The Art of Witnessing by Lindbladh, Johanna; Tippner, Anja;

Short description:

This volume discusses documentary film, theatre, and literature from the 1960s to the 2020s in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. It presents new developments in documentary aesthetics in the region but also expands on the political, medial, and aesthetic developments that shaped Soviet attitudes towards documentary arts.

Long description:

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has reinforced the dynamics of decolonization that had already gained traction after the pollical transformations post-1991. Especially, Ukrainian artists have been creating works that address these traumatizing as well as transformative experiences of the war by keeping records and analyzing the ongoing events at the same time. All over the region, documentary art has counteracted the media wars waged. The book reflects on documentary approaches proving to be an interdisciplinary and collaborative artistic tool in politically charged times.

This volume discusses documentary film, theater, and literature from the 1960s to the 2020s in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states with a focus on contemporary practices. Methodologically innovative case studies address contemporary “witness art”—for example verbatim theater and spoken word poetry. The contributions expand on the political, medial, and aesthetic developments that shaped Soviet attitudes towards documentary arts. The essays outline how these concepts still influence contemporary practices, but also present new developments in documentary aesthetics in the region.

Table of Contents:

Introduction 1. Tracing the Documentary: The Uses and Abuses of Factuality and Fictionality in Soviet Art and Beyond Witnessing in Art: Theoretical Perspectives 2. Implicated Witnessing: The Ethics of Documenting Testimonies in Belarusian and Ukrainian Witness Art 3. Documenting as Teamwork: Ales’ Adamovich and Daniil Granin’s Book on the Leningrad siege as a Case Study of Collaborative and Collective Writing 4. “No Other Certainty in History”: Sergei Loznitsa Constructing, Reconstructing, and Deconstructing the Historical Film Image Documentary Practices in Theater and Film 5. The Ethnographic Moment of Lithuanian Poetic Documentary: Last Summer of a Homestead (1971) by Robertas Verba 6. Reflections on the Institutions and Sociology of Post-Soviet Independent Russian Documentary Film 7. Epics of Tears Held Back: Latvian Film Director Dzintra Geka’s Essays on Genocide 8. Ukrainian Documentary Theater in the Context of War 9. Ukrainian Witness Theater Before and After the Full-scale Invasion: “Now We Need to Explain Ourselves to the World” Documentary Practices in Literature 10. “Looking for a Form”: Testimonial Discourse in Soviet Estonian Documentary Literature 11. The Truth of Literature or Mundane Reality? Ludmila Ulitskaia’s “Novel in Documents,” Daniel Stein, Interpreter 12. Cognitive Overload and the Documentary Mode in Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory 13. Looking for a New Access to Reality: Russian Documentary Poetry since 2008 Index