TRANSmute at Sprengel Museum / Hannover / 2002
interviews, session, film archive, kinder kino apparatus / Sprengel Museum / Hannover / 2002
TRANSmute is a mutation of the Transaction project as well as MUTE Transaction. TRANSmute unfolds hidden routes of split and shifted identities between us and the others.
TRANSmute borrows the drama triangle from the transaction and grows to the second layer to focus on the victim’s scenario, raising a question of „What happened to men?”. A triangular logic offers the user three parts consisting of the interviews, film archive and session.
TRANSmute follows that logic and methodology, which is to extend the spatial narrative by extracting notion and references from one domain and feed it further – to another one, i.e. from speech to text, from text to image, from image to sound, from sound to people.
TRANSmute consists of two split parts unfolding in the navigation as TRANS and mute. TRANS refers to a historical shift of the past, whereas mute deals with the present.
Women INTERVIEWS
starts from the interview with Zivile Pipinyte, film critic, in which the notion of an artificial space of Homo Sovieticus is articulated. It tells so much about the world of Homo Sovieticus, its goals, illusions, desires, because in fact, foreigners were people Lithuanians wanted to be. According to Zivile this space was based on a mismatch of image and fantasy. In the interview Zivile suggests: „I have always wished to collect a series of Soviet movies, where Baltic actors played the roles of foreigners”. TRANSmute supports this idea and starts collecting the Film archive.
… Why was there this myth that Lithuania was a foreign country – I don’t know. Maybe they matched those conjured up portraits of foreign actors, some kind of model. Maybe they felt, that these actors could represent the Soviet Union. And in fact these actors had a nice physical outlook and they were good actors – Budraitis, Adomaitis and Banionis… Lolita Sutkaitiene / journalist
Russians had very many good actors, but they were looking for different faces. And they found those Lithuanian faces. Besides, Lithuanian type of personality is very close to German type. Masiulis, who played an endless number of roles of German officers and soldiers, not according to all his posture he had at least those epaulettes. Because it was important that these people’s personality types are different. Besides, cinematography has its own laws, such as showing the physical features of humans face, and only then – psyche. So there was a need for a slightly different physical personality type than general context. And in that general context these three beautiful, the reason for popularity of very different profiles – Adomaitis, Budraitis and Banionis was not accidental. There was Masiulis, Babkauskas and then Smoryginas. And then there was Bagdonas and many others. They radiated differently. They had those different physical features.
They were able to express dome other psychological moments. Look at how broadly the personality type of Liubomiras Lancevièius was explicated on the screen of former Soviet Union, because its physical features were outstanding. And his psychological possibilities were even wider than facial features. So that is why these faces stood out so strongly and remained in a that context for so long, in the context of screen of that large country. And that it was only men who performed this function here is a peculiar point, because there were also some interesting women, such as Pleðkyte, later – Onaitye, although the latter was interesting not because of extraordinariness, but because of acceptance.
Grazina Arlickaite /film researcher
Film ARCHIVE
shows how Lithuanians used to recreate a model of the environment where they lived by laws of supposed reality. When finally all obstacles disappeared and everything became available, thus the reality turned out to be alien because they anticipated something different. They used to be the most Western people among Easterners and now seem to be the most Eastern people among Westerners. In the Soviet film Lithuanian men were valid as an export commodities, they had always been performing the role of foreigners. TRANSmute archive presents Lithuanian male actors starring as spies, fascists, intelligence, secret service, espionage, ambassadors in cult Soviet films. TRANSmute film archive is interested in this split identity and becomes the source for investigation asking how we could transmute.
“Man: And this is our messenger, Mr.Gardner. Do you recognize him?
Woman: Yes, yes, of course. A courageous man. I once met him in South America.
So doesn’t he play the chess?
Man: He prefers poker and chooses a guy as a third partner from CIA or in the worst case – from Israel’s MOSAD.
Woman: Your speeches will kill you, Harry.
Man: You know Claire, you look as if you were on the hunt and about to choose a victim.
Woman: Oh, come on, Harry, do we belong to those who make choices?
From THE CHASE / starring D.Banionis, J.Budraitis / directed by B.Gostiov / Mosfilm / color / 1987
“1 Man : And what kind of a man is he, that Ross?
2 Man: Ingmar Ross? He’s an employee of Economic Division of German embassy. He started out as a spy in 1949 in West Berlin. He came to the USSR in September, 1983. According to the data, he is running a group of intelligence guys. They collect information about the defense industry. There were cases when he met with Soviet citizens, pretended to be a resident of a Baltic Republic. He is a conservative by nature, dresses modestly, owns two cars – Mercedes and Chrysler. As a spy he is notable for highly professional features: brave, inventive. He was married once, but his wife was killed in the car. He has a daughter, who studies in Hamburg, and he’s very attached to her. He knows much about music, his favorite composers are Bach and Sybelius.”
From CASE OF THE GUY WITH THE MERCEDES / starring R.Adomaitis / directed by / G.Nikolajenko / Film Studio Gorkij / color / 1986
TRANSmute APPARATUS
draws back onto media history and other modes of artistic production, offering a toy camera, so called „children’s cinema”, which developed during the 70’s by the union of amateur filmakers under the request by “Neringa” toy factory for distribution in the whole USSR. Toy cameras have been produced for more than thirty years, claiming a „low-tech” Soviet Disney utopia. TRANSmute works with idea of animation to bring utopia back to life on a scale of a model. If the logic of the camera is based on a 8 mm film 1 minute loop, featuring animation, TRANSmute suggests to re-animate the dead format by re-making cameras and host super8mm films. Following the logic TRANSmute digitizes Film archive and controlling the frame-rate of the moving image from 2 to 8 frames per second, brings the images back to film.
TRANSmute SESSION