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The Screen and Everyday Life

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(lietuviškai ir angliškai)>> /abstracts
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Everyday life enjoyed a privileged position in the academic disciplines of the 20th century. Yet the interest for everyday life should not be restricted to the academic context only: the revolutions of the 20th century incorporated it in the domain of politics and art.

Soviet ideology treated theoretical, political and artistic aspects in the interpretation of everyday life as tightly interrelated. Firstly, the Marxist revolution of thought encouraged not to explain or depict reality but to transform it. Everyday life was viewed as a medium where the structure of the social world was directly revealed. Therefore in the global transformation of the world, transformations of everyday life were considered to be the most important and urgent task. Secondly, in order to achieve this goal, cinema or, as the Soviet ideology described it “the most important of all arts”, was given the status of the main means. Consequently, the transformations of the cinematographic everyday life became a major theme on the screen.

The soviet ideology treated cinematographic social space as a matrix where every person, thing, symbol and word should have its own place and function. This matrix had for the task to absorb even the smallest details of the social world and to enumerate all the possible moves allowed for the camera. Only moves corresponding to ideologically pre-established trajectories were considered as legitimate and correct.

When looking back on the Soviet screenings, the official side of the former life often arises in memory, i.e. the picture of the Soviet celebrations with all typical attributes (posters, portraits, red flags and ribbons, slogans). This official side of the Soviet life and its cinematographic versions could be treated as the best example of the totally determined and ideologically structured space. Looking at the images of official parades, we identify now not only spatial but also temporal structure. Every image, every poster, portrait, flag and ribbon had its own place in the sequence of cadres of the film. Certainly, the presentation of the official celebrations depended on their importance. Here we see, firstly, the reportage on the celebration of 40th anniversary of Soviet Lithuania.

The filming is precise, accurate and strictly ordered. From this reportage slightly differ two other quite “daily” celebrations: the filming is less structured; the montage is a little bit freer and sporadic. Anyway, it also perfectly fits to the rules of the screening of official Soviet events.

This ideologically pre-established order of official side of Soviet life by no doubts was one of the main criteria comparing Soviet socialistic system with capitalist societies. It’s episode from the movie of Albertas Laurinciukas “Happy American”. The director of the movie says that “Americans like to celebrate and they celebrate a lot”.

By doing this, they do not differ quite much from Soviet people. But what is totally different is of course the style of celebrating. Albertas Laurinciukas screens American celebrations as if it would be gatherings of uncontrolled people. The images apparently have no meaningful sequence; the montage is wild and chaotic. As the director of the movie suggests, the chaos of the celebrations reveals the emptiness of American life. What previously appeared as just joyful face now is seen as the mask. Under the mask, conceals themselves supposedly true faces of Americans.

As we see here, the ideologically pre-established order of Soviet celebrations had to symbolise the stability and meaningfulness of Soviet life itself. This ideological order has played the role of the weapon by means of which the Soviet ideology fought against ideologies of West. But apart from this function, the order of the official side of Soviet society was supposed to be an example how to structure all the territories of the Soviet reality, especially, the everyday world.

The Soviet everyday life had undoubtedly absorbed many symbols of the official ideology. How the idea of the ideological matrix worked in the process of presenting everyday in the screen is evident in the episodes devoted to one of the most important social tasks of Soviet authorities – the providing Soviet citizens with the new flats and houses. I do not analyze here all the speeches of official functionaries of Communist Party that necessarily accompanied all reportage about housing. But even if we leave apparently “neutral” images, the text expresses the idea of such matrix where every detail of the everyday world has its own definite place. Here is an episode from the official news program “Panorama”. The reporter’s voice is recovered from the stenography. I quote: “Every child in this family knows its own

place, every one remembers very well were to put and from where to take dresses, book and toy. Daughters help mama keeping clean their house; sons and father work in the collective garden. In this house children do not have their own secrets. They willingly share their plans with parents” (end of quotation). As we see here, in the Soviet ideological everyday children know their own place in the flat; they do not have any secret just like the Soviet life itself does not have any back side, the side unseen and not transparent for the eyes of ideology. The absolute transparency of the social matrix guaranties absolute control under all phenomena and situations.

But when everything is controllable, some variations in the details are not prohibited. This feature of the ideological matrix could be understood by means of the conception of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari described it in “A Thousand Plateaus”, the space without its invisible part should be called the total space of cogitatio universalis (lat.). Such space has two main characteristics: firstly, the classification of the space into many commensurable parts, and secondly, the connection of these parts by stable and fixed trajectories. These categories perfectly fit to the Soviet screening of the everyday. Firstly, all the territories of the Soviet life were hierarchically classified according to their status. Secondly, the movement of the camera strictly depended on the ideological importance of the filmed event.

One of the Lithuanian TV directors has told me quite characteristic story. He filmed the anniversary of the Lithuanian writer Juozas Grusas. The writer with all the functionaries of the Lithuanian Communist party took seats in Presidium. The audience sat below, in the hall. The TV group filmed from the hall as well; the camera stood on the level of the legs of Communist Party members just in front of Presidium. Having filmed the event in manner corresponding to the style of all official Soviet meetings, the director and a cameraman spontaneously paid their attention to the shoes of the Communist Party bosses. Thus, instead of looking at the faces of Communist Party members, all the Lithuanian TV audience approximately 5 seconds glanced at their shoes. Needless to say, that these 5 seconds were enough to treat this cadre as an ideological diversion.

We can easily reconstruct the logic of Soviet censors. According to them, the director confused two different territories of the ideological matrix. The cadre of the shoes of the Communist Party bosses had to be understood as a deviation from the official trajectory of the camera allowed to the filming of official event. Nevertheless, this comic accident does not mean that Soviet ideology prohibited filming such object as shoes. Not at all, just this object had to be filmed in its “daily” context.

There, in this context, was allowed not only to demonstrate ordinary things, but also to make critique of them. This critique was supposed to manifest self-criticism of the Soviet thinking and its inner resources for renewal. Therefore the everyday was one of the few territories, which to a certain extend ”legalised” quite free reflection on of the prevailing social situation.

Here is an episode demonstrating such supposedly free reflections on production and repairing of shoes, on the problems related to the work of the other public services, on the so called ideal functioning of these services.

Allowing partial critique, however, the soviet ideology did not manage to keep it all the time within the pre-established ideological boundaries. Here are some other examples of the slight transgressions of the primary meaning. The first example is from a Russian animation, quite comic one.

The dog: in order to buy a cow, we must sell something needless.

Fiodor: in order to sell something needless we must buy something needless.

This conversation paradoxically reflects one of the main statements of Communist ideology, namely, that Communist Society has to reject the money as the element of Capitalist philosophy. But if Soviet citizens ideologically have no need in money, they cannot earn them. Thus, a hero of the animation comes to a quite logical conclusion: in order to buy a cow, we do not sell anything; we will go to look for a treasure. Seeking for a treasure, the dog and the cat discuss how they will spend it.

The dog: I will go to a shop and will by some meat there. The meat in the shop has more bones.

It’s natural that a dog would like meat with bones. His statement is justified simply by his existence of the dog. From the other hand, every spectator understands this statement in a quite different way, namely, that “meat in all Soviet shops is of awful quality”. The meaning of the same statement divides into to topos. Looking from the topos of the dog, it’s simply the statement of the personage of animation. Looking from the topos of spectator, it’s quite straightforward reference to the actual condition of the Soviet economy.

The second example of such cinematographic heterotopy is less comic and, consequently, less evident. TV director Henrikas Sablevicius asks why a young person loses the courage to live, the courage to transgress his own boundaries. This question becomes a cover to raise another, existential, questions. Thus, the film is, as Henrikas Sablevicius puts it, about inner boundaries, inner province, existing in every person, or as we, spectators, understand it, about the stagnation of the Soviet life.

In this film, Sablevicius shows us the person who tells us about his experience of the travel to India. In fact, as we see later, the Image of India that we see is not "real" but only a decoration. Moved away, this decoration opens the monotonic and boring everyday reality of Soviet person. Thus, the decoration becomes an example of the illusions that mask sometimes ugly but nevertheless "the real" life.

Summing up all the examples of the Soviet documentary movies, we could conclude that in Soviet times the screened everyday life has split into at least three different parts: firstly, patterns of Soviet life, secondly, refined and supposedly self-critical self-examination and, thirdly, the existential discourse not embraced by the Soviet ideology.

Soviet ideologists, creators and the audience used to find their own, often not the same, motives to keep up their interest in various spheres of everyday life. The “revolutions” of independence have changed this established relationship between the everyday and the screen. The Soviet ideology was rejected together with the occupational regime. In order to reject it in the sphere of cinema, one needed not to invent new ideology, but simply to see the heterotopical spaces of meaning which, as we see, already were in Soviet screenings.

Everything, what we previously have seen, now is interpreted in the heterotopic – opposite to the Soviet – meaning. Such strategy helps indeed to reveal the inner structure of Soviet propaganda. But it does not provide sufficient basis for the new, not Soviet screenings of the everyday. Paradoxically, but having rejected the soviet screenings of the everyday, the transforming and socially critical function of cinema and TV also lost their power. Unfortunately, the cinematographic discourse on everyday phenomena, which attempted not to get involved in the official political games, has also lost its urgency. It is obvious that it could be back only when another discourse, based on new principles and equally referring not only to heterotopias of Soviet heritage, but to many other heterotopic spheres of contemporary life, is created.