Zane Balčus

Vilnius University

The Use of Egodocuments in Documentary Film Narrative: Personal (his/her) Stories about the Soviet Past in the Baltic States

This collective paper examines the creative non-fiction films of renowned Baltic documentary filmmakers – Giedrė Beinoriūtė, Giedrė Žickytė, lze Burkovska-Jacobsen, Jaak Kilmi, Kiur Aarma – which are recognised for their distinctive visual style, as well as their captivating and well-crafted narratives which integrate different types of egomaterials (oral histories, diaries, family photos, etc.). Their works constitute a collective memory discourse about the lives of citizens under the communist regime and the Soviet legacy in Baltic societies. They are successfully screened at international festivals, on TV channels, and on streaming platforms and are appreciated by audiences in their home countries. By engaging the audience in ‘the aesthetics of experience’ of the recent Baltic history, “that prompts a sensory response, a viewpoint revived in the concept of the aesthetics of the everyday” (Hartsock 2016: 4), these filmmakers employ different non-fictional narrative techniques and ways of seeing. They can be defined as micro-historical, as the autobiographical perspective places the personal memory at the centre of historical investigation (Cuevas 2022). In these films, montage plays an important role in constructing emotively and epistemically engaging narratives from various archival materials (television footage, video footage of independent cameramen, personal notes and diaries of the filmmakers and the characters of the films).

Methodologically, the conclusions of the research are based on a close examination of the style, narrative and rhetoric of the sample films, based on the scheme of characteristics proposed by Philip Gerard (2004) and Sheila Curran Bernard (2010), that help to identify nonfiction stories as creative. We argue that egodocuments and various forms of autobiographical storytelling techniques have become vital elements in the contemporary Baltic documentary film and other areas of memory and history research and signal an emotive and personal turn in the film history. We argue that the films of Baltic documentalists, despite being ‘liminal’ and ‘marginal’ (Dagmar Brunow uses these terms to define small (minor) productions (2015)), are valuable from an epistemological point of view and play an important role in refreshing the national and European collective memory by creating emotive and personal narratives about the recent history and communicating them to people who did not directly experience the actual events and situations