A textual rendering of fifteen films from 1997 to 2015, completed by authors' comments and introductory notes by Narkevičius himself.
Between 1961 and 1967, the French filmmaker
Chris Marker published, through éditions du Seuil, two volumes entitled
Commentaires. Marker himself, who had collaborated as both an author and editor with the publishers—for whom he had conceived and curated, amongst others, the illustrated volumes of
Petite Planète series (1954-1964)—designed the two publications that contain the “commentaries” or scripts of his first films. As a cineast and bibliophile, Marker's interest in the re-lationship between images and text underscored both the film-essay and the book “ersatz cinema”. The structure and compositional method chosen for this volume “revisits” Marker's form of commentary, making its own a theme that is dear to the Lithuanian artist and filmmaker. Indeed, the parallels and superimpositions between film material and printed matter are not secondary in Narkevičius' work: from the shooting of Stanislaw Lem's novel in
Revisiting Solaris, to the enactment of the founding myth of the city of Vilnius in
Legend Coming True, to the tracking shot over the covers on display in a German Democratic Republic bookshop in
Into the Unknown, through to his more recent video,
Books on Shelves and Without Letters, shot inside a secondhand bookshop. The relationship between text and image emerges once again in the various stratifications of speech (voiceover, direct, transmitted, deferred, etc), as a multiplicity of levels that defines time both in a biographical and historical way. In transcribing the integral version of the films' dialogue list, we have attempted to account for this articulation specific to Narkevičius' film montages, highlighting, where considered necessary, the corresponding scenes and the subjects of the enunciation. The publication is completed by the comments of 16 authors on the 15 films made by Narkevičius from 1997 through to today, an exception being made for
Scena (2003) and
Ausgeträumt (2010), to which reference is made in parallel with the reading of
Books on Shelves and Without Letters. Each film is introduced by the artist's personal statement.
Published following the touring exhibition “Da capo”, at Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, gb agency, Paris,
Le Magasin,, Grenoble, and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, in 2013.
Originally trained as a sculptor, Deimantas Narkevičius (born 1964, Utena, Lithuania, lives and works in Vilnius) has mainly been working on storytelling using film and video. His central focus is an exploration of history with a current and subjective point of view. History itself has become his methodology and his primary material. Choosing moments in History has helped him understand physical and psychological phenomenon, and that process has made him reconsider his own place in the world.
