Reboot

Time to get serious about blogging again--summer vacation (give or take that section of COMM 130), like baseball's Opening Day, is a time when we're allowed to think that anything is possible.

Like, for instance, getting (back) into the habit of regular blogging.  Is 3x/wk really too much to ask?!  Don't answer that one--at least not for another couple of months.  Let's see where it goes...

Two weeks from now I have a conference presentation on post-accession-era Baltic film industries in Kaunas, so along with the class and the home-front (weeds!  boxes!  filing!), I'm looking to craft something presentable at the Baltic Studies conference....

I named my talk "From Despair to Where?" making a nod to the Manic Street Preachers (who I first got into while teaching in LT in the 1990s) while trying to put my finger on this transitional moment immediately after EU accession.  When I came up this title last fall, I thought I was placing the present moment in the "where," locating "despair" as the period of re-independence / reemergent capitalism (1990-2004) that had been less than completely kind for the local film industries.  However, with the global recession in full swing, I realize that the real moment of despair (industrial or otherwise) is in fact right now.  So the question is how Baltic film has managed to reposition itself within EU structures, and how it's positioned to weather this recession...

In the meantime, I'm trying to watch all the Lithuanian films we're managed to stockpile before making another run.  This weekend, for instance, I screened Paskutiniai Brėmeno muzikantai (Bremenas' Greatest Musicians, 2005), which for anything reminded me most of the hip-hop parody Fear of a Black Hat.  Here, for instance, is the band having a go at what I'm 99% sure is a Boney M parody:

Several of the actors were involved with the LT staging of Jesus Christ Superstar back in the 1980s, and offer up a loving look at chasing Soviet-era musical fame (click here for a Wikipedia overview of Lithuanian rock).  An overwrought love hexagon drags things down a bit, but there are enough good bits to recommend interested parties to seek it out--available, among other places, at BalticShop. 

A Sunday morning in the life of a prof....

I'm not sure if this is a cautionary tale or what, but here I'm posting a proposal for a Baltic Studies conference in Lithuania....that I whipped together this morning before taking off to Boston with L for cepelinai.  Fingers crossed!

"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.