Postpoetic Soviet Baltic Documentaries of the 1980s: The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Summary

The overall goal of my dissertation, provisionally titled “Postpoetic Soviet Baltic Documentaries of the 1980s: The Aesthetics of Disappearance,” is to study the late-Soviet postpoetic documentary cinema and its modes of production and circulation through an examination of documentaries produced in the Baltic Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) throughout the 1980, and to analyze this body of work produced in the 1980s leading up to the dissolution of the USSR. In my analysis, an issue of geographical formations becomes important on macro and micro levels. On the one hand, the whole cinematic industry was subordinated to the Soviet state: three republican film studios (Tallinnfilm, Riga film studio, and Lithuanian film studio in Vilnius) were well-equipped by the provided financing and technical means from Moscow. The industry was embedded into a planned economy which meant that every film had to be pitched to the studios’ management and approved by several committees including Glavlit¹ in Moscow for motion pictures longer than 40 minutes. On the other hand, filmmakers established close connections with their colleagues from the sister republics both on official (symposiums and festivals) and semi-official (annual visits, initiated by the filmmakers themselves, to screen their films for the colleagues and gather feedback). Considering that the filmmakers used different documentary methods and were involved in the production not of a homogeneous but of a hybrid documentary genre, I argue that these filmmakers historiographically and aesthetically have formed a coherent movement that inherited a poetic tradition of the Soviet cinema of the 1960s.

The purpose of my historical research is to preserve and interpret the socio-political practices and cultural and political events that led to a collapse of the Soviet empire on the Western borderlands. A particular problematic of such a research is grounded in the lacking of a common balanced view on historical events that happened with the Baltic states while being incorporated in the Soviet Union. In my thesis, I theoretically question the very imaginary geographical formations (Soviet space, USSR, Baltic republics, Pribaltika²). Despite the fact that this dissertation is divided into chapters each of which focuses on one of the three Baltic republics, its specificity and uniqueness, I will try to trace and highlight links among local film studios and professionals. A relocation of this subjective position within the Baltic region is, of course, a part of the theoretical questions raised in the dissertations. This is a question not only about circulation and distribution but about the geographical and epistemological scale itself. The notion of the Baltics in the dissertation is questioned from both geopolitical perspective and perspective of the local cultures. These relations between physical and political geographies are important to me and to the authors and auteurs whose bodies of work I analyze. By referring to the Baltics as a specific entity I am stressing the ambiguous nature of this geographical space. While there is an ongoing struggle of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian societies against the neo-colonial label “Eastern Europe” assigned to the republics by global discourses, the question of spatial and political positioning has a deeper history. The intimacy of the people who share the space, a special combination of space and the body that had to structure local contexts in the Soviet era experienced what Homi Bhabha calls the “outsideness of the inside” —"an invasion of exteriority or alterity into the intimate spaces of one's subjectivity,” as Epp Annus applies it to the analysis of the Soviet Baltic everyday life (Annus 2018, 206). Thus, I intentionally merge three geographical contexts into a single body to emphasize the problematiс status of the Baltic region within the USSR and to question integral issues related to postcolonial question in relation to the Baltic states and the politics of disappearance of the Soviet politics and poetics in the post-Soviet contexts. In the dissertation, I propose to theorize these issues in the sphere of documentary cinema through the concept of postpoetics.

I use the term “postpoetic” to identify the specific examples of the temporal, spatial, political, and aesthetic sensibility I analyze in this dissertation. As distinguished from Baltic poetic cinema, which is recognized and institutionally accepted³, postpoetic cinema, as I conceived it and deployed it, does not refer to any specific movement or school of filmmaking, but rather to the documentary aesthetic itself—its “documentality.” I developed the term postpoetic, and propose to use it, for several reasons. First, because it reflects a specific period of the Soviet history that comes after the Thaw era of the late 1950s-1960s characterized by romanticism, humanism, and optimism in popular culture and a reduction of a repressive nature of the regime, such as release of significant number of political prisoners. The term postpoetic then delineates the boundaries of the period of stagnation during the rule of Breznev, Andropov, and Chernenko--the two subsequent leaders of the USSR, representatives of the extreme conservative-wing of the party—and the beginning of Perestroika—a political movement for reformation within the Communist Party. Second, the term postpoetic indicates the new epistemology, rooted in the experiences of the political transformations within the Soviet society of the 1980s and national movements in the Baltic region. Postpoetic in an epistemological sense highlights the development of the late-Soviet poetics, aesthetics, and politics in the distance to ideological centers of the Soviet state and uncovers alternative circulatory networks of the Baltic documentary film community such as the documentary film symposium held in Jurmala, Latvia every second year since 1977, organized by filmmaker Ivars Seleckis and film theoreticians and critics Ābrams Kleckins and Miks Savisko, or more frequent visits of the Baltic filmmakers by the neighbors organized by local offices of Dom Kino (House of the Cinema), headquarters of the Soviet
Filmmakers' Union.

In this thesis, I propose to use term postpoetic for several reasons. First, in a constructivist sense, postpoetic cinema will be analyzed as an integral stage of the evolution of Soviet poesis, from Russian futurism/formalism to Socialist art to Khruschev’s Thaws, Stagnation and finally Perestroika. Methodologically, it questions and problematizes the very notion of the institutionally recognized poetical cinema of the 1960-1970s and its place within the wide poetical tradition in art and literature of the Thaw. Epistemologically, it scrutinizes how postpoetic’s sensitivity as a method provided the filmmakers with a tool to inscribe their own stories into the larger transnational traumatic history.

Speaking about poetics in postpoetic, I plan to rationalize this methodology by appealing to approaches of Russian formalism—a school of literary criticism emerged in the 1910s. The school had survived during the October Revolution and was involved in the intellectual metamorphosis that occurred later in the 1920s. Inspired by the futurism and the critique of cult of masterpieces in academic art, Victor Shklovsky, together with poet and critic Roman Jakobson, created a theoretical school based on the idea of researching not for the emotional response to a piece of art but for the structure of this object. Shklovsky identified the world of perception through the clash of two epistemological strategies: poetic speech and ordinary speech (prose). The first category refers to the ability to give meaning to the world, to see an image behind every word. The latter, is applied to the routine communication and the process of turning a word into a concept, prose is “economical, easy, correct” (Shklovsky, 12); poetic language obeys the laws of expenditure that coordinate with a texture of a poetic text, prosaic language, on the contrary, represents an economy of energy. Working through Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization (as if seen for the first time) will enable this pertinent methodology to think about poetry and poesis in relation to the Baltic documentary cinemas as a transmedia transformation from poetical dominative protoforms of tones, rhythms, and pauses to the particular type of augmented reality and fragmented visuality in the 1980s’ documentaries.

Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization (ostranenie, estrangement, as is rendered in more recent translations) combined with Brecht’s alienation effect⁴ as the way to experience Marxist alienation but without losing a natural spontaneity (ingenuousness) seems particular useful in order to relocate Alexei Yurchak’s anthropological methodology in the studying of the last Soviet generation through the conceptualization of the core concept of his 2006 book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More—being vnye (outsideness). Yurchak describes the specific experience of simultaneously being a part of the Soviet system and thus participating in ideological bureaucratic rituals and accomplish a performative shift, which is a reproduction of the form of the rituals but not their content. While describing the state of being vnye, Yurchak explicates and contextualizes late-Soviet subjectivity as not characterized by the term stagnation, which is a common name used to delineate the period of Brezhnev leadership in 1964—early 1980s, but as a period of implicit transformations within historical and cultural generations. The scholar transfers the concept from literary criticism to the debates about different modes of interaction with the political and ideological part of the state. In my thesis, I propose to perform a reconstruction of this shift and bring the analysis of late-Soviet subjectivity in the Baltic States back to the debates in correlation to Baltic literary situation, Ranciere’s le partage du sensible, formalist notion of estrangement, and postcolonial theory to problematize the understanding of Baltic subaltern subjectivity in the late period of USSR’s history. For that reason, it is important to relocate the idea of the Soviet subjectivity from a historiographical and linear understanding of historical and conceptual universals and narratives towards an anthropological approach that scrutinizes the societies and communities in the attempt to reveal a specific form of the cultural configurations.

Recent postcolonial tendencies in film and media studies provide fundamental tools to analyze the emerged tension in the history of media. Multidisciplinary methodological discussion in the field between historians and film scholars resulted in a new conception of cinema, where cinema is manifested as a multi-layered and complex sociocultural industrial, political, institutional, and ideological phenomenon. Over the past few decades after the dissolution of the USSR, film scholars have made a notable contribution to our knowledge of Eastern and Central European cinema of the former Eastern Bloc (Golding 1989, Imre 2005, Portuges and Hames 2013, Mazierska et al. 2014, Bahun and Haynes 2014). However, the thriving cinema tradition of the Baltic States continues to be neglected in contemporary English-language scholarship. Baltic national cinema movements of the 1960-1980s have always been looked at under the umbrella of Soviet cinema (Horton and Brashinsky 1992, Beumers 2007), ignoring the cultural landscapes in the region, as well as the conflicts of identity within the ongoing renegotiations of past and present inside Baltic society. National Baltic cinemas under Soviet rule remained foreign to both the English and Russian speaking academy.

Bringing a concept of “estrangement” to the analysis of cinematic reconfigurations of the 1980s has another methodologically motivated reason. In the past decades, there is a new dichotomy of thinking about “estrangement.” Some contemporary authors address this concept from the perspective of a distance, comparing this notion with an idea of detachment and isolation (Slobin 2005) or exile (Ruttenburg 2005). On the other hand, Svetlana Boym connects Shklovsky’s estrangement with the idea of freedom (Boym 1994). For Boym, estrangement of the routine becomes a characteristic of the Soviet everydayness. It becomes a freedom of the artificial behavior—a device that now should be uncovered and which has to be hidden after the Stalinist’s 1930s come into the place. Boym recovers “estrangement” as a theoretical method while speaking about (post)Perestroika’s times and connects it with the notions of nostalgia and intimacy (sincerity of the 1990s). Drawing on the example of Russian-Soviet avant-garde poet Dmitrii Prigov she defines his “new sincerity” as “at once an act of defamiliarization and of unadmitted nostalgia for a certain kind of pure-hearted and naive first-person discourse that escapes multiple narrative framings and scaffoldings; indeed, it is not a discourse at all, but pure-heartedness itself-something that may have never existed in its ideal pure form.” (102)

Following Boyms impulse of re-articulation of the idea of “estrangement” when analyzing cultural reconfigurations of the 1980s and 1990s, I propose to question the current historical antagonism of Soviet revolution and Perestroika’s counter-revolution as an exemplary opposition that obscures a comprehensive understanding of the cultural processes of the epoch. Instead, I argue that it is due to the appeal to Revolutionary devices that Baltic documentary filmmakers were able to create a unique aesthetics that mediated the explosion of reality to the Soviet screen. Mediated in a revolutionary way, opposing the old myth of the Great October Revolution with its own myth of a widely shared belated postmemory re-narrated and re-represented in the Singing Revolution of the late 1980s. Therefore, estrangement as a method can be applied not only from a historical perspective as a way to re-contextualize narrative reduction of a revolutionary cultural production, but as a theoretical method that uncovers relationship between form and content both in cinema and social relations (Yurchak 2013). Alexei Yurchak has elaborated on the evolution of a socialist ritual during the late-Socialist period. In this dissertation, I suggest that returning to the polemic within formalist methodology and complementing these debates with post-colonial theory as well as Ranciere’s approach to aesthetics is a productive way of thinking about Baltic postpoetic documentary from the perspectives of time, space, and institutional and cultural mechanisms of subjectifications within late-Soviet reconfigurations of memory.

Moreover, the history of the late-Soviet Baltic documentary cinema is still not written. Institutional demarcation between media and art also guides contemporary academic studies. Soviet Latvian poetry, Lithuanian photography, and Estonian late-Soviet postmodern art are the research objects that continue to exist in different intellectual context: from the Kantian figure of genius to the idea of art as an internal migration or a dissident gesture. At the same time, positioning cinema within the state apparatus emphasised the ideological and propaganda aspects of films, rather than their artistic and creative dimensions. The still-present trauma of the post-Soviet condition of the Baltic states and the fact that the whole cinema industry was subordinated to the state apparatus prevents any significant debates on the role of documentary cinema in production of the national discourses that contributed to the processes of subjectification within local societies.

The above-mentioned scholars Svetlana Boym and Alexei Yurchak have enriched our knowledge about the everyday life in the Soviet country, however, they are not completely adequate for the understanding of late-Soviet cinema cultures. My project aims to combine an attention to Soviet everyday life and analysis of aesthetical transformations within Baltic documentary cinema in order to draw attention to this unique cinematic phenomenon—postpoetic Baltic documentary—in a situation when these authors and their films are being neglected within the post-Cold war and post-socialist debates. There is still no adequate language which can be used, for example by local Baltic educators and film festivals’ programme directors⁵, to speak about late-Soviet documentaries produced in the Baltic states. The situation of the two conflicted models of national and Soviet is still present and cannot be solved in the context of the growing geopolitical tensions in the region. My goal is to overcome the pathos of both nostalgic/patronizing and sovietphobic paradigms and to map out a theoretical approach that will elucidate a unique phenomenon of the postpoetic cinema that emerged in a bewildering labyrinth of the late-Soviet reality.

My initial assessment of postpoetic cinema starts with the identification and exploration of a series of key points: the construction and transformation of national discourses through non-violent anti-imperial struggles; the genealogies of postpoetic cinema from avant-garde formalist experiments of the 1920s to the poetic cinema of the 1960s⁶; the political, cultural, and social functions of propaganda newsreels and other documentary films made for Baltic publics; the emergence of witnessing subjects in postpoetic cinema and its involvement in the construction of memory of national trauma; the political and ideological aspects in the documenting of the everyday life and reconstruction of Baltic nations within Soviet narratives; and the attributes of the last Soviet generation from the perspective of both its specific cultural configuration and its mechanisms of social dynamics.

Keeping in mind these key historical and societal frameworks, the main objectives of this project are twofold. The first goal is to explore the interactions of place, identity, politics, and memory in documentary cinema during the decade of the collapse of the Soviet regime in the Baltic States. I will use the division of the political into policy and emancipation as defined by Ranciere (1992) to outline the distinctions between different types of political documentary. According to Jacques Rancière, “political” is a product of two processes, one of which he calls “policy,” and the other "emancipation,” or “politics.” Policy is the process of “governing, and it entails creating community consent,” which “relies on the distribution of shares and the hierarchy of places and functions;” emancipation instead is "a set of practices guided by the supposition that everyone is equal and by the attempt to verify this supposition.” (Ranciere 1992, 58) The encounter of these two processes composes the political. Additionally, if the first process relates to the “citizen” and the second one to the “person”, then the political deals with the problematization of both these concepts. In his 2005 book The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere conceptualizes an approach to the understanding of sensibility, in which he disagrees with the approach of Alain Badiou. Badiou considers aesthetics as a unity of transcendence and immanence: “Art is a thought in which artworks are the Real (and not the effect).” (Badiou 2005, 9) Ranciere, however, approaches a concept of aesthetics through a matter of social and collective transformations. An aesthetics, for Ranciere, is a specific mode of sensibility and intelligibility. His main idea that aesthetics invariably recreates a new collectivity through a distribution (reorientation) of the sensible. Aesthetics, according to Ranciere, is a global phenomenon that could be seen as a totality. In this way he contrasts it to the logic of the modernist project that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century. The logic within modernism is subordinated to theology⁷, the belief in the reliable meaning of the human history. Thus, modernist logics build on consensus (ideals, canons, values). In contrast, dissensus is a “conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it”; it is driven by contingency and public anonymity (139). That is why Ranciere distinguishes cinema and photography, both of which are able to notice invisible details of the ordinary—to estrange. So, as if quoting Shklovsky, Ranciere writes, “the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure” (34). Therefore, an aesthetics, for Ranciere, is a medium that keeps dissensus active. Dissensus breaks the dichotomy of the spectator and the artwork. It cancels the division between the visible and the real and emancipates the spectator from the hierarchical structures (Ranciere 2008). To apply this thesis to the objects of this dissertation, dissensus of the postpoetic documentary liberates itself from the hierarchies of the socialist realist dogmas and reconstitutes an aesthetics as a collective phenomenon without reducing a discourse into a dialogue between art and subjects of power. This theoretical maneuver allows for Ranciere to identify an aesthetics as a metadiscourse of art and politics and to retrieve a dissensus from power relations. Therefore, Ranciere’s theory of aesthetics is a fruitful theoretical framework for analysis of organization of subjectivity within postpoetic cinema of the 1980s. This disciplinary approach focuses on non-individual sensibility and expands theorizations on subjectivity from the limited concepts of subject-object relationships toward complex aesthetic spheres of unity and diversity, public and private. This methodology seems to me particularly applicable to the analysis of processes of reconfiguration occurred in postpoetic documentary in the Baltic countries.

Second, I propose to reconceptualize the problematics of subjectivity during the final periods of the USSR by using an anthropologically-inspired method that allows me to historicize generations that, in turn, reveals the multiple cultural and political configurations of subjectifications. This mode of analysis reveals the late-Soviet mechanisms of social mimicry that allowed for the Soviet people–not to reject the great Socialist project–to start to build new types of independent horizontal relations, thus turning the private sphere into a political realm. In this regard, I will challenge the popular concept of Homo Sovieticus as an average socialist subject lacking identity and self-respect. (Fitzpatrick 2000) Based on the binary construct between oppression and resistance, such an approach narrows the study of late-Soviet subjectivity to a repression vs. freedom model. In opposition to this binary construct of antagonism between oppression and resistance, socio-cultural anthropologist Alexei Yurchak in his 2006 book developed an alternative conceptual model of understanding relations between the Soviet system and people who lived in it. Through deconstruction of a stereotypical middlebrow vs. dissident dualistic pattern Yurchak traces the other forms of community, language, and discourse and builds an ambivalent approach to understanding of forms of the Soviet subjectivity. I propose that while working through issues of witnessing trauma through documentary image, postpoetic cinema developed a conceptual configuration that addressed the dynamic landscape of Perestroika and revealed, as Moore puts it, specific decolonial desire to “return to Western-ness that once was theirs” (Moore 2001) and escape from the collapsing Soviet Empire

At the historiographical level, my research will scrutinize the Baltic documentary cinema of the 1980s as an independent generational concept that incorporated ideological, cultural, and transnational facets in the nexus of everyday aesthetics. Methodologically, my project intends to address these problems by using an eclectic approach to the analysis of Baltic postpoetic cinema and late-Soviet subjectivities, where different subjective positions in socialist society are looked at within multiple ideological discourses, and therefore rejecting the binary model promoted by modern Sovietology (Groys 2010, Yurchak 2006). In order to do this, my dissertation focuses on representational spaces, political non-violent struggles (Eglitis 2005), modes of production and circulation, and interactions in everyday life (Cresswell 1996) with regard to the Baltic postpoetic documentaries from both national (national past, identities, and belongings) and transnational (Eastern European socialist film schools) perspectives.

At the same time, focusing on the scholarship in the field of Baltic Studies on research of movements and not generations, producing a comparative research of Baltic poetic schools and their Western siblings (Cinéma vérité, Direct Cinema, French New Wave) ignores the complicated nature of social relations between subaltern periphery and dominant center within Soviet Empire. Thus, it results in the loss of a massive heritage of many filmmakers whose work is now forgotten.

My dissertation does not ground the research of the Baltic documentary cinema as a study of isolated single nation traditions. On the contrary, in this thesis I will reveal and stress the relation between local film industries and the Soviet cultural authorities. Dina Iordanova in her article, or as she calls it herself, “reaction to the incident [of the cinemas of the newly independent former Soviet republics being covered in the BFI’s companion]” (Iordanova 2005, 230) accentuates the structural problem of the debates on rediscovering of the emerging or nascent (Ibid, 244) cinemas after disappearing from the Cold-War set-ups. Iordanova advocates scholars and researchers and indicates that these are the academic publishers who dictate the framework for a topo-temporal exploration of the cultural histories of small nations. However, it needs to be said that the other side of the confrontation, as described by Iordanova, is also involved in this politics of memorialization.

Another most recent example that again indicates a related structural issue around the idea mapping Soviet Baltic cinema within the larger European cultural history is 2018 film Bridges of Time. The authors of the film—a major event in the Baltic documentary industry putting together an extensive set of key works of poetic documentary films from the Baltic region—tend to represent the Baltic poetic cinema in line with the French pioneers of cinéma vérité and direct cinema in Québec.⁸ This comparison, while allowing Baltic documentary cinema of the 1960s-1970s to being included in a global historiography, is not always adequate. For example, the notion of unmediated existence (Hall 1991), a traditional characteristic of cinema verite and direct cinema, usually associated with the new technology of synchronized sound recording which made possible “a new privileged grasp of reality.” (Waugh 1976, 235), does not apply to the Baltic case. According to Estonian historian Riho Västrik, access of filmmakers from the Baltic republics to synchronous sound recording technology (Nagra or it analogues) was extremely limited and could barely have any effect on the development of the poetic style of Baltic documentary.[^9] Likewise, the impulse to collate the aesthetics of some Baltic documentaries of the period with the Astruc’s concept of the camera-stylo, which “break[s] free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language” (Astruc 1968), is especially alluring if we tend to understand the poetic as romantic and metaphorical, tempting to understand Baltic poetic documentary cinema as an attempt to escape from the totalitarian system of oppression through the artistic alienation. However, and this is one of the core assumptions of this thesis, I propose that Baltic postpoetic documentary cinema of the 1980’s, along with its precursor embodied in poetic school, while not being fully insulated from the global aesthetic and technological transformations, is a distinctive phenomenon that developed its own language to address the issue of memory, trauma, colonization, and subjectivity within the socialist mode of cinema production.

Finally, by addressing the topics of everyday life, postpoetic documentary filmmakers have demonstrated how it is possible to outwit the capacity of state censorship. Speaking about postpoetic cinema as a new kind of language, this project intends to analyze the concept of subjectification through the process of transgression, which is essential when mapping the boundaries of authoritative discourse in the Soviet Union. In this sense, trauma studies and its main object—the traumatized subject–becomes a new kind of contemporary identity that witnesses and captures the disappearing past and reveals a new kind of cultural politics (Bennett and Kennedy 2003). The discourse of trauma creates a bridge between memory discourse and the discipline of historiography. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s study of “unclaimed experience” (2006), this project identifies the figure of the witness who is inseparable from its object. Combining this view with Yurchak’s analysis of late-Soviet publics, this project examines how professionally educated documentary filmmakers in national film industries and their approach towards filmmaking differed from the established shooting of newsreels and propaganda materials. These filmmakers developed an un-institutional and yet coherent cinema community whose artistic and historic sensibilities unpacked the Soviet epic narrative. (Pētersone 2012)

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1. Glavlit—abbr. General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press under the Council of Ministers of the USSR (Glavnoe upravlenie po ohrane gosudarstvennyh tajn v pechati pri SM SSSR). The state agency responsible for the censorship of printed materials in the Soviet Union. ↩

2. Russian word for the Baltic States, when translated literary means “by the Baltic Sea” ↩

3. The movement has been researched and analyzes in cinema studies under different names such as the Riga poetic school of cinema, Lithuanian poetic cinema, Estonian social (experimental) documentary, Baltic New Wave. (Kleckins 1993; Pētersone 2012; Vītols 2012; Mikonis 2010; Näripea 2010; Kõrver 2012) ↩

4. In different translation: “distancing effect” or “estrangement effect” (German: Verfremdungseffekt) in Brecht, Bertolt. "On Chinese Acting", translated by Eric Bentley. The Tulane Drama Review 6.1 (1961): 130–136. ↩

5. After interviewing film educators and film festival organizers in Riga, Vilnius, and Tallinn in 2019 ↩

6. In Latvia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan. ↩

7. Here I refer to Keti Chukhrov’s underatanding of theology in Adornian way and her thesis about modernist art which “never needed to be ontological” (Chukhrov 2007) ↩

8. Bridges of Time 2019 ↩

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