Deimantas Narkevicius’ films are characterized by the obviousness of their formal simplicity. Yet this obviousness always offers a gradient conducive to encouraging a multiplicity of approaches. But rather than capitalizing on the benefits of a stratification of meanings, rather than aiming astutely to complexify layers of interpretation, this Lithuanian artist’s highly singular operation consists, on the contrary, of pitting them against one another. Setting the different interpretations in play against one another in this way results in turning his films into a hotbed of high dialectical temperature. Except, however, and importantly so, that the final fusion does not result in any form of synthesis that enhances (aufhebung) the various exegeses; on the contrary, it confirms each one’s exhaustion. As if it was a question each time, in his own way, of repeating Rauschenberg’s gesture in Erased De Kooning: of making sure to first erase all prior appropriations – to start afresh. A manufacturer of belief traps, that’s how one must resolve to define Narkevicius’ undertaking. Let us thus accept this risk of being trapped and allow ourselves to lose our way in several of his procedures.
One film, The Role of a Lifetime (2003), which is more intentionally explicit than the others, presents a theoretical exposé in the form of a rambling interview. A blurred portrait of filmmaker Peter Watkins, it seems to display the characteristics of a method. It wouldn’t be hard to concede that the words articulated by Peter Watkins’ systematically off-screen voice might, for Deimantas Narkevicius, serve as an Ars Poetica. Famous for introducing television’s live news reporting techniques to the cinema, the English director pushed back the boundaries between reality and fiction, deliberately risking anachronism1, in a spectacular and highly questionable Anglo-American rendition of Brechtian precepts. A particularly jerky hand-held camera, direct sound, recurrent direct camera address, mikes in the shot, the film crew participating in the action, and so forth; these, in brief, are the ingredients of a recipe that, after The War Game (1966), produced for the BBC, made Punishment Park (1971) shot in Nixon’s America a success. First an emigrant to the United States, then resident in Vilnius at the time of the interview, what does Watkins talk about? About his profession, the choices he has made during his lifetime, as the title indicates. He applies himself to examining the documentary credo’s verist illusion. The artificial is for him the opposition between fiction and documentary, to the point of challenging the pertinence of this latter term. More generally, he denounces cinematographic power and its hypnotic character which, according to him, reigns today in a manner so sovereign that it refuses all possibility of vigilance on the part of the viewer. He notably challenges the manipulation that editing represents, a crucible of decisions that in his view reflects the dangerous autocracy of the artist. At the same time, contradictorily, he proclaims the so rarely used responsibility and freedom of the artist. In one of the most salient passages of his diatribe, he thus situates the stakes of contemporary cinema in a fertile cross-over between the freeness of the video artist and the scrupulousness required of a television director.
Given Deimantas Narkevicius’ own filmography, his own interweaving of archive and reconstruction (in Legend Coming True, 1999) and use of documentary rhetoric in the form of pastiches (in the 1998 film His-Story), all of this could be taken as gospel. It is indeed noticeable when listening to the soundtrack how Watkins’ answers follow the questions asked, for their part never audible. It is flagrant, in short, how despite the plea for autonomy, one artist enlists the other. The Role of a Lifetime thus seems to be less the production of an archive, a document about an esteemed neighbour, or a homage to a peer’s lucidity, than it is an indirect form of self-interview. Just as Glenn Gould did in one of his famous radio shows, it can thus be taken to mean: Narkevicius talks to Narkevicius about Narkevicius. Through the voice of Watkins, invisible in direct on the screen, and contrary to the tangible mythology this genre usually requires, it is in reality Deimantas Narkevicius who is speaking.It is apparently he who, via a questionnaire and the unverifiable tricks of montage, comes to ventriloquize not only Watkins’ body or name, his envelope, but even his voice. Here, Watkins appears no longer be the monument one questions to piously note down his thoughts, but is enlisted to fulfil the humble task of dubbing an inaudible Lithuanian original version in English (inaudible here because visible only). It is thus apparently Narkevicius, the Lithuanian, behind the international idiom of a world-famous filmmaker, who, with subtle irony, is offering the keys to his work.
But nothing in The Role of a Lifetime confirms the univocity of this hypothesis. Or rather, more subtly, everything plays on a more convoluted complexity. Without entering into the detail of an exhaustive analysis, Narkevicius’ discreet but devastating denial of Watkins’ theses rests on one simple factor: the use of the relationship between sound and image. There where, as we know, Watkins’ cinema, faithful to the logic of television, overrides the distinction between the two, Deimantas Narkevicius seeks only to fuel discontinuity. There where Watkins imposes the law of synchronism, which pushes its consequences so far that it ultimately proposes the equation: yesterday equals today, anachronism equals current affairs, Narkevicius’ film confronts History. Shots of a pencil-drawn snowy landscape alternate with documentary shots of day-to-day life in Brighton, of a tranquil banality and a period that might have been that of the British director’s youth. The latter’s discourse, caught in the trap of rehashing his own declarations, remains far removed from the images, as if snow-covered himself, covered by the silent whiteness of the page. He only manages to regain a degree of acuteness when his commentary rejoins and specifically designates the nature reserve near to Vilnius evoked here by the pencil lead. As if he at this point stops expressing himself as a foreign figure to become a manner of Lithuanian citizen. As if, all things considered, he enters the limits fixed by the drawing. It is indeed what ends up happening, as the filmed images of the interview, absent here, are replaced by a few successive sketched portraits of the filmmaker talking, a suspended animation we are used to seeing in courtroom sketches.
But it isn’t only the opposition between voice and landscape that is at play. The landscape itself is not intact. It finds itself subjected to a transformation fuelled by the narrative’s progression in images. Its first appearance seems initially to place it under the sway of a nostalgic movement. A kind of image that signals its belonging to a past of representation echoes Watkins’ recriminations against illusory documentary authenticity and his affirmation of the predominance of fiction. Treated via primitive means (pencil drawing), captured moreover by the camera in slow panning movements, such an image combines the requirement of documentary precision with the affirmation of a reconstruction. It thus becomes metonymic of an entire landscape tradition, that which insists on posing the question of the possibility of representing the native land. The trees, snow and deserted forest are present here, along with a descriptive desire, the signs of a singularity that can only manage to manifest itself through art (in opposition to the ordinary sequences filmed in Brighton). We recognise here a well-known commonplace, regularly attributed to Eastern artists when they don’t actually proclaim it themselves, concerning the symbolic nature of the image. Nature, that is to say here the country, the native land, has constantly to be re-conquered, and firstly in the space of memory, in its presence in the form of traces. Always a priori already lost, it is the object of an elegiac complaint, in the way one understands it in the work of that great Lithuanian filmmaker in exile, Jonas Mekas2, or in most of Tarkovsky’s films, to which Narkevicius’ Revisiting Solaris (2007) pays a thwarted homage.
But this mystique is short-lived here. The forest is not the eternal national ideality, a mute and dreamed of territory. Despite the delicacy of the pencil lines, it reveals itself to be no more than a piece of private property. Even more prosaic and almost grotesque, it is a sculpture park open to visitors that, in this open-air museum, exhibits the torn-down statues of the leading figures of the days of Soviet occupation. The drawings show several of their contours, standing alone amidst the trees, as Watkins voice, uncertain, comments on this eccentric collector’s gesture. Has History reclaimed its rights? Perhaps, but at the very moment it pleads to have lost them. At the very moment when the expression of its utopia, translated in socialist realist style, has slid into mercantile picturesque, thereby cancelling any possibility of a horizon. But to such an admission of the failure to act is refused the dramatic place of a conclusion.
Precisely, there is something more conclusive. Late in the film, the revelation of these obsolete historic monuments’ existence produces a contaminative effect. It is the whole of what is presented (a filmmaker’s voice, the trees, the drawing, the filmed archives, etc.) that threatens to become monumental. And this, despite the fact that it seems clear that all the decisions engaged in the film’s making have been taken to ward off this monumentality: the fragility of the pencil line, the absence of figuration of the heroic cineaste, the anti-heroic banality of the fragments of Brighton, the intermittence of the montage, etc. It remains that both Watkins’ militant virulence and the ancient delicacy of the drawing are suddenly forced to situate themselves in relation to monumentality. The days when they were spared are gone. Which also signifies that they adopt the new language of these monuments. What new language? Not the one, authoritative, initially invented to their own ends: the language of controlled memory. The attraction park has put pay to that one for ever more. But the language of their unprecedented situation as an object of curiosity set right in the midst of nature, somewhere between cultural cast-off and fantastic sculpture. Less a language in reality, as its opposite, an infirmity that affects the capacity of elocution: aphasia.
In his analysis of Alexander’s Tomb/The Last Bolshevik, Chris Marker’s film devoted to Medvedkine, Jacques Rancière opposes two systems of memory: on the one hand, the document, and on the other, the monument. The first has the qualities of a remains, has not calculated its survival in any way, is not signed with any exclusive power and only owes its survival to the grace of an exegesis that authorizes it to emerge from the silence to which its initial strict usage confined it. The second is a complete system of signs, geared to a posterity towards which it has premeditated its reception. In other words, the document awaits its translation into a language that it was not itself aware it could articulate. The monument, on the other hand, expresses itself in a complete language, that anticipates the permanence of its translatability. It is in the in-between-ness of this provision of translation that the Lithuanian park is situated. Its silence has no yesterday nor tomorrow, it is unarticulated: if the language of the statues has ceased to resonate, it is not any more situated in the provisional purgatory of a deferred translation. The statues have become curiosae: once monuments, they have been reduced to the rank of documents, but ones that have become illegible again, documents one only wants to laugh at now, silent ruins, and, just like them, the park (the country?), a sphere banished from language.
Once in the XXth Century (2004) brings into play a similar un-topicality, one that freezes discourse. A simple montage of images taken from a television report and from a private source, the film depicts one of those gatherings around the toppling of one of the bygone regime’s idols. Here, in Vilnius, a huge black bronze Lenin, hand outstretched amply towards the future and the people. With one difference: the film replays the action in reverse, and presents, not the sculpture’s removal, but its being restored to its pedestal before the cheering crowd. The use of reverse play in film was, as we know, a familiar technique in totalitarian utopias. Both Leni Riefensthal (in Olympia, women swimmers leap back out of the pool onto the diving board) and Vertov (in Enthusiasm, the food fabrication line is reversed, going from sausage to live beast) used this possibility intrinsic to cinema’s mechanical reversibility. The aim at the time was to prove through images that the whole of existence was subjected to rationality, and that time itself was at our disposal. A time so controlled by the political project that it was nothing more than a stable fiction that could run indifferently both ways, making it possible to exchange the past with the future in a malleable duration. Only that supposed that the images were silent (voices don’t so easily annul the progression of their phrasing), that is to say uniformly covered by the implicit or explicit discourse of a designated truth, untouched, for its part, by temporality.
In Once in the XXth Century, authoritarian discourse of this kind has disappeared. Nothing protects the return to the past from the most flat – or in other words catastrophic – comedy anymore. The repeated erection of Lenin’s statue on its pedestal is preceded by a magnificent aerial ballet in which the oversized hand of the man of State sweeps through the air and greets the crowd gathered to watch his deposition. For several minutes, between the truck that drives the prostrate statue away and the pedestal that holds it upright, Lenin floats in the sky, his weight suddenly lightened. There he is in a moment of grace, metamorphosed into an angel bearing no other news than his own silence. Lenin, just like the sculptures in the park, occupies a space that is not void (inhabited in one by the trees, in the other by the crowd), that he does not sign anymore with his absence (his presence, as overbearing as his colleagues in the park, remains a liability), but which is on the contrary left open to a new dance. That he, even for a grandiose and pathetic farewell solo, happens to be the first to interpret. This dance is the possibility of a veritable gesture beyond all finality, beyond the ideology that seemed nonetheless to be its sole and weighty medium.
The truly beautiful danced moment of Energy Lithunania (2000) bears the same signification, open to an intaglio utopia, a whatever utopia, to paraphrase Agamben. Which, in the same film, is echoed by the long passage in which the camera lingers on the fresco eulogizing collective work, set to Mozart. Neither in the mode of a monument to emphatic eloquence, nor in that of the posthumously revealed document, something insists on making itself heard via its maintained silence: a coming community (to cite Agamben again), whose gestures alone are visible, even indecipherable, that is to say at last rendered to themselves. Autonomy, certainly, in a sense, but aphasic rather than glorious: modernism, in other words, on the threshold of its project, rather than triumphant. And it is undoubtedly the same operation that Disappearance of a Tribe (2005) or Europe 54° 54’ – 25° 19’ (1997) work. In the latter, Narkevicius films his journey to the geographic centre of Europe, situated in Lithuania. On arrival, the discovery is minimal: a sparse glade, in the middle of which stands a simple stone designating the symbolic cardinal point. Europe is neither about a deception, nor is it ironical about vain pretensions, but reveals a pure availability, freed from both heroic debt and the pathos of a coming achievement. It is the glade that, the narrator’s voice over says so, reveals its resemblance to so many other glades. It is a principle of equivalence that this voyage reveals: the centre is here, it is everywhere, it is moveable, it can equally be forgotten.
Burying the past retained by ideology in the snow, or suspending it in the ecstasy of dance, on the one hand. Opening space to an anticipation empty of prior significations, on the other. It is in this sense that, in Narkevicius’ work, vocation, in all its meanings (destiny and its verbalization), finds itself suspended, to coin a Klossowski title. It is no doubt not by chance that in one interview he declares that, after initially working with sculpture, he started his current work as an artist by recording conversations: “I was very much interested in site-specific objects, the places where objects are placed. But somehow it was not enough. I really needed things to tell. So I started to do interviews. Just recording conversations.” It was a matter, in short, of replacing the volume, of producing a slippage and dissolving the monument in a narrative that takes the inceptive form of conversation. But which this time, once again, doesn’t acquire the status of a suddenly ennobled raw document. In His-Story, Legend Coming True or Matrioskos (2005), it is the oscillation between falsehood and reality, the production of the legendary that interests Narkevicius. In other words, the effects of citation, the effects of genre that he solicits and exhausts. The conversation is, just as it is in Ian Wilson’s work, a way of fixing a rendezvous with a form rather than with its result. It is first of all, paradoxically, a pretext to say nothing, to subtract the event from the fatality of a conclusion. But if with Wilson the conceptual framework of the discussion opens up a mystique that is won over in advance, Narkevicius’ silence is, on the contrary, situated at the end of a story.
Which is why, when Re-visiting Solaris explicitly defines itself as a remake, it is first of all to cut the sound of the original version. And to cut it twice. First, by replacing the film’s text with a passage from Stanislas Lem’s book which Tarkovsky didn’t retain in his adaptation. As if giving back a voice to literature’s silence and to that of the landscape described in this extract. Then, by literally cutting the sound of the text spoken by the actor so that he articulates in the void, reciting before spectators rendered deaf (even if in one particularly ironic sequence we are faced with two useless switchboards). This is all the more accentuated given that Solaris fulfilled two missions. It was both a commission on the part of the Soviet authorities to rival the Americans and their 2001 in space conquest propaganda; and, for Tarkovsky, subverting the commission, it was a meditation on the impenetrable limits of intimate space, on the haunting nature of memory that is impossible to conquer.
What do the two films share then? A body and a voice, that of Donatas Banionis, the famous Lithuanian actor who plays the Russian-speaking astronaut Chris Kelvin, that the remake silences and who leaves the stage after a dialogue of the deaf with Narkevicius, himself visible on screen. But also the images of the Black Sea. Shot by Tarkovsky in 1972, the sea is also present in Re-visiting Solaris in the form of photos taken in 1905 at Anapa by a famous Lithuanian composer, Konstantin Ciurlionis. Lem’s narrative, then Tarkovsky’s film gave this sea a mysterious mimetic power, one remembers. That these images of the sea, a metaphor for art, and its relation to the real, are, in Narkevicius’ work, shots taken before the revolution by a Lithuanian musician whose music we don’t hear, in a film from which the sound is banished, is quite eloquent, if one can put it like that. All the more so, given that, other than muffled humming, the only music, taken from the original, is Bach’s cantata BWV 639 entitled Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ).
The aim is not to re-begin a country, to propose a facetious remake, to fraudulently reinvent its original language, nor to rerun its history. It is not a case of rehabilitating it, in short (that country or any other for that matter), but of accepting that it will only open up provided one pursues its exhaustion. To exhaust the question of identity (national, individual), to expose it as an aphasic site, without vocation; that is the wager taken up here.
Notes:
1 In several of his films, such as Culloden (1964), Edvard Munch (1976), and La Commune (2000), Watkins more or less abruptly introduces filmed interview situations, with the microphone held out to the interviewees, according to the codes of live reporting. These flagrently anachronistic moments clearly proclaim a dual virtue. On the one hand, they break with the fraudulent naturalism of costume drama to reveal and accentuate the projet’s inherent discourse: the proximity with the present. On the other, they operate a critique, or even a self- critique, of this very act and replace the alleged objectivity of a media that is intrinsically bound up with the political machine. We shall not insist here on the political and artistic naivity that turns these acts into additional fodder for the machinery of a belief that never exceeds its initial framework. Combatting television (even if it is a valid combat) by rolling out its rhetoric has only ever ultimately resulted in confirming it.
2 In one interview, Narkevicius testifies to Jonas Mekas’ importance. He nonetheless specifies that his interest in this work is related more to the figure of the artist and to a vague, indescribable sentiment, than to a given technical aspect of Mekas’ cinema.