Deimantas Narkevičius
[5] Amongst his most recent solo shows are 20 July.2015 at Maureen Paley (London, 2017), Books on Shelves and Without Letters at The Blank Contemporary Art (Bergamo, 2016), Archeology of Memories at former KGB building (Riga, 2015).
Films by prominent Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, in particular his Ivan Grozny, Part II (1958), which he saw at the age of five, and Bronenosec Potiomkin (1925), were among his earliest cinematic experiences that in Narkevičius's own words had a dramatic impact on him.
Having grown up with the tradition of realist cinema, I experienced this movie as a great leap from the films permeated by didactics and literary plot; its imagery acquired autonomous meaning and required extra effort to be understood.
[9] The majority of his films deal extensively with the cultural legacy of Communism and attempts to erase it after the fall of the Warsaw Pact regimes in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, with an emphasis on statues, sculptors, artists and moving images.
A seven-minute 35mm film His-story (1998) shown at Manifesta II in 1998 gained the artist international recognition, making Narkevičius a leading contemporary Eastern European filmmaker.
[4] In perhaps his best-known film The Role of a Lifetime (2003), commissioned by UK-based organisation Art and Sacred Places for a parish church in Brighton, Narkevičius asked what it meant to be a filmmaker with a social conscience.
The centrepiece of the film is an interview with British director Peter Watkins whose politically-charged, fictionalised documentary-style works had addressed the Hungarian uprising, The Battle of Culloden (1964), and the La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), and who had left the UK in frustration with censorship and neglect, settling in Vilnius.
Noting that some people considered the decision to save the statues "a disaster", Watkins described the park as a place to contemplate "man's unbelievable folly and inhumanity ... and sadly, the endless repetition of history".
[10] Narkevičius's next film, Once in the XX Century (2004) played with Lithuanian television footage broadcast across the world of the statue of Lenin being torn down in Vilnius's Lukiškės Square in 1991.
The film documents the creation of the world's second-largest head sculpture – a seven-metre-high profile of Karl Marx by Soviet socialist-realist Lev Kerbel (1917–2003) – from its conception in 1968 to its unveiling in Karl-Marx Stadt (now Chemnitz) in 1971.
They are rather testimonies to historical crimes, visual heritage of an era to be kept and appreciated: if we want to feel any compassion for what the people who lived then lost, and in order to separate individuals from their creatively inhibited artworks – even if the consequences of this aesthetical repression can still be felt in the Eastern Bloc ...".
In Revisiting Solaris Narkevičius used a series of photographs taken by prominent Lithuanian symbolist painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis in Anapa (now Russia) in 1905 to represent the foreign planet, as well as Eduard Artemyev's iconic score from the original film.
Revisiting Solaris marked an outstanding interdisciplinary effort by the Lithuanian filmmaker to join multiple talents from different periods making it into a timeless monument.
[11] Restricted Sensation (2011) was Narkevičius's first long feature shown in cinemas: a 45-minute film depicting the abuse of a talented young gay theatre director in the Lithuanian SSR in the 1970s, with the post-Stalinist re-criminalisation of homosexuality representing the oppressive cultural policy that took hold as Stalin assumed total power in the late 1920s.
Although it can be read as a comment both on that period's homophobia and Vladimir Putin's current persecution of Russia's LGBTQI population, Narkevičius said he was not aiming to depict the explicit, illegal life of gays in the Soviet Union.
[12] It is perhaps The Role of a Lifetime (2003) that most evocatively and thoughtfully ties together Narkevičius's interests in the uncertainties at the heart of post-Soviet Lithuania with the implications of his own work in creating film and video.
Known for his pioneering docudrama films Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965), which politicised and fictionalised the documentary form, Watkins lived in Vilnius for many years in the course of his self-imposed exile from Britain.
[13] In works like Punishment Park (1970) or La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), Watkins has challenged what he calls the "monoform": cinematographic editing that reduces disparate visual and acoustic parts to a narrative whole.
The film scenes are too idyllic and too recent for the traumatic World War II childhood that Watkins recollects; a summer hum of birds and insects accompanies his description of the Soviet monuments collected in Grūto, and the pencil sketches of the park show a thick layer of snow covering the defunct socialist heroes.
In his role as a master editor, Narkevičius mismatches these silent images and invisible sounds not only to question the documentary's veracity but also to begin the elusive discussion with the audience, who must put the parts together.
Cook's Brighton initially appears to be part of Watkin's childhood memories, only to emerge as the eye of yet another filmmaker; in this shift the cathartic hit of nostalgia, instantly delivered by Super 8, dissolves into two visions of the past whose incommensurability makes them all the more fascinating.
[14] As in other works, in The Role of a Lifetime, it is Narkevičius's editing of the quotidian and the unmonumental qualities of everyday life that complicate the material and bring it into dialogue with the misplaced authoritarianism of the dead monuments.
Watkins's attention to reinterpreting history and continually bringing it into dialogue with the present-day – resistance to pushing the past away out of sight and mind – is mirrored in the dystopic/utopic space of the sculpture park, neither alive, nor dead, but fully both.
Independently of each other they have produced films with similar concerns: dismantling the conventional visual rhetoric of historic testimony and searching for a cinematic language that does not subject history to the forces of ideological assimilation or mass media commodification.
These images of the figure hanging above the crowd with his hand raised have been broadcast hundreds of times by CNN and other news channels over the last decades as a symbol of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the failure of Communism.
Recutting the action in reverse, Narkevičius shows a violently enthusiastic crowd cheering a statue as it is paraded on the back of a vehicle, and raised into the air to then swing uncannily into place, as Lenin is seamlessly reunited with his legs.
Narkevičius's aim to personalise the relationship between the artist and his work emerged during his study years at Vilnius Academy of Arts, as did his search for a means of expression matching the conceptual idea.
At that stage, he sought to cast off the dominant romantic concept of art and actualise other principles of visual expression that would directly and didactically reflect the thinking of the artist.
The means of expression selected by the artist, a pair of worn-out classic-style shoes, now filled with coarse salt, points to the statues of heroes that used to embody the value system of the former epoch, but the people promptly removed them from their pedestals, as politics changed its course.
The Documentary FilmPlatform ZONE, The Arts Center Buda, Kortrijk; The University Movie Theater Film Plateau, Ghent; MuHKA media, Antwerpen.
