Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR
Dir: Jonas Mekas
Rating: 3.5
Anthology Film Archives
289 Minutes
In 1992, German experimental filmmaker Harun Farocki and Romanian writer Andrei Ujica released their film Videograms of a Revolution in which they piece together the narrative of the 10 day Romanian revolution using footage shot when demonstrators took over a Bucharest television studio, with archival footage and the work of amateur videographers. The result is a fascinating look at a modern revolution as it happened.
Jonas Mekas has done something similar with his Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR; Mekas used a Sony camera to shoot his television screen whenever a story regarding Lithuania’s plight in separating from the USSR appeared on the major television news broadcasts between 1990 and 1991. Farocki and Ujica had the luxury of pure footage of the revolution to construct their film. Mekas, however, as a part of the Lithuanian diaspora in the US, has to rely on Ted Koppel, Cokie Roberts and Peter Jennings to inform him of what’s happening with his country. The result is a compilation of memories and an unconventional narrative pieced together from news reports, complete with analysis from pundits. Clocking in at nearly five hours, one rarely gets such life-or-death news immediately; like a grueling period in a hospital waiting room, time stands still, except Connie Chung is there to give it to you straight.
While his narrative comes with the handicap of being filtered through the news, thus removing the sense of immediacy (after all, we’re not there but rather hearing the story from an uninvolved party), Mekas creates new immediacy in his editing. We watch the situation escalate and new developments come in with each report. The handheld camera watching television puts us in a place of first person identification. We may as well be right there in the living room watching pundits argue about the effect Lithuania’s breaking away will have on the Soviet Union.
It’s so easy to watch the news, absorb the bits you care about, and then change the channel and forget what you just watched. With Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR, we do not have the mind-numbing wait between reports. And because every news report captured is about Lithuania, it makes its plight seem like the most important thing on the news (whether or not it actually was — for the sake of this paragraph’s argument let’s pretend this doesn’t fit into the grand scheme of the fall of the USSR) so when Mekas manages to capture bits of another news item between segments, it feels frivolous when juxtaposed with the mega-narrative he’s constructed.
Because Mekas shot his TV screen and didn’t use a VCR to record, we get ancillary noise from his family. We hear children babbling for attention, a man (possibly Mekas himself) clearing his throat, and other such human household noises. It reveals to us that which the Grand Narrative of History tends to forget: history is not just Washington and King George or Bush and Gorbachev. It’s also the regular people who have to hear about it in the news and react to their changing world.
by Danny Djeljosevic
