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Abstract
Portuguese director Salomé Lamas’s experimental documentary Extinction (2018) is a poetic exploration of post-Soviet and post-Socialist space. The documentary follows Kolja, a Moldovan national living in the de facto state of Transnistria, a breakaway region on the border of Moldova and Ukraine. Shot in stark black and white, the film seeks to investigate the current geopolitical borders of eastern Europe by undermining those between documentary and fiction. It combines modes of the essay film, ethnographic documentary, road movie — even the paranormal spy thriller — to interrogate the subject of borders and the borders around its subject. Critics have thus far failed to note how the film exoticizes the image of eastern Europe. Using Extinction as a case study, I would like to question how experimental ethnographic documentary that blends modes of fact and fiction addresses issues of borders, citizenship, and identity in post-Socialist and post-Soviet space. Extinction, I suggest, misrepresents particular post-Socialist and Soviet spaces like Transnistria and its bordering countries in the interest of making an abstract global commentary on borders. In the film, experimental devices intended to question borders end up voiding post-Socialist spaces of their historical meaning and commodifying them for a film festival market.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Kapuściński attributes the anecdote to the writer Yurii Boriev.
2 On MUBI’s role as cultural tastemaker see: Smits and Nikdel (Citation2019). At the Montréal International Film Festival, the film won the Special Jury Prize for ‘its uncompromising aesthetic ambition reminiscent of Tarkovsky’ and its ‘monumental physicality’. ‘Award Winners of the 21st RIDM Edition, https://ridm.ca/en/news/award-winners-of-the-21st-ridm-edition.
3 Lamas consulted with Bobick before making her film. Her press packet includes excerpts from Bobick’s articles as well as copies of their email exchanges. The press materials are of enormous help to reviewers and critics in filling in details about the film, as well as understanding the film’s reception. Unfortunately, they have not been published, nor are there any plans to publish them.
4 Kolja does not in fact visit the NSA field station, though images of the field station’s distinct spheres are featured throughout the film as part of its aesthetic mood.
5 Salomé Lamas, ‘Director’s Intention Note’, Press Materials, Unpublished. The wording ‘spectral figures’ is Lamas’s.
6 Lamas borrows the term ‘parafiction’ from Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s article ‘Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausability.’ Her use of this term is discussed below.
7 Salomé Lamas, ‘Artist Statement’, Press Materials, Unpublished.
8 Ibid.
9 Thank you to one of my peer-reviewers for pointing out this article.
10 The term second world is itself fraught. For instance, does one consider non-Soviet-aligned communist countries like Yugoslavia, China, and Cuba ‘second’ or ‘third’ world? What about republics within the Soviet Union like Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Kygyzstan? This article focuses only on the spaces of formerly Soviet and Socialist countries of eastern Europe. The term, however, may be applied more generally.
11 This description in fact accompanies an installation called ‘The Tower’ comprised of footage from Extinction. See Salomé Lamas, ‘The Tower’, http://www.salomelamas.info/projects-ii/a-torre–the-tower.
12 This translation follows the subtitles from Extinction and not the original Polish of Imperium. There are some minor discrepancies that don’t alter the sense of the official English translation.
13 This latter fact may help explain Kolja’s reluctance to discuss his identity, especially since Lamas poses this question in strictly nationalist terms — e.g. do you feel yourself to be Russian? Transnistrian? Moldovan?
14 This may be compared with Soviet communism’s ‘tactical deception’, which attempts to convince the viewer that they are already living in an alternative (utopian) reality. This ultimately backfires insofar as it leads to a conspiratorial mindset that questions the reality of all images, even true ones. In this case, all reality is treated as a manipulatable fiction, which is not the same as using fiction or alternative histories to question one’s current understanding of what’s real.
15 Indeed, since the publication of Artur Domosławki’s 2010 biography, Kapuściński has come under fire for playing fast and loose with journalistic facts. Such criticisms are somewhat misguided, failing to take into account that Kapuściński separated his journalism and creative non-fiction (Domosławski 2012; Birrell Citation2012).
16 Kapuściński, Imperium. ‘Cartesian discipline” see p. 315; ‘Homo Sovieticus,” p. 134.
17 In this regard, Kapuściński ‘positions himself in a long and fruitful tradition of Poles-turned-Anglo-Saxons’ like Joseph Conrad and Bronisław Malinowski who simultaneously formulated a Polish national idea while contributing ‘to the self-consciousness of the European elites, endangered by the unpredictability of the other, encountered in the course of colonial expansion (Waldstein 2002). For a longer, historical account of the construction of the idea of eastern Europe see Wolff Citation1994.
18 These sites are also the subject of Lamas’s art installation (also titled Extinction) exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Portugal and the Chiado Museum, Portugal (2018).
19 Nadav Kander’s Chernobyl, Half Life (2004); Andy Day’s Former; Eric Lusito’s After the Wall: Traces of the Soviet Empire (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2009); Maria Morina’s Atomic Cities (2012); Rory MacLeans’s Back in the USSR: Heroic Adventures in Transnistria (London: Unbound, 2014). On these and other works see Jamie Rann, ‘Beauty and the east: allure and exploitation in post-Soviet ruin photography’, Calvert Journal (July 2014), https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/2950/russian-ruins-photography. Also see Masha Gessen’s article on the HBO mini-series Chernobyl in The New Yorker (Gessen Citation2019).
20 Bobick analyzes both film and novel in ‘Profits of Disorder’, pp. 249–252.
21 Salomé Lamas. Interview with Ben Nicholson, ‘Salomé Lamas on her threshold foray Extinction: ‘I can’t tell apart my life from filmmaking’, Sight and Sound, https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/salome-lamas-extinction-transnistria-parafiction-borders.
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Daniel Schwartz
Daniel Schwartz is an assistant professor in Russian and German cinema at McGill University. His research focuses on the intersection of urban studies, Russian and German cinema, and sound studies. He has published articles in Music, Sound, and the Moving Image and Slavic Review. Currently, he is at work on a book project, City Symphonies 1913–1931: Sound, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, which explores the relationship between audial practices and the composition of political communities in the works of Luigi Russolo, Arseny Avraamov, Walter Ruttmann, and Dziga Vertov.