May You Live in Interesting Times

Transitioning Boredom in Lithuania‘s (Post-)Soviet Image Cultures

Author

Martyna Ratnik

Abstract

 The essay aims to explore the transition of boredom in (post-)Soviet Lithuania as reflected in image cultures produced by Lithuania’s last Soviet generation in regard to its decolonial potential. By using textual analysis, boredom is positioned as a by-product of modernity that, due to the Soviet Union’s over-reliance on a single grand narrative to manufacture meaning, played a pivotal – if ambiguous – role in Soviet society. The text goes on to explore how boredom was viewed as an anti-social(ist) practice, while also being partly caused by the state itself, contributing to its eventual downfall. The movement of Lithuanian social landscape photography is then read as one such example of cultural production, which used the aesthetics of boredom in order to critique the prevailing grand narrative, in turn, revealing both the state’s as well as the traditional photography’s production of meaning as a production of meaninglessness. Through close readings of Tomas Andrijauskas’ films and conversations with the filmmaker, the paper further theorises the transition of Soviet boredom into post-Soviet nihilism in 1990s Lithuania. By focusing on the production and consumption of Andrijauskas’ short films Gamyklos ir mes / Factories and Us (1992, Lithuania) and SO (1996, Lithuania), nihilism is defined as an attempt to dismantle the idea of a grand narrative itself, transcending the critique of a particular way of constructing meaning. Within Andrijauskas’ films, nihilism is then understood as a device that enables the filmmaker to deconstruct both the idea of ‘meaningful’ time in terms of its future-oriented utopian dimension, as well as ‘meaningful’ space, by disrupting the perceived power divide between the centre and the periphery. In addition to this, the paper also includes notes about the author’s artistic research that led to the making of an experimental found footage short May You Live in Interesting Times (2022), which re-contextualises Tomas Andrijauskas’ moving-image work and is based on a manifesto written by the filmmaker’s father, Ugnius Ratnikas, and his two friends at the time of the failed 1991 August coup in Moscow.

Keywords

Tomas Andrijauskas, Antanas Sutkus, Aleksandras Ostašenkovas, Julio Garcia Espinosa, Lithuania, aesthetics of boredom, the 1990s, nihilism, the Lithuanian School of Photography, social landscape photography, the Soviet everyday, ruins, decay.

Introduction

“A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to be claimed by boredom” – in 1989, Nobel prize-winning Russian poet and essayist Josef Brodsky opened his address to the graduates of Dartmouth College (Brodsky 2016: 104). His speech, titled “In Praise of Boredom”, delivered on the brink of the collapse of the post-Second World War world order, is no less than a warning. In it, Brodsky prophesizes that soon enough, his young listeners will be bored with their work, friends, spouses, lovers, the view from their window, the wallpaper in their room, their thoughts, and even themselves. And, no matter if they one day wake up in a bedroom with a new family and a new wallpaper, “the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring through” the window will follow them wherever they go (Brodsky 2016: 108).

Boredom is inescapable – and so “the only way out is always through” (Frost 1914). On the other side, Brodsky remarks, one finds boredom that “speaks the language of time” and can therefore teach “the most valuable lesson in your life – the one you didn’t get here, on these green lawns – the lesson of your utter insignificance” (Brodsky 2016: 109). It is an insignificance that makes one look at the present with “all the tenderness” one can muster – since, by looking at the present, one is already looking at the past (Brodsky 2016: 113). Apart from reminding Dartmouth graduates of their mortality (and possibly triggering an existential crisis), Brodsky’s speech is also a reminder of a different kind. As a Soviet émigré who settled in the States in the 1970s, he too prompts us to remember boredom’s peculiar fluidity. This is a quality that allows it to transgress both literal and metaphorical borders without the risk of, like the Eastern Bloc’s citizens fleeing to the West, never making it out alive or, like the radio waves travelling in the opposite direction, being distorted beyond recognition.

Yet, unlike Brodsky, those left on the other side of the Iron Curtain and therefore condemned to live in the ‘interesting’ times of historical transition encountered its transformations solely by moving through time, from stagnation to perestroika, from early independence to late-stage capitalism. This paper looks at cultural artefacts tied to two distinct periods in Lithuanian history – the 1980s movement of social landscape photography and the 1990s short films created by post-independence avant-garde cinema pioneer Tomas Andrijauskas. In so doing, it explores the ways in which Lithuania’s last Soviet generation experienced the relationship of boredom and ambivalence to the changing times. It also examines how ambivalence was reflected in the images that this generation produced. The aforementioned reflections form the basis of the last section of the essay, which chronicles the artistic research behind the archival short film May You Live in Interesting Times (2022). The film reuses and re-contextualises Andrijauskas’ moving-image work while trying to assess its relevance in shaping the representation of the 1990s in the present day.

As Russian imperialism continues to haunt both the material and political landscapes of the region, decolonial discourse acquires new levels of urgency and highlights the need for the emancipation of artistic and/or intellectual practices. Hence, the essay frames boredom as a subversive visual regime that holds radical potential to both expose and disrupt the (post-)Soviet status quo, in turn, questioning the imperialist power dynamics upon which it was based, as well as the legacy it has left behind. Moving beyond the perceived passivity and neutrality of boredom, the focus is instead placed on the political dimension of boredom in addition to its possible use as a form of active resistance against (Soviet) ideological oppression. Boredom here is seen as a tool that enables artists to dismantle the idea of ‘meaningful’ time in terms of its future-oriented utopian dimension. Boredom is also shown to disrupt the notion of ‘meaningful’ space by challenging the perceived power divide between the centre and the periphery. While the essay is informed by a particular context of (post-)Soviet Lithuania, the rather spacious definitions of both boredom and decoloniality can hopefully yet again undergo a transition in order to include and account for other – ‘interesting’ – times and places.

Bored in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic

If a substantial part of what still lies ahead of us is indeed going to be claimed by boredom, then perhaps we ought to better acquaint ourselves with the inevitable. According to Patricia M. Spacks, boredom was culturally constructed at the end of the eighteenth century because“even if people […] felt bored before, they didn’t know it” (Narušytė 2010: 56). The birth of boredom thus coincides with the birth of modernity and is influenced by the emergence of such concepts as leisure, human rights, and individualism, as well as the introduction of standardised and rationalised time. While boredom is known by many different names, from ennui to depression, and can take many different forms, ranging from overstimulation to a total lack of activity, what is constant is its ability to infiltrate all modern societies no matter where one would place them on the political spectrum. At the core of its shape-shifting nature, however, boredom signifies a relationship with ourselves and our environment marked by a lack of meaning. Perhaps not incidentally, as noted by art historian Agnė Narušytė, the Lithuanian word for boredom – “nuobodulys” – is derived from the word “badas”, meaning hunger (2010: 37).

While it is true that boredom was present on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it might be equally true that during Brezhnev’s rule, Soviet citizens were exceptionally good at being bored – so good, in fact, that Soviet society in its entirety could be understood as a society of boredom.¹ The idea of stagnation was introduced retrospectively during perestroika to rebrand what was previously known as an era of stability; however, both these eras could potentially share the same definition. Narušytė argues that the period constituted “a world dominated by the experience of anonymous time, with an environment that seems to be given a priori, and that cannot be changed by the subject, as everything is planned in advance and seems to unfold on its own" (Narušytė 2010: 113). This dynamic was not merely linked to the state apparatus’s active involvement in the production of what is traditionally coded as boredom – from standardised housing to socialist realist art that were always meant to follow a strict set of rules – but even more so to its monopoly on the production of meaning. In the Soviet Union, life could only be explained by a single grand narrative, as one’s actions were meaningful only insofar as they adhered to the constantly postponed construction of a communist ‘afterlife’. However, under Brezhnev, this notion was becoming increasingly performative and reliant on rhetorical clichés, in turn, making people’s engagement with the officially promoted line of meaning equally meaningless (Vaiseta 2014).

Yet should we then presuppose that all Soviet citizens lead meaningless lives? Brodsky here once again serves as an example, in an anecdotal story told by Sergei Dovlatov, of how “he lived not in a proletariat state, but in a monastery of his own spirit. He did not struggle with the regime. He simply did not notice it […] When the facade of the building where he lived was decorated with a six-meter portrait of [politburo member] Mzhavanadze, Brodksy asked: ‘Who is this? He looks like William Blake’.” (Yurchak 2005: 127). Not incidentally, Brodsky was persecuted as a “social parasite” [tuneiadstvo], linking a lack of engagement with the state-imposed meaning to anti-social(ist) behaviour. However, Alexei Yurchak continues, “Brodsky’s way of being became increasingly widespread among urbanites a decade younger than him – the last Soviet generation” (Yurchak 2005: 127), which was described by a Soviet newspaper published in the 1970s as “bored, apathetic, state club avoiding teenagers” who “throughout the entire country are breaking the laws, making their parent and adults worried by drinking wine, smoking, and following Western fashion in their after-school get-togethers” (Narušytė 2010: 102). Therein, however, lies a paradox, since the widespread anti-social(ist) behaviour was enabled by the state itself: if the “oppressive burden” of direct belief can be offloaded “by the practice of a ritual” (Žižek 2007: 31), then one must “enact the symbolic registration” for the Big Other precisely in order to transgress it (ibid.: 25). In this context, Viktor Tsoi could be viewed as the archetype of an entire generation: in order to be a rock musician, the Kino frontman followed the mandate of mandatory labour and became a worker in a boiler room; its heat pipes reaching “like arteries into thousands of apartments in the district, embedding […] [them] inside the very entrails of the system, simultaneously providing utopian amounts of time, space, and intellectual freedom from its constraints” (Yurchak 2005: 154). So, at the heart of the society of boredom, one finds a flourishing society of non-sanctioned meaning, making the seemingly eternal system erode from within. While the state of stability unintentionally enabled networks of “social parasites”, it could not fully control the discourses they produced: the songs Tsoi wrote in-between loading coal were deeply immersed in the ambiguous themes of boredom, meaninglessness and the everyday – and then started their journey as the anthems of dissent with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In Lithuania, perhaps the most notable example of an engagement with boredom can be found in the movement of social landscape photography that came to prominence in the 1980s (Fig. 1). According to Narušytė, these photographs deployed the aesthetics of boredom – characterised by monotony, emptiness, banality, coincidental compositions, depictions of the everyday spaces, as well as the slowing of time – and came into stark opposition with the leading photographic movement of previous generations (under Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s) known as the Lithuanian School of Photography (LSP) (Fig. 2). While the LSP was associated with professionalism and the Cartier-Bresson-inspired idea of a decisive moment, tied to idealisation and dramatisation of life, the last Soviet generation instead presented intentionally amateur-looking works – faulty prints of hardly legible and compositionally ‘incorrect’ images – detached from their social and ideological environment. Or, in other words, while traditional photographic narratives acted as an anaesthetic by offering an escape to some artificially constructed ‘there’, depictions of the boring ‘here’ instead attempted to awaken the “spectator’s intentionality and awareness of existence”. (Narušytė 2010: 64). In this context, the aesthetics of boredom can be viewed as a form of representation that holds radical potential since, as argued by Slavoj Žižek in relation to “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “when we inadvertently disturb the appearance, the thing itself behind the appearance also falls apart” (2007: 25).

Aleksandras Ostašenkovas’ Einu iš kapinių per vaikų darželį / I Cross a Kindergarten on My Way From the Cemetery (Fig. 1) taken in 1989, and Antanas Sutkus’ 1970 Žaidžia mokyklą / Playing School (Fig. 2) can be viewed as typical photographic examples of their respective decades. While both pictures are monochrome landscapes set in socialist modernist urban spaces that explore the theme of childhood, a closer look at their aesthetics makes their starkly different approaches visible. The latter is a crisp black-and-white image that, in terms of its composition, follows the traditional rule of thirds in order to show a group of children playing school in a yet-to-be-constructed neighbourhood. Here, the children’s game transforms the everyday space from a construction site into an imaginative playground filled with endless possibilities out of which new worlds may emerge. In the same vein, it links the future of children – with its promises of growth and vitality – to that of the neighbourhood and, in turn, of the entire country, visually marked by an expansive landscape behind them and in practice exemplified by the government policies of free education and social housing. After all, for these children, just like Soviet citizens, more generally, the future is sure to be bright. As suggested by its title, Ostašenkovas comes across a playground on the way from the cemetery, superimposing stasis and decay onto the childless – post-Chornobyl – kindergarten. This time, instead of implying some great beyond, the social housing blocks our view, creating a sense of claustrophobia, while the visually filthy image looks as if it was taken by accident. Its central object – a shining rocket that has seemingly crashed into the Earth together with its dreams of space exploration – is here to remind us that in the Soviet Union, there is no future – bright or otherwise – in sight.²

To conclude, boredom emerges as a by-product of modernity and, while having different implications depending on the context it finds itself in, it is defined by a lack of meaningful relationship to one’s surroundings and/or oneself. As a modern state, the Soviet Union was also infiltrated by boredom, yet, due to its over-reliance on a single grand narrative to produce meaning, the Soviet brand of boredom was especially widespread in its public life. While the state viewed alternate – personalised – meanings as a form of anti-social(ist) behaviour, paradoxically, their emergence was partly enabled by the state itself. By allowing citizens to follow ideological norms only in form, it unintentionally supported the creation of milieus of parallel ‘boredom’, yet it could not fully control the ideas and cultural artefacts they then went on to produce. The aesthetics of boredom found in Lithuanian social landscape photography of the 1980s could be viewed as one such example, that used boredom as a tool to reveal both the state’s, as well as traditional photography’s, production of meaning as production of meaninglessness.

Bored in the Republic of Lithuania

In 2019, the Vilnius-based private MO Museum opened the first major exhibition dedicated to Lithuania’s first decade of independence titled, “The Origin of Species: 1990s DNA” (as an evident nod to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection). The show’s catalogue includes a text by historian Aurimas Švedas, who, in paraphrasing Zacharthy S. Schiffman, notes that the past not only constitutes something that happened before the present but, more importantly, something that is radically different from it – a gap between the “then” and the “now” closely linked to the notions of anachronism and surprise (Švedas 2019: 23). Following Lithuania‘s accession to the European Union in 2004 and the major socio-economic shifts that came with it, the 1990s only recently started to yet again feel surprising – and therefore entered into the sphere of history. Yet, their representation still remains in a state of limbo. However, the Origin of Species’ formula proved to be rather successful by not only becoming the museum’s most visited show to date (Anon.? 2020) but also by cementing a certain way of framing the anachronistic past, widely echoed in the proliferation of the 1990s-themed “visual culture archives” on social media, novels, and plays. After the exhibition’s closure in the capital, aspects of it were showcased in Lithuania’s regional cities, before, in 2021, arriving in Šiauliai, the hometown of Tomas Andrijauskas – a pioneer of independent Lithuania’s experimental cinema.

Andrijauskas, born and raised during the era of stagnation, came of age during the times of great political upheaval. With the help of his analogue camera, these times were transformed into eight experimental, non-narrative short-form works made between 1989 and 1996 that are set in the former military and working-class town in search of its new identity. While Andrijauskas went on to study at Vilnius’ Academy of Arts and later worked as a camera operator and a music video director, after 2000, he only made films that were commissioned. With their recent inclusion in a collection of a newly restored Lithuanian experimental video-based art, the amateur “little movies” (Andrijauskas 2021) he screened for his friends in his parents’ home are being re-contextualised as part of the previously overlooked early image culture in independent Lithuania. However, Andrijauskas's films, assembled from “trash, errors, and chiaroscuro“ (Andrijauskas 2021; original emphasis), would have felt awkwardly out of place in the context of the MO exhibition. While the museum deployed a retrospective exoticising gaze in order to construct a kunstkammer, filled with flashy curiosities in the form of nostalgia, poverty porn, commodity fetishism, and irony (Gimbutaitė 2020), in terms of its aesthetics, Andrijauskas’ work remained within the sphere of boredom. This might suggest that his filmography should then be viewed as an extension of Narušytė’s theory. However, since it was constructed as a photographic reaction to a society of boredom, it begs the question of what happens to boredom once its society finally falls apart – and the once still images start moving.

The aesthetics of boredom operate in a time when, as argued by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, “often in spite of the state’s proclaimed goals”, “many of the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialist life” were of “genuine importance” to Soviet citizens. While these values naturally were not accepted by everyone – and most definitely existed alongside the widespread “feelings of dullness and alienation” – it is safe to say that they were at least clear enough to be directly opposed (2005: 8). The same sentiment is echoed by Andrijauskas, who, when recalling “the utopian socialism” of his childhood, views it not as tied to the state itself but rather to a time when “everything worked, everything was clear, there was no confusion […] everyone knew the rules of the game” (Andrijauskas 2021). However, to him, the 1990s present quite a different picture: “There was no sudden fracture, it was very slow, painful, boring. Many people got lost, their illusions were shattered – these were the times of disappointment, pain, the stench of alcohol […] The West didn’t come on a silver platter […] it all progressed through broken lives” (Andrijauskas 2021). The collapse of the society of boredom brings us into a time of ideological free fall, in which boredom is revealed simply to be a symptom of an illness that has no real cure. Furthermore, since the collapse of modernist grand narratives means that an external narration of life is nowhere to be found, people are propelled to seek meaning in places ranging from religious cults to Darwinesque doctrines of the criminal world. Or, perhaps, stare into the abyss and let boredom morph into, to borrow the way Tomas Andrijauskas defines his own filmmaking style, nihilism (Andrijauskas 2021).

While boredom serves as a critique of a particular way of constructing meaning, the philosophy of nihilism is sceptical towards the existence of meaning altogether – or, in case some external divine explanation of life exists after all, sceptical towards our ability to grasp it. As such, it negates the need for life’s “narration”, and while it is usually viewed as a pessimistic worldview because of that, it can equally be emancipatory, freeing the nihilist precisely from the oppression such a need entails. Grand narratives, which embody the ultimate belief in our ability to comprehend and coherently explain life, are dangerous illusions that specialise in selling us false comforts instead of contingencies and uncertainties, which, to a nihilist, make up the real fabric of the universe. I would argue that this is the theoretical background from which Tomas’ work stems – and as such, it can be placed within the wider framework of perestroika and early post-Soviet moving-image culture, ranging from ultra-violent chernukha films to the slow cinema of Béla Tarr. This audiovisual culture saw previously suppressed meaninglessness spill into the cinematic mainstream as “an apt description of the collective hangover […] after 70 years of state-commissioned mandatory optimism” (Beumers and Zvonkine 2018: 85). In order to explore how Andrijauskas’ films engage with nihilism as a critique of grand narratives, as well as how his practice both continues the aforementioned photographic tradition and differs from it, I will examine two case studies that appear emblematic of the filmmaker’s relationship to images and sound. I will also consider the production and consumption of these two works.

However, at first, it might be worthwhile to interrogate what the shift from still to moving images entailed, as well as what it meant to work with analogue in 1990s Lithuania. While in the West, the decade is usually associated with early digital video recording technology like VHS, this equipment remained scarce and far too expensive for the average user in the post-Soviet space. The abundance of semi-professional 16mm gauge Andrijauskas uses to shoot his films, as well as the skills needed in order to both produce and develop such footage, is a relic of these materials’ accessibility in the Soviet Union. It is also a relic of the encouragement of amateur film clubs and collectives in the USSR, where Andrijauskas first learned his craft. While VHS allows filming on top of already made footage and offers the option of playback analogue images, due to their complex method of production, the 16mm cameras instead require a greater degree of intentionality while also being more prone to visual glitches and disruptions such as noise. 1980s analogue photography offered a single perspective with a fixed sense of time and space at 24 frames per second. The use of camera movement, montage, and sound instead enabled the creation of a fluid space-time collage, merging distinct localities and points in time. In a sense, this mode reflects the greater levels of interconnectivity and speed brought about by the collapse of physical barriers, as well as the influx of new commodities and capital after the fall of the Soviet Union. In Lithuania, the 1990s were a time of fast cars and even faster migration, 24-hour news cycles set to a soundtrack of 140 BPM Eurodance and uniform cityscapes marked by political slogans giving way to privatisation and flashy foreign brand advertising. Unlike photography, which requires an active spectator able to decipher its ‘frozen’ meanings, the speed of film instead has the potential to immerse them in an affective wave of images and sounds – a tendency that is reflected in Andrijauskas’ films.

The two-minute short Gamyklos ir mes / Factories and Us (Tomas Andrijauskas, 1992, Lithuania) – originally conceived as a music video for the filmmaker’s DIY punk band Gold und Speck [Gold and Bacon] – takes the form of a seemingly post-apocalyptic home video set after the death of belief in historical progress (Fig. 3). Filmed in Šiauliai’s industrial district, it is a stream of a consciousness-like montage of two people wandering around abandoned infrastructure, which are intercut with fragments of a scratched film gauge in times “before wild capitalism turned extra HD” (Kalinauskaitė 2020). The post-Soviet youth here emerge as displaced, alien-like archaeologists wandering around the ruins of what once was a ‘great’ Empire, casting their eyes at the artefacts it has left behind. These include asphalt and teacups, fences and rusty machinery, people stuck in enclosed spaces, all of which render the familiar strange. These fossils seemingly are the leftovers of a civilization’s belief in linear progress, which demanded the present to be sacrificed in order to turn constant extraction, expansion, and production into a bright tomorrow. Through the use of film gauge,³ the ghosts of this imperialism-fuelled modernist factory – nuclear waste, dead bodies, minefields, poisonous water – are made to come back and haunt the sonically dissonant landscape in the form of blurry, noisy, and dirty-looking frames. At the end of the day, this empire, as all great empires do, produces trash.

And yet, since they are merely a different form of commodity production, the production of images might be equally complicit. In an interview, Andrijauskas emphasises that televisions were the “teachers” of his generation, given the “information vacuum” that they lived in. He then recalls being a sickly child who had to regularly skip school and would therefore spend a lot of time in front of a television set (Andrijauskas 2021). Nonetheless, given that “all the normal people“ went to work, there was not much to choose from, leaving him with “bare” documentaries chronicling “Soviet people’s achievements in industry […] cinema journals, perhaps propaganda at the same time“ (Andrijauskas 2021). Therefore, what enables the production of trash might be precisely the smokescreen of a state-commissioned joy that deploys an assembly line-like “linear storytelling” as “a central tactic of state coercion” (Hrdy 2021). This is combined with a montage that aims to establish cause-and-effect relations between the images and a narration that uses an omnipresent all-knowing voice to explain the connections between them. It is a form of “perfect cinema” par excellence dedicated to “celebrating results” and reiterating the concepts the audience already possesses (Espinosa 1979). Its power then is lying not so much in the content itself but in a structure that, in turn, structures the viewer. Just like the image of a hypnotist that briefly appears in Factories and Us, the form of the film mesmerises us into believing in imaginary realities that are yet to come.

In this sense, non-productivity might be a far more authentic – and considerably less destructive – way of being. However, how can it extend beyond the space of a factory to include the equally accountable production of images? In Andrijauskas’ films, the cycle is broken by carrying the camera “for a year or so and waiting, hunting for something interesting”, since “life itself, the sun itself […] puts everything into place, you have to just stand there, push the button, and film” (Andrijauskas 2021). The fragmented production of images that the “bored” gaze encompasses allows us to move beyond the transmission of pre-packaged meanings and instead to “dislocate our understanding of reality” (Pattison 2021). It does so by teaching us how to relate to it in ways that go past the rationalisation and narrativisation of life. Not incidentally, in the Soviet Union, such “useless” non-narrative cinema would have been classified as amateur and formalist, directly linking professional work with the production of meaning. However, as argued by Julio Garcia Espinosa in his Third Cinema manifesto, “For an Imperfect Cinema”, “art is not work, and […] the artist is not in the strict sense a worker”. Therefore, he should neither “justify himself as a ‘worker’, ‘intellectual’, ‘professional’, disciplined or organised man, like any other individual who performs a productive task”, nor “make transcendental declarations, as if he were the true interpreter of society and of mankind” (Espinosa 1979). By transcending the meaning-focused work for the state, one instead becomes, in regards to the etymology of the word “amateur”, a lover, unlocking different means of communication situated in the realm of affect, senses, and emotions.

This notion is further elaborated in the 1996 short film SO (Tomas Andrijauskas, Lithuania) (Fig. 4). The short is a black and white two-and-a-half minute home video, its title referencing the English word “so” that here stands for “let’s go for a drink, you know, maybe let’s do something” (Andrijauskas 2021). In the film, we yet again find ourselves in the company of two of Andrijauskas’ friends as they share a joint and drink tea in someone’s living room. This scene is set to a distorted soundtrack of an American news anchor reporting on an aeroplane crash, followed by a conversation with a Soviet astronaut. As the camera moves between the pair, and later starts fragmenting their bodies through the use of freeze frames, a superimposed shapeshifting figure, as well as the non-diegetic voice of an invisible narrator, disrupts an otherwise casual scene.

It could be argued that both the soundscape and a visual glitch here function akin to radiation. In 1986, the Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko was granted permission to fly over Chornobyl’s Exclusion Zone three days after the explosion to capture the efforts of the disaster’s liquidators. After developing the film, he was surprised to learn that the sounds and images he neither heard nor seemingly recorded had entered the frame and changed its initial meaning. If Shevchenko’s gauge turned radioactive in literal terms and was therefore sonically and visually marked by it, SO could be read as its metaphorical counterpart. While the filmmaker believed that he was recording the environment solely, he was, in fact recording the levels of its contamination. In the same vein, SO reworks Chris Marker’s remark that “you never know what you are filming until later” to claim that “you never know what times you are living through until later” (Le fond de l'air est rouge / A Grin without a Cat, 1977, France). In the film, the displaced abstract authoritative voice, as well as the visual glitch that accompanies it, are made to permeate the images of the mundane, creating an uneasy feeling that everyday life might be contaminated with the toxic waste of history. In this sense, it becomes particularly resonant to the last Soviet generation, who had to learn the hard way that the everyday sphere of tranquillity is no more than a fragile illusion that could at any point be disturbed by the bigger picture. However, out of this reciprocal relationship, an inverted reading might also emerge, suggesting that it is not only the history that inscribes meaning onto the everyday but rather the other way around. If “life’s main medium is precisely repetition” (Brodsky 2016: 105) then perhaps the real history is not life minus the boring parts, but only the boring parts combined. The godfather of American avant-garde cinema Jonas Mekas expresses his desire to “celebrate […] things that […] make no contemporary history, art history or any other history”. He adds that “the real history of cinema is invisible history: history of friends getting together, doing the thing they love” (Mekas 1995). In this respect, Andrijauskas’ shorts, which functioned as “spam” and were shown “everywhere and to everyone” ranging from parties to projections onto an apartment block (Andrijauskas 2021), could be viewed as a part of this invisible history. The sort of history which, instead of disappearing “into nothingness”, rather disappears “into everything” (Espinosa 1979). Therefore, before being televised from the brightly lit public square, the battles – whether political or artistic – that decide the future of empires are instead fought by bored youth sharing a joint and a pot of tea while making films in a cramped living room somewhere at its periphery. And yet, since the “Super 8mm camera just made a little soft buzz somewhere […] the world will never be the same” (Mekas 1995).

To reiterate, while the 1990s in the post-Soviet space tend to be constructed as a kunstkamera of flashy curiosities, Andrijauskas’ documentation of the decade instead resides in the sphere of boredom. However, boredom that is used to critique the Soviet state’s production of meaning becomes insufficient to explain the times after the fall of modernist grand narratives and instead morphs into nihilism. This way, it serves as a tool to question the idea of grand narratives altogether, placing Tomas within the wider tradition of nihilist post-Soviet audio-visual culture. By analysing two of his films that take the form of home videos, we can learn more about the last Soviet generation’s relationship to transitioning boredom. Factories and Us (1992) uses fragmented production of images and the aesthetics of boredom to deconstruct the barren landscapes left after the fall of the Soviet Empire as a way of critiquing its future-oriented utopian dimension. In contrast, SO (1996) deploys displaced sound and superimposition to merge the centre of historic narratives with the periphery of the everyday, in turn, questioning their ambivalent dynamics of power.

May You Live in Interesting Times

While the films of Tomas Andrijauskas are an immediate reaction to his surroundings, May You Live in Interesting Times serves as my own reflection on both his work and his times, the latter of which, as someone born in 1999, I never had the chance to experience myself. Assembled from footage found on the filmmaker’s 1990s VHS tapes, the four-minute speculative short is constructed as an inverted news report that never took place. It focuses on a real-life manifesto written by my father Ugnius Ratnikas (the narrator) and his two friends known as Moškus and ST at the time of the failed 1991 August coup in Moscow.

The film aims to translate my research on boredom and its historical transitions into a medium that allows it to overcome the limitations of academic language by using editing, rhythm, and sound as the primary means of communication. Moreover, I am equally interested in overcoming the limitations of the Soviet Union’s version of Marxist historiography and its preoccupation with fixed meanings and clear-cut binaries. It is, therefore, an exercise in filling in the gaps of representation by rethinking how the past can be remembered on different – more fluid – terms that go beyond recycling the language and story structures of the (imperial) past, both on the level of story and visuals.

Just like the film itself, the following text will be divided into four parts - prologue (1), the manifesto’s backstory (2), the manifesto itself (3) and epilogue (4) – attempting to reconstruct the thought processes that lead to some of the creative decisions.

1

The film opens on a vignette from a Soviet-era news programme before cutting to two picture-perfect reporters wishing good evening to the “comrades” on the other side of the screen (Fig. 5). As their voices get “hijacked” by static noise, we enter the sphere of the parallel news report, consisting of a handwritten text chronicling my father’s reminiscences about the manifesto intercut with blurry fragments found on the tapes – slow dancing and empty fields, faraway factories and smoking silhouettes. The moving images here play with the way news reports are typically constructed, using associative, pre-manufactured visuals that set out to create an illusion of authenticity and ‘realness’. In this case, however, they are denied such an interpretation as the shots neither correspond to the text nor form a coherent narrative; rather they function as faded memories, with all the gaps and inconsistencies faded memories encompass. 

2

Yet who are these comrades at the centre of the evening’s news report, really? The text informs us they are in fact three presumably hungover Lithuanians – the narrator, Moškus, and ST – laying on the sofa on the third day of Moškus’ wedding and listening to “old blue plastic records” one would get as free gifts along with Soviet magazines. After hearing the first artificial Earth satellite’s message to mankind in the form of its signature “pip” beeping sound, marking the establishment of the “contact between the Earth and the Sky”, they get inspired to write their PIP – Post-Industrial Paradise – manifesto (Fig. 6). The film goes on to include rather trivial details about their endeavour – “[they] were sitting in Moškus’ room on Lenin Street. It was a room with a vista of poplar trees, concrete apartment blocks, and high-voltage electricity towers. They took a piece of paper (it had a tiny drawing of a fish skeleton on it) and wrote […]” – mimicking the mystified discourse on revolutionaries, such as Lenin, my dad recalls from his childhood:

Lenin was some sort of Übermensch, a saint, with a channel to the beyond. All of these stories, like how as a kid he fell to the ground trying to save some books from being shredded to pieces by geese, forming a sort of mythology […] Even now I see this one picture of him, lost in thought in his hut in the swamps, busy writing something. A poet! Yet what he was writing about exactly never crossed my mind. Perhaps it was about how one ought to live? Or how in Siberia, he and [his wife] Krupskaia would make an inkwell out of bread and then pour some milk in it and use it for writing. And so whenever they would hear the guard coming, Lenin would just quickly stuff the entire thing in his mouth. There was never a picture of Lenin munching his bread inkpot, though. (Ratnikas 2021)

3

While Lenin was busy DIY’ing inkpots in order to bring his comrades out of their huts and into the streets, the narrator, Moškus, and ST instead urged the society of workers and new-born capitalists to stay at home, writing as follows:

“Little man is the soul of the room. The room is the soul of the house. The house is the soul of the city. The city is God. Dedicated to a lonesome person in a little room, who is unknown to the rest and might forever remain so, even if he loves the whole world and never breaks the contact. And that is the reason everything exists”.

As they finished writing their non-productive anti-manifesto a thousand kilometres west from the centre of political power, a hard-line communists’ attempt to overthrow the Soviet Union’s government failed, leading to the eventual collapse of the state and, in turn, the end of the Cold War. 

So what is the moral of this story? Did three hungover Lithuanians, due to a butterfly effect of sorts, write a manifesto that did not start a revolution but instead ended one? Or was it simply a coincidence and posing such a question solely testifies to our need for crafting yet another narrative of huts, geese, and milk? While one should not search for readymade answers within the text of the film, it can still perhaps provide enough space to keep on asking – how does historic change come about? And can it come from an unlikely place? A periphery? Or someone’s kitchen? How can one, while ’stuck’ in history, transcend it? Or establish an independent contact between the Earth and the Sky that goes beyond the beeping of the government’s satellite? While far from a moral fable, pondering these questions in relation to both the Soviet kitchen culture as well as Lithuania’s Singing Revolution nevertheless might give one some reasons for hope. 

However, as the coup dissolves, the three Lithuanian youths’ post-industrial paradise proves to be nothing more than a wasteland, as they find themselves among the ruins of Russia’s failed imperialist project. Nonetheless, it is equally a lawless junk playground of sorts, allowing them to construct new futures by ‘recycling’ broken pasts. On the level of visuals, instead of trying to emulate the bygone era as if it were the present in all its high-res glory, sustainability is also reflected in the reuse of these ‘poor’ images. Aesthetically, they too reference how, by changing formats from analogue to VHS to digital, the video material at one point becomes “an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image”. Yet, precisely because of that, it is “no longer about the real thing” but rather “about […] [its] own real conditions of existence” (Steyerl 2012) as a neglected cardboard box in someone‘s attic full of forgotten and visually opaque records of the past.

While the images are more associative, the soundtrack, crafted by Lithuanian DJ and composer Viktoras Urbaitis, who released music under the stage name ‘teatre’, carries the film’s dramaturgy. In a way, it mirrors how throughout my father’s youth, sonic information was more accessible than visuals through which one could escape into different worlds beyond the Iron Curtain. That, however, also meant passing through the wall of the government’s sonic disruptions, here emphasised by the use of noise. The soundtrack also took inspiration from acts producing what could be described as uncanny pop music, such as Laurie Anderson and The Residents, this time applied to the sound motives standing in for the official government narrative. Repetition, reminiscent of a needle stuck in a vinyl record, which gets more and more out of tempo as the story moves along, is deployed to throw off balance a fragment from Swan Lake and a Sputnik-like beeping noise . It functions as a reminder that what we are in fact watching is an ‘inverted’ version of history that is just as familiar as it is strange.

4

“In two months’ time, Moškus will fall from his five-story apartment building and die” (Fig. 7), we are informed over the image of him moving across the screen for the last time, before getting interrupted by white noise. A blue VHS holding screen, making the process of the film’s production visible, then reads: “In spring, the narrator and ST will tear apart their passports and become refugees on the other side of the Iron Curtain”. As the soundtrack reaches its crescendo, abruptly giving way to silence, we learn that the two remaining protagonists will “return to Lenin Street years later, yet when they do, it will be there no more“. I would like to think of the 1990s as a box with a Schrödinger's cat in it, which, before being opened, has a cat in two states at once, both alive and dead. By the end of the film, however, the box is opened, with the future in flux that it once contained transformed into a clearly defined present. Moškus disappears, the street disappears, and the state disappears. As all the alternate possibilities become erased, I keep on wondering: what was it that was gained – and which futures got lost in the process?

And yet the News is over, and one is only left hoping the comrades on the other side of the screen had a rather good evening. 

Martyna Ratnik

Acknowledgment

My sincerest thanks go to Ashwani Sharma for seemingly never getting bored of talking about boredom and Tomas Andrijauskas, without whose trust (and VHS tapes) I would not have learned about the many joys of being bored in the first place.

Bio

Martyna Ratnik is a Lithuanian cultural worker whose practice interrogates the aesthetics of boredom, landscapes, and their (de)colonisation, as well as the politics of archives in the (post-)Soviet space. She holds a BA in Film and Screen Studies (1st class) from the University of the Arts London and is currently a member of the London Short Film Festival’s election Committee. Her debut found-footage short, May You Live in Interesting Times (2022), had its world premiere at the thirteenth edition of the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Scotland, UK).

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Filmography

Andrijauskas, Tomas. 1992. Gamyklos ir mes / Factories and Us. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuP3Ll575y8.

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Suggested Citation

Ratnik, Martyna. 2024. “May You Live in Interesting Times: Transitioning Boredom in Lithuania‘s (Post-)Soviet Image Cultures”. Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen II (ed. by Heleen Gerritsen). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 18. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2024.00018.335.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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