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The Art of Witnessing

Johanna Lindbladh (ed.)
Title
The Art of Witnessing
Subtitle
Documentary Art, Literature, Film and Theatre in Eastern Europe and the Baltics
Editor
Price
€ 141,00 excl. VAT
ISBN
9789633866733
Format
Hardback
Number of pages
350
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.2 x 22.9 cm
Categories
Art and Material Cultures
Literary Studies and History
Discipline
Language and Literature
Imprint
Also available as
eBook ePub - € 140,99
Table of Contents
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Prologue: Witnessing in Art. Ukrainian Voices from the War
 Olexii Kuchanskyi

Introduction: Performing the Documentary: The Uses and Abuses of Factuality and Art
Johanna Lindbladh and Anja Tippner

PART I. Witnessing in Art. Theoretical Perspectives
A Crowd in Every Face: The Documentary Image in Concentrationary Art
 Libby Saxton
 The Methods of Second-Hand Testimonies Exemplified by Svetlana Aleksievich’s Artistic and Dialogic Practices
 Johanna Lindbladh
 Documenting as Teamwork: Problems of Collaboration in Documentary Art in Belarus and Russia
Anja Tippner

PART II. Documentary Art on Screen and Stage
Ukrainian Documentary Theatre in the Context of War
 Molly Flynn/ Ielizaveta Oliinyk
 Reading the Soviet Time Speeches: Contemporary Russian Theatre’s Reflexion
 Elena Gordienko
 The Sociology of Contemporary Russian Documentary Film
 Jeremy Hicks
 Melodrama, Truth Telling and the Memory of War in the Soviet Cinema of the Thaw
 Violeta Davoliūtė
 The Ethnography of Damaged Life: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema between Document and Dream
 Olha Briukhovetska

PART III. Documentary practices in literature
Towards a Testimonial Mode: Documentary Literature and the Memory of WWII in Ülo Tuulik’s In the Way of the War (1974)
 Eneken Laanes
 Ludmila Ulitskaya’s ‘Novel in Documents’, Daniel Stein, Interpreter
 Fiona Björling
 Cognitive Overload and the Documentary Mode in Maria Stepanova’s

Johanna Lindbladh (ed.)

The Art of Witnessing

Documentary Art, Literature, Film and Theatre in Eastern Europe and the Baltics

The volume examines the documentary practices of film, theatre, and literature from the 1960s to the 2020s in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and the Baltic states. 

Methodologically innovative case studies consider contemporary ‘witness art’ – for example verbatim theatre based on interviews with people participating in political protest and war. The contributions expand on the political, medial, and aesthetic developments that shaped Soviet attitudes towards the arts and show how these concepts still influence contemporary practices. The essays are written for scholars and students of literature, culture, sociology, film, theatre, and trauma studies, but also for general readers interested in the documentary arts.  

The Russian invasion of the Ukraine has reinforced a dynamic that had already gained traction due to the political transformations post-1991 and the Euro-Maidan. Ukrainian documentary art has become a tool to witness rapid change and to counteract media warfare. Artists have reacted by creating works that address traumatizing experiences by keeping records and analyzing the ongoing events at the same time. The essays reflect on documentary approaches that are proving to be collaborative artistic tools in violent times.

Editor

Johanna Lindbladh

Johanna Lindbladh is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Lund University. She studies memory processes in literature, film and theatre dealing with (traumatic) experiences during and after the Soviet era. Her current research focuses on conceptualizations of testimony in art as well as in court, psychotherapy and everyday conversation.

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