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ABSTRACT
Pašportrets/Self-Portrait, a 1972 short film by Latvian body and performance artist Andris Grinbergs, is both a singular artifact of Cold War-era Soviet dissident culture and an addition to first-person quasi-documentary cinema's experimental vein. Hailed by filmmaker-critic Jonas Mekas as ‘one of the five most sexually transgressive films ever made,’ Pašportrets is a selfie avant la lettre and a prototypical sex tape – important medium-specificity considerations aside – though its greater historical significance may reside in the fact that it was essentially social media deprived of social circulation. It shares similarities, both in editing style and visual content, with certain films of the so-called American underground, Western European auteurs and various East European New Waves, although Pašportrets lacked their access to audiences. This predicament beset a cycle of contemporaneous, self-portrait works by members of Birojs (Office), a small collective of Latvian artists that included Grinbergs. Narrowly escaping confiscation by the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (KGB) shortly after its completion, Pašportrets remained hidden until 1994–1995, when it was restored and premiered at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.
Acknowledgements
This article is an expansion of a presentation commissioned for the FIPRESCI (The International Federation of Film Critics) Latvia conference, “Latvian National Cinema in European Context,” Riga, December 2014.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Often misdated, the commercial is perennially accessible on YouTube. For a fuller unpacking of this caricature and an account of the counter-cultural environment that occasioned Pašportrets, see Svede (Citation2001).
2. The assault was, in fact, staged, with the attacker played by fellow amateur filmmaker Ivars Skanstiņš, author of an equally remarkable, though vastly different, experimental short titled Mijkrēsļa rotaļa ar spoguli /Twilight Plays with Mirror (1972).
3. Kinostudija Rīga's Sejas/Faces (1971), directed by Imants Brils, was a particularly well-known example. In late socialist society, however, one person's denouncement was another's tutorial, often by design.
4. For the direct effect these films had, see Svede (Citation2000, 189–208).
5. Informing Poor Theatre as it did, Eastern mysticism in general was popular among Birojs members, and to much the same end.
6. One thirty-three-second fragment of the original film remains missing, replaced by black leader in the restored version (from approximately 19:49 to 20:22), a suggestion offered by restorer Julius Ziz to Grinbergs and me, in my capacity as producer, at Anthology Film Archives, New York City, winter 1994. Post-production/restoration decisions regarding soundtrack, titles and such were mutually decided and are reported here (and below) as witnessed by the author.
7. These events, first recounted anecdotally by Andris and Inta Grinbergi as they showed me recovered fragments at Jura Podnieka studija, Vēcrīga, in June 1993, have since been corroborated in conversations with other Birojs members, some of whom conspired to hide the film.
8. That said, it is unclear whether taxonomer Rascaroli has actually seen Grinbergs's film.
9. Gotovac's 1981 action Šišanje i brijanje u javnom prostoru III/Haircut and Shave in Public Space referenced Dreyer's La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928); his action Ležanje gol na asfaltu, ljubljenje asfalta (Zagreb, volim te!)/Lying Naked on the Asphalt, Kissing the Asphalt (Zagreb, I Love You!), Hawks's Hatari! (1962); and his 1996–2000 collaborative action/documentation The Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill!, Adolphas Mekas's Hallelujah the Hills! (1963).
10. The fate of the other surviving film was less problematic. Despite modernist elements and allegorical references to social imprisonment, Skanstiņš's film was quietly screened and well known in Rīga. For a discussion of Pašportrets and Spogulis as competing visions of avant-garde expression, see Svede (Citation2003, 341–346).
11. Grigorescu ingeniously compensated for the solitary nature of his casting with the use of double-exposure images in Box/Boxing (1977), mirrors in Masculin/Feminin/Male and Female (1976), and a mask in Dialog cu Ceauşescu/Dialogue with Ceausescu (1978).
12. Levi cites Tsivian (Citation1991, 9) regarding Stanislavsky's 1899 appropriation of the term ‘sinematograf’ to describe a sequence of fragmentary theatrical excerpts instead of a single action.
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Mark Allen Svede
Mark Allen Svede is a senior lecturer at The Ohio State University in the History of Art Department, with a specialization in Latvian nonconformist art during the Soviet occupation period. For 20 years, he served as the Latvian acquisitions advisor for the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union at Rutgers's Zimmerli Art Museum.