"From despair to where? The post-accession era Baltic film industries"
Bjorn Ingvoldstad, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Bridgewater State College (USA)
Abstract submission for the 2009 Baltic Studies Conference
Vytautas Magnus University--Kaunas, Lithuania
Cinema Studies offers a particularly revealing lens through which to investigate the intersections between Baltic cultures and Baltic identities. In addition to work on texts and audiences, work on film industries reveal the economic spine of "the most important art." Building on recent work on "cinema of small nations" generally (Hjort & Petrie [eds.], 2007) and on Baltic cinema in particular (Naripea & Trossek [eds.] 2008), I propose to discuss the most recent, post accession era (2004- ) in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
In particular, my focus will be on the film industries in the Baltic and their adaptation to the economic and geopolitical opportunities and constraints coupled with accession to the European Union and NATO. My presentation uses Baltic cinema circa 2004 as its initial reference point, and works its way out both chronologically and geographically.
While accession to the EU and NATO was an endgame envisioned and worked towards for over a dozen years, it certainly was not "the end of history" (Fukuyama, 1992). Rather, it opened a new chapter in the political, economic, and social transformations taking place in the Baltic States (the post-postsocialist era?). Half a decade is a blink of an eye compared to the millennium of Lithuanian history we celebrate in 2009, yet it still offers us a vantage point to trace the continuities and discontinuities in the film industries of the region upon greater European integration.
Rather than strictly focusing on one particular country, the analysis will center on the national cinemas of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. My presentation will consider the level of interaction and integration with one another (is there such a thing we can meaningfully refer to as Baltic Cinema?), as well as interplay with other regions' cinemas (Scandinavia, Central Europe, Western Europe, and the CIS) and the global film marketplace. In this regard, I will explore EU-based funding networks for production and distribution (in particular, co-production and cross-medium strategies), the evolution of exhibition and ancillary markets, and the relative position of Baltic cinema within both the EU and the global marketplace.
Seeing film as a cultural crossroads of culture not only allows us to look at the ways in which cinema industrially links texts with audiences, but also offers a connection between people of different localities, nationalities, and regions. Baltic cinemas, in this sense, can rightly be viewed as an intersection of civilizational identities.
