Deimantas Narkevičius
Deimantas Narkevičius (born in Utena, Lithuanian SSR in 1964) is a Lithuanian filmmaker and artist, who lives and works in Vilnius.[1]
Contents
Film career
Narkevičius graduated from the Art Academy in Vilnius as a sculptor, having spent a year in London in 1992-93. He was concerned site-specific objects and the newly independent Lithuania's political history at a time when the removal of Soviet monuments (and particularly was making international headlines, but his interest in narrative and cultural memory led him to record interviews and conversations with artists, and then into artists' film and video.[2]
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. The themes were developed through his early features and shorts, including Europa, 54° 54' - 25° 19' (1997), Legend Coming True (1999), and Energy Lithuania (2000).
In 2001, Narkevičius represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Bienniale. He also exhibited in the 50th, two years later, in the 'Utopia Station' curated by Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist.[2]
In The Role of a Lifetime (2003), Narkevičius asked what it meant to be a filmmaker with a social conscience. He placed an interview with British director Peter Watkins - whose politically-charged, fictionalised documentary-style works had addressed the Hungarian uprising, the battle of Culloden, and the Commune of Paris 1871, and who had left the UK in frustration at censorship and neglect and living in Vilnius - over 1960s Super-8 footage of Brighton & Hove, and sketches by Lithuanian artist Mindaugas Lukosaitis of Grūtas Park, the sculpture garden 80 miles south of Vilnius where many of the country's momuments ended up. 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."[3]
His next film, Once in the XX Century (2004) played with the Lithuanian television footage, broadcast across the world, of the Lenin statue in Lukiškės Square being torn down in 1991. Recutting it in reverse, Narkevičius showed a jubilant crowd cheering the monument as it was hoisted from the back of a vehicle onto a plinth, being reunited with its legs, commenting on 'a moment of breakage in the country's history' in which 'dramatic political [moments] reveal an unnervingly undefined limbo'.[3]
The Head (2007) consisted entirely of photographs and archive footage, made for East German television, documenting the creation of the world's second-largest head sculpture - a seven-metre-high Karl Marx by Soviet socialist realist artist Lev Kerbel (1917-2003) - from its conception in 1968 to its unveiling in Karl-Marx Stadt (now Chemnitz) in 1971. Of The Head, which also used footage of East German children talking about their role models, Narkevičius said: "Objects from that period are not a crime. 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 ..."[1]
In Revisiting Solaris (2007), Narkevičius filmed the final chapter of Stanisław Lem's novel, left out of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 adaptation, with Lithuanian actor Dionatas Banionis reprising his role as Kris Kelvin, reflecting on his brief time on the surface of Solaris before returning to Earth. He also re-used Eduard Artemyev's iconic soundtrack, using a series of photographs taken by Lithuanian Symbolist artist Mikolajus Čiurlionis in Anapa in 1905 to represent the planet, but he played up Lem's critique of the effects of electronic media on human relations, a theme less prominent in Tarkovsky's film but deeply relevant to Narkevičius' time.[1]
In 2008, he won both the Lithuanian National Culture and Art Prize, and the Vincent Award at the Vincent van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe.
Restricted Sensation (2011) was a 45-minute feature 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. Narkevičius said he was not aiming to depict the explicit, illegal life of gays in the Soviet Union, although it can be read as a comment both on that period's homophobia and Vladimir Putin's persecution of Russia's LGBTQI population; rather, the film comments on 'the distrust and intolerance of what is perceived as foreign to a particular country's culture' and was 'an attempt to identify the causes of the increasing prevalence of intolerance'.[1]
His most recent work, 20.July 2015 (2016), traces the removal of several socialist realist sculptures from the Green Bridge in central Vilnius, that had been erected in 1952. Presented in immersive 3D - his first use of the medium - it culminates in the final removal of the monuments at 2am on 20 July 2015.[4]
Filmography
Europa, 54° 54' - 25° 19' (1997)
His-story (1998)
Legend Coming True (1999)
Energy Lithuania (2000)
Kamietis (Countryman) (2002)
Role of a Lifetime (2003)
Scena (2003)
Once in the XX Century (2004)
Disappearance of a Tribe (2005)
'Matrioškos' (2005)
The Head (2007)
Revisiting Solaris (2007)
The Dud Effect (2008)
Into the Unknown (2009)
Ausgeträumt (2010)
Restricted Sensation (2011)
20.July 2015 (2016)
See also
Deimantas Narkevičius at UbuWeb
