Performative Cinematic Acts of Form in the Baltic New Wave Documentary: The Old Man and the Land, Ruhnu, and Bridges of Time

Abstract

This article explores via John L. Austin’s speech act theory the poetic manifestations of three Baltic documentary films: Bridges of Time, The Old Man and the Land and Ruhnu. The aim is to illustrate the way in which the Austinian division between the constative and the performative articulates the meaning-making process in these documentaries. This is done on two levels: on a larger scale the analysis looks at how Bridges of Time serves as a single performative speech act, establishing the Baltic New Wave phenomenon through its own aesthetic style; in a more detailed level, the article examines two examples from the aesthetic movement to demonstrate how they avoid reproducing a given reality by creating a semantic shift away from the surface structure in order to connote a rustic pre-occupation sensibility.

Keywords:

• Performativity
• documentary
• Baltic New Wave
• late Soviet period
• J. L. Austin

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Susanne Helke identifies the Baltic poetic films as belonging to a broader trend of Eastern European Poetic Vérité, distinguished by a unique ‘philosophical lyricism’ that lends heightened significance to everyday observations (2013, 247).

2 Poetic mode is one of the seven documentary modes (poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, performative, interactive) identified by documentary theorist Bill Nichols (2017).

3 A good example of this is Andres Sööt’s 511 Best Photographs of Mars (1968) or Ivars Kraulītis’ White Bells (1961).

4 See also Eva Näripea (2010) and (2005) and Anne E. Gorsuch (2011).

5 Other examples from Austin are Christening by a priest via which one becomes baptised and a naming of a ship by breaking a bottle of champagne against it and stating the ship’s name (Austin 1962, 6, 11).

6 Karolina Kluczewska and Niso Hojieva have similarly shown how the Soviet slogan ‘socialist in content, national in form’ was often reversed in the Arts, making the form ‘socialist’ and the content ‘national’ (Kluczewska and Hojieva 2022, 373).

7 For a recent data analytical approach to kinokroonika by Mila Oiva see https://vatsondev.ee/kinokroonika/eng/about-the-project/

8 The connection to Swedish fishermen is also suggested visually by some of the crosses in the cemetery reading ‘född’ (born) in Swedish.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Teisi Ligi

Teisi Ligi is a Cultural Studies PhD candidate at Tallinn University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and documentary film studies. Her work is focused on Baltic poetic documentary, film-philosophy and performativity theories, exploring how poetic documentaries engage with philosophy through style and non-verbal means.

Teet Teinemaa

Teet Teinemaa works as a lecturer in Film Studies at Tallinn University, Estonia. He received his PhD from the University of Warwick, UK. Teinemaa serves as the co-editor of Baltic Screen Media Review and his articles have appeared in journals such as Film International, Journal of Ageing Studies, and Studies of Art and Architecture. He is the head of an international MA programme Literature, Visual Culture, and Film Studies and the Estonian coordinator of the FilmEU project https://www.filmeu.eu/. His research interests are Eastern European cinemas with a particular focus on masculinities, ageing, and nostalgia.