a different direction, i.e. to find a new home when the old one was lost, to create a family where there wasn’t one, to stay free when confined – all of this clearly shows through such a landscape. These films (without moralising and stating undisputable truth) let us feel and prevent from forgetting that invisible people live just beside us and they want us to hear and see them.

The directors of this year competition program, especially A. Stonys, M. Kaat, Moonika Siimets, Roberts Rubīns, and Ilze Burkovska-Jacobsen, look into the world of young  people by exposing their strengths and weaknesses, revealing life intimacies, trying to understand passions and needs as well as by highlighting the role of family and society in the lives of the young ones. The program, thus, could be designated as “family films” – it could definitely help both children and their parents to look at themselves from a distance. Invoking memories, fragments of photo and video archives, conversations, the “testimonies” of cheerful as well as sad situations along with other signifying elements, the filmmakers are thoroughly assembling the ontology of a young person. Some directors (A. Stonys, M. Kaat) are fascinated with young people’s determination in solving tough existential problems, others are more interested in the child-parent relationship, youthful sexuality, emotions and passions perfectly reflected in unusual hobbies of those young heroes (for example, making horror films or clothes for “fashionable” dogs); their observation provide the audience with voyeuristic pleasure (I. Burkovska-Jacobsen’s Mothers, Dresses and Daughters (2010), R. Rubīns’s How Are You Doing, Rudolph Ming (2010), M. Siimets Trendy Dog (2010).

Creative process and liberation from various restrictions (institutional or that of age or illness), dependencies (drugs or social rules), and impurities (spiritual or mundane) – these are the underlying postulates of the “political cinema” of E. Jansas, Kullar Viimne (Breath, 2011), A. Maimik (Kuku: I Will Survive, 2011) and Ilze Ramāne (Aging with Joy, 2010). By following them, the characters may rejoice at the fullness of life and go easier through various losses, failures, and betrayals. The possibility to create and to give makes us feel necessary, grant us visibility and audibility; it, thus, can direct the time flow, bespeaking of the traumas of the past and the present towards the restoration of historical truth and social balance.