newspaper 29, November-December 2001

Deimantas Narkevičius
by Raimundas Malasauskas

The Beginning: Legend

After a few seconds of cinematic silence [1], the voice of a small girl bounces off the screen. This invisible child re-tells - in Lithuanian - the founding legend of the city of Vilnius [2], as concocted by romantic 19th century historians. The soft, supple celluloid darkness transports us back to the city's prehistory, not yet invested with meaning, not yet haunted by existential or collective remembrance. This childhood legend evokes a historical figure - the nature-loving Gediminas, Grand Duke of Lithuania. It is dark on the screen, and our prince is having a strange dream: an iron wolf is howling on a mountain. He wakes up and re-tells the dream to his soothsayer, Lizdeika, who then explains its meaning: where the dream took place, a glorious city will be built. It will be prosperous, at peace with the world, and the rumour will spread - amplified to wolf-like, heavy-metal decibels - of its might and honour. The prince seems to believe in this utopian reading of his dream [3]. The screen is lighting up, little by little. The sun, shining in through a window, helps the girl to find the last words in the open book. This is the beginning of Deimantas Narkevičius' film Legend Coming True.


From Legend to History

Fade-out. The Lithuanian stuttering of the girlish voice gives way to the high-pitched voice of elderly woman speaking in fluent, Yiddish-tinged Russian. The narrative unfolds in calm, almost hypnotically rhythmic fashion. Later on, we will experience how this voice is occasionally lost for words, but the intense coherence of her story lasts throughout the whole film. The voice belongs to Fania, an old Jewish resident of Vilnius who survived the Holocaust in this legendary city. Although she is the protagonist, she remains invisible in the film, just like that other historical figure - the legendary prince.

"1939, when Vilnius was handed back to the Lithuanians, my uncle came here from Kaunas (. . .)" This is where our first person's monologue begins. Childish legend is replaced by mature history. A street-light twinkles on the screen.

We learn that Fania has lived in Vilnius since 1927, when her family moved there from their native Kaunas. She went to school in Vilnius, and then she became a village teacher. But she soon returned to the city. Ten days later, the war began. A fenced-in Jewish ghetto was set up. Fania ended up there, with 20.000 others. In spite of the repressions, there was a resistance movement inside the ghetto. A unified guerilla command was established. Weapons were clandestinely bought from the Germans, and there was underground rifle practice, while sabotage actions were organised out in the open. In Paneriai (Ponary), the mass killings of Jews had started, but our protagonist managed to escape from the ghetto five minutes before it was sealed. After this, most of its people were exterminated. Fania left the city, she and a friend tried to find the guerillas, and they were finally accepted to join the cell named after Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish-Lithuanian romantic poet. She stayed on, fighting. There, she also got to know her future husband. Back in camp after her missions, she used to listen to a record of Rhapsody in Blue together with the other fighters of her cell. In 1944, her father was killed in Estonia, and a ship that carried her mother was sunk in the Baltic Sea. After the war, Fania stayed in Vilnius. She worked in the Institute of Statistics until 1990. In 1990, when she visited Israel for the first time and met her relatives, she was given a photograph of her mother pregnant with her.


Geography, Topography, Space-Time

The story spans an extraordinarily vast territory - Kaunas, Vilnius, Israel, Varena, Tadjikistan, Italy, Latvia, Paris, Australia, Toronto, Siberia, Stutthof, Los Angeles, Paneriai. The extensive network of a scattered Jewish community. But the fundamental topography of the film is made up of four aspects of Vilnius: the childhood street, the school facade, the ghetto yard and the Rudninkai forest. This visual structure of the film merits separate analysis. Together with the complex inter-connections in time and the dramatic narrative, this topography helps to create the fundamental effect of Legend Coming True.

In those four locations around Vilnius, all of them dramatically associated with Jewish history, Deimantas Narkevcius had a camera rigged for 24 hours. The camera was programmed to shoot one frame every minute. In this way, the 24 hours of shooting became 14 minutes of viewing. The result is similar to animated film.

"1939, when Vilnius was handed back to the Lithuanians, my uncle came here from Kaunas (. . .)" This is how our first person's monologue begins. A street-light twinkles in the darkness of the screen, and then it fades, stroboscopically. At daybreak, the cupola of the Vilnius synagogue and the nearby street are pulsating, frame by frame, in the oblique sunrays. The shadows and fragmented clouds twitch neurotically, much like the stuttering bodies of passers-by. The light is boiling over. A 3D-animated and speeded-up version of Claude Monet would probably look like this. Again, the atoms of darkness multiply in space, and gradually hurl themselves at the screen. Fania's story rolls on. The day is already breaking in another location.

These are four days and nights, compressed and wrapped in a story that takes more than an hour to tell. And our protagonist brings together the whole 20th century in the time of her story. In the beginning of the film, mythical time is being spoken, and at the end there is a performance of meta-historical hope. This multi-dimensional temporal structure must be a necessary tool for bringing us as close as possible to the truth of the event.


The End: From History to Hope

The fourth night ends in the killing fields of Paneriai. It is dark. "If there would have been no hope, I am not sure I would have survived", says Fania. After that, we hear a third language - Yiddish. Chasia Spannerflieg, another surviving guerilla veteran, sings the song that became the anthem of anti-Nazi resistance movement, Never Say by Irsha Glik. After all the stroboscopic landscapes, a woman's face now appear on the screen.


The De-Patriarchalisation of History

Although the prince and his soothsayer at the beginning of the film were both men, Deimantas Narkevičius' main character is a woman. The personal and collective history of the community is spoken through her. As we know, history is traditionally written by men, and the heroes of classic epic films are almost exclusively male. (In classic Hollywood cinema, even flashbacks by women are usually framed by the unchallenged institution of the male voice.) Since Fania is a real person, and not a fictional construct, it is clearly demonstrated that Deimantas Narkevičius is according the right of speaking in the voice of truthto the "abused." (But of course we must not forget that the author is himself a man.) It is this real person who saves us from the attempts to look for "history through our own popular images and historical simulacra" (Frederic Jameson).

The other level of compensation is socio-political in nature. It is legible to those who know Lithuania's history - or rather: its different versions. Without going into all the details of a chronicler, we should remember that those who took part in anti-Nazi resistance were the heroes of history in the Soviet period. (Apart from their symbolic authority, they also enjoyed special social privileges.) When the political regime was changed and Lithuania became independent, the hero status was awarded those who took part in anti-Soviet resistance [4]. People like Fania became outsiders in this society.

As nationalist ideology made its come-back in history, the outside world was alarmed by the unwillingness of Lithuanian officials to publicly acknowledge Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust. ("The war began. But it was not the Germans who started walking around people's flats, but Lithuanians with white ribbons", our protagonist remembers.) There was no moment of collective atonement. Instead, there were even attempts at subjecting the multi-national history of the capital city to a form of ethnic cleansing. At a time when the "Jewish Issue" has become lopsided, Deimantas Narkevičius tries to give a voice to those who lost their privileges, and to remind us about the ideas of social and historical justice.


Time, Memory, Reconstruction

The image techniques we have discussed - the streams of light that organise memory in this film - suggest that we should interpret its use of time in photographic terms. To watch Legend Coming True is like flicking through an album of photographs at high speed. (In her narrative, Fania often mentions photography as a prosthesis for memory.) It would not be wrong to compare the operations of memory to shapshots in time

In a certain way, the photographic time of Deimantas Narkevičius, memorialised in this cinematic format, can be connected to Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962), where the photograph is also the primary signifier of memory. But in spite of their equally complex time structures, the two works differ fundamentally. La Jetée is based on the concept of parallel time, whereas Legend Coming True employs linear historic time. The main character of La Jetée is "glued to the image of his past", and he is sent back and forth into the past and future, in order to save the present. Narkevičius' protagonist delves into the past in order to save the future, i.e. the collective project of the Future. History is not re-written, but re-filmed, with the objective of organising the future more rationally and correctly, and to serve not only the interests of the ruling class or the dominant ideology.

The historicist approach of Deimantas Narkevičius is elaborated in his other films History and Energy Lithuania - which make liberal use of the pastiche. Here, a concrete period in history is visualised with "period" visual techniques, i.e. older technologies of film production and screening.

It is obvious that the end of history envisaged by Baudrillard has encouraged many artists ­ particularly towards the end of the 1990s - to engage in highly interesting artistic revisions and reconstructions of history. Just a few examples: the re-enactments of Rod Dickinson and Eran Schaerf, the historical loops of Pierre Huyghe and Simon Starling, the photographic restorations of David Claerbout. In spite of their historicism, the revisions of Deimantas Narkevičius should also be analysed in this context.


Rescue and Heroism

The protagonist of Legend Coming True rescued herself and others. The author of the film is rescuing several things: the ideas of history, truth and civic responsibility


The End

Imagine Deimantas Narkevičius as the soothsayer. What would he have told the prince?


[1] Legend Coming True is an 8 mm film demonstrated in video format.
[2] The capital of Lithuania.
[3] Just think: what would have happened if the soothsayer Lizdeika would have been an expert in, say, psychoanalysis, instead of classic hermeneutics?
[4] The best example is the Guerilla Street (Partizanu gatve) in Kaunas, which - unlike most other politically motivated street-names - was left unchanged by the new political regime. But it is clear that the name now refers to something completely different.