Luni

Text on practice

At this point of my creative life, my practice is mostly spinning around the poetic mode of documentary filmmaking. I do believe it is rooted inside of me – poetic way of documentary filmmaking was an important creative tool in Lithuania during the time of the Soviet occupation – it was a way for Lithuanian artists to secretly express their thoughts and feelings without disobeying the totalitarian regime.

Poetic documentary is this hybrid genre that connects classic, experimental and essayistic styles of documentary film making.

Themes for my most recent work mostly comes from my personal worries and experiences. For me working on those personal topics is a way of learning about the world and about myself. It is in a way therapeutic and liberating. Therefore, poetic mode documentary way of filmmaking is a very suitable medium because it allows the personal experiences and emotions to unfold by using creative techniques, which are supposed to affect the viewers to become a part and to experience and/or feel that part of the makers life.

(note to formulate later:: my previous work – Lithuanian identity, now somehow trying to ‘reach’ the other side – dislocation, living in between 2 worlds)

That being said, my most recent work – I Think They Are Buildings – began from this big word - solitude. To me it (solitude (at this moment I am kind of sick of this word so don’t want to use it)) seemed important since it is like a metamorphosis of loneliness that I (and many other people) have encountered after emigrating. While trying to unfold topic to a more personal, a wider level I tried to relive the time when I felt the loneliest and where did I find relief. I took the same well-known routes around Rotterdam. the same routes that were unfamiliar 6 years ago. And it struck me – I always found comfort in Rotterdam buildings – big, large structures, weird shaped and colored, I wasn’t sure why I always felt calmer and (on a good day) even happy to see the landscape of the city of Rotterdam. Apparently, there are some studies that proves that the complexity of buildings facades affects people in a positive way. And I was interested to dig deeper into that, but my project took slightly another way when I got recommended a book Poetics of Space by a French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Labeled as a book about architecture, author examines the domestic space of our homes through poetry.

Lithuanian identity was always a part of my work. Now that I emigrated to Rotterdam for the second time – I realized that I have two homes. Two places in the world, where I feel myself, I feel happy and I feel at home. Another side of the coin – when you have two homes – something is inevitably, ultimately lost. Because you can’t have it all and be in the two places at the same time. After reading a part of the thesis of Nermin Saybasili during the Cihads seminar, I realized that I am like a ghost – stuck in between two worlds, belonging yet not  fully belonging in the both of them.

These findings got me thinking about the notion of home. I asked myself, what is home to me? What makes me feel at home? Do I need to have couch to sit at to feel at home? What if I had to leave my home because of war and not because of privilege? These all questions got to me during the freewriting exercise.

By the influence of the book and the questions I asked myself, I realized, that all the houses/homes that I have ever lived at (I moved a lot after the divorce of my parents), all the memories of home that I store within me – makes me feel at home. I am home myself. So I started to see this piece as a transformation of a person. Transformation of how throughout the life person becomes home for himself.

If the project would be developed more and if it did not have time restrictions, there would be 3 parts:

1.     Home as a house. First house that made you feel at home is a base of you understanding about a feeling of home. Your first home is just 1 place, you don’t know any better nor worse.

2.     Home as a feeling. All the houses and homes I used to have in my life taught me all these different feelings made me understand what does it mean to feel at home. Home is a feeling, not a place.

3.     I carry all the memories of my previous houses, moods, people, I know what it means and what do I need to feel at home. I carry it all with me. I carry many houses inside of me – my first house, my father’s house, all the houses of mine and my mothers, my first house of my own. I bring them everywhere with me and they make me feel at home at all the new houses.

Poetry

I did make poetic documentary before, but before the beginning of this study year I never wrote poetry myself. I tried out the cut-out method to write something, and I really enjoyed the process and the outcome – collage of words/sentences, results in rather surrealistic text with intriguing phrases. The cut-out poetry became the base of this project – I tried to narrate the idea in non-literal way by using poetry. Written poetry became the most important part of this project, and it was difficult for me to accept. I thought ‘But I am filmmaker, not a writer, I can’t just write stuff on screen and call it a film!’ later on I accepted that writing sentences on screen is also a way of image making. In the making process, it was difficult to balance it out – I wanted visuals and the sound not to overpower the written text. Therefore, I minimized the visual material to a very minimum.

“To read poetry is to daydream” (Bachelard 38)  - my attempt was for this video to unfold as if you were reading poetry, as if it was a mind space. (Time based media? ) I chose the main visual to be an abstract, very zoomed in image of a snow falling in the background of trees – snowy landscape might bring people back in time – in many places it doesn’t snow as much anymore as it did 20 years ago. The image of the snow gets interrupted by short glitches – those are the actual images from my childhood. Most of them are from the film that my mother made when she was studying in the film school in Moscow – she made a movie about a little girl who lives alone in the forest with her animals. Perhaps I was programmed to live in solitude since I was born?

In the past half year that I’ve been studying in Piet Zwart institute, I have noticed an interesting quality in my work –as I am stuck in between two worlds – I am also stuck between two languages. My Lithuanian identity and language are very important to me – my work has always been in Lithuanian language. But because of the academic circumstances and my 2^nd home in Rotterdam – every work that includes language has to be translated to English. In my most recent 2 projects translated text accidentally became a part of the visual instead of being just a functional subtitle. I would like to research it further – to work with texts on the screen as a way to connect my two worlds.

I also would like to engage more into script writing and to challenge myself to make a fiction film. I want to make a film about love/obsession which would relate to Lithuanian mythology perhaps a nowaday story of Lithuanian goddess of Love – Milda.

Working with typography and film, engaging into writing scrips of fiction and documentary. Starting working on the film about love/obsession – connect it to Lithuanian mythology (Milda – goddess of love). I want to connect documentary and fiction, gain more power over my projects, make it work instead of let it work by itself. More planning, organizing, collecting NEW material (opposed to working with the one I already

1.     What have you been making?

2.     How did you do it?

3.     Relation to previous projects?

4.     What do you want to make next?

5.     Why do you want to make it?

6.     Relation to a larger context?

7.     References.

1.     Moving image making, films, video ‘art’, 2 languages, post-totalitarian, Lithuanian, living in between 2 worlds, feeling-based, personal, texts, texts on screen, poetry, surreal, cinematic mixed with experimental, (too) abstract, (sur)real, documentary, (literally) poetic documentary, identity, re-connecting experimental, archive, interview, observational, cut-out, challenge, speak up.

2.     Writing methods (and more) that seemed to work for me :

- Stream of consciousness;

- Cut-out method;

- Translating from Lithuanian to English

           Readings :

-       Poetics of Space (Gaston Bachelard)      

-       Vilniaus Pokeris (Ričardas Gavelis)

-       Tūla (Jurgis Kunčinas)

3.     Took a very abstract, experimental way de-attached from more obvious/commercial making, less technical more personal, more poetic. Was great exploring these new ways of creating, next step would be connecting these two and making something that is rich technically yet has poetic, abstract artistic qualities. Developing new technical skills (graphic design, blender, audition) and applying it to my creative world.

4.     Working with typography and film, engaging into writing scrips of fiction and documentary. Starting working on the film about love/obsession – connect it to Lithuanian mythology (Milda – goddess of love). I want to connect documentary and fiction, gain more power over my projects, make it work instead of let it work by itself. More planning, organizing, collecting NEW material (opposed to working with the one I already have) producing more.

5.