Why the Baltics?

I like to play a small intellectual game with my students at film department: I ask them to define a familiar phenomenon or explain a simple concept or object as if they were speaking to an alien—someone who knows nothing about our civilization, history, or culture. For film and media students, it often feels strange to spend time reflecting on something as “obvious” as the question, what is cinema? Yet, once you take on this seemingly simple task, the question reveals itself to be both fascinating and complex.

This website grew out of my attempts to organize the accumulating knowledge and materials gathered in the course of my doctoral research, which explores documentary cinema of the late Soviet period in the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It is also, in a sense, a preparation for that imagined encounter with extraterrestrials, when I might have to offer a few basic definitions of my own.

What?

The term Baltic states or simply the Baltics usually refers to three republics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—listed from north to south. Yet when we speak of the Baltic region or the area around the Baltic Sea, it becomes impossible to ignore the mutual influences of neighboring countries such as Poland, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Belarus, and Russia. Even this broader list is far from complete if we take into account larger geographical or geopolitical notions like Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, or the Nordic countries.

Here, however, my focus is on the three Baltic states—distinct yet intertwined in their histories, geographies, cultures, and languages. The title MatoBaltica comes from the Lithuanian verb matau, meaning I see—it reflects both a way of looking at and thinking through the Baltic space.

Which?

When we speak about “the Baltics,” what exactly do we mean? A geopolitical category shaped by twentieth-century history? A shared coastline of the Baltic Sea? A cultural space marked by overlapping memories and aesthetic sensibilities? My work approaches the Baltics not as a stable region marked on political maps and borders, but as a constellation of perspectives, practices, and temporalities that often resist those neat lines.

This site gathers research, notes, and reflections that explore how visual culture — particularly cinema — has contributed to imagining and redefining this space. It is less about defining which Baltics exist, and more about tracing the ways in which they come into view.

Who?

The Baltic states are home to people of different nationalities, classes, professions, and faiths. Alongside the titular nations of the three republics live smaller ethnic groups such as the Võros in southeastern Estonia, the Latgalians in Latvia, and the Samogitians, historically inhabiting the lower reaches of the Nemunas River in Lithuania, among others. These lands are also home to local Jewish, Polish, Russian, and Belarusian communities — some rooted here for generations, others arriving as a result of Soviet-era resettlement, industrialization, and the militarization of the region in the second half of the twentieth century.

Despite the abundance of definitions of who counts as Latvian, Lithuanian, or Estonian, choosing the “correct” one is a futile task — more methodological than ontological. In this regard, I am close to the observation of the Latvian poet Knuts Skujenieks, who, in a 1989 conversation with literary scholar Aleksei Golubev published in Rodnik, shifted this question into the sphere of translation — and to the often superficial attention translators pay to local cultures. On this site, without denying my own identity and, admittedly, my biases, I aim to problematize this translation of visual national and local cultures.

Where?

The Baltic states owe their nickname to the cold Baltic Sea that washes their northern shores. Proximity to the sea has been one of the key factors in shaping local identities. The ability to walk for a long time through the shallow edge of the shore before finally immersing oneself in the cool, salty water in summer — or to listen in winter to the sound of waves mingling with salt and ice — cultivates a certain disposition. Perhaps that is why people here dislike being labeled as “Eastern Europeans,” a term that ties local identities to the political history of the difficult twentieth century, the narratives of the Cold War, and the clichés born of the division between the global North and South.

Where is Latvia, then? Perhaps there — where poet Imants Ziedonis liberated and protected trees in his dissident ecological and poetic project of the 1970s. And Lithuania? Kukutis, the character created by the poet and playwright Marcelijus Martinaitis, remains puzzled by the question, musing that “anything you could possibly think of resembles Lithuania.” And Estonia? Maybe it is where someone still speaks “snakish,” as in Andrus Kivirähk’s novel. Here, I see the Baltics wherever they make themselves visible.

When?

The Baltic emerges in many temporalities — in myth, in everyday gestures, in the fragile continuity of memory. While I do not believe there is a “most interesting” or “moderately boring” period in Baltic history, my focus here is primarily guided by my research interest in the period of Soviet occupation and colonization of the region, and its consequences and affects at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Why?

This brings me to the final question — why?

It is also the question the curator of the Lithuanian Theatre, Music, and Cinema Museum asked me, when I explained that my research focuses on the poetics and aesthetics of Baltic documentary cinema, pursued as a Russian scholar at a Canadian university. At first, the question left me momentarily stunned: the answer seemed both obvious and unnecessary, yet it had never been spoken aloud.

If the answer seems obvious to you as well, try saying it out loud. It is a surprisingly useful exercise — whether for writing a grant proposal, drafting an article introduction, or simply clarifying why we care about a particular topic. Here, my hope is that this site serves as both a guide and a companion: a place to explore, question, and perhaps discover your own reasons for looking at the Baltics, through cinema, culture, and the many ways these lands continue to make themselves visible and exciting.