Nature, movement, liminality: representing the space of the nation in 1960’s Estonian cinema

Abstract

The recent upsurge of Estonian cinema, characterised by an increased number of productions as well as by the remarkable success of these productions both at international film festivals and in the domestic box-office, has left the broader audiences with a strong conviction that Estonian cinema as a national cinema was not born until after the Estonian state was re-established in the early 1990s. This reflects eloquently the fact that a whole branch and period of the Estonian culture – Soviet Estonian cinema – is to this date not recognised as a self-evident part of Estonian national culture, at least not in the wider, popular imaginary. This paper examines Soviet Estonian narrative cinema of the 1960s and seeks to demonstrante that while it was inseparably tied to the Union-wide, i.e. transnational, cinematic circuits, both in terms of policies and practices, themes and topics, Estonian cinema still succeeded in sculpting a distinctive, i.e. national, sensibility. This dynamic, in my opinion, is manifested in a strikingly clear manner through dominant spatial representations of the period’s production. The portrayals of Estonian territory, its characteristic land-, sea- and mnemoscapes as seen in the cinema of the 1960s provides a reasonably strong case for arguing that despite the lack of a nation-state on the one hand and the rigorous regulations of Soviet cinema authorities on the other hand, the local cultural agencies managed to establish a specific representational order which bears clear traces of local idiosyncrasies.