Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- Part 1a Mapping Cinematic Journeys: Chronotopes of Journeys
- 1 Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity
- 2 Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film
- 3 Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Heaven on Earth
- 4 Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree
- 5 Memories, Notebooks, Roads: The Essayistic Journey in Time and Space
- Part 1b Expanding Europe: Interstitial Production and Border-crossing in Eastern European Cinema
- 6 Shadows of Unforgotten Ancestors: Representations of Estonian Mass Deportations of the 1940s in In the Crosswind and Body Memory
- 7 The Holocaust and the Cinematic Landscapes of Postmemory in Lithuania, Hungary and Ukraine
- 8 Hesitant Journeys: Fugitive and Migrant Narratives in the New Romanian Cinema
- 9 Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions
- Part 2a Form and Narrative in Journey Genres
- 10 The Sense of an Ending: Music, Time and Romance in Before Sunrise
- 11 Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films
- 12 Gothic Journeys: Travel and Transportation in the Films of Terence Fisher
- 13 Transnational Productions and Regional Funding: Bordercrossing, European Locations and the Case of Contemporary Horror
- Part 2b The Politics of the Road Movie
- 14 Colonialism in Latin American Road Movies
- 15 Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the US Indie Road Movie
- 16 Sic transit: The Serial Killer Road Movie
- Index
6 - Shadows of Unforgotten Ancestors: Representations of Estonian Mass Deportations of the 1940s in In the Crosswind and Body Memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- Part 1a Mapping Cinematic Journeys: Chronotopes of Journeys
- 1 Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity
- 2 Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film
- 3 Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Heaven on Earth
- 4 Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree
- 5 Memories, Notebooks, Roads: The Essayistic Journey in Time and Space
- Part 1b Expanding Europe: Interstitial Production and Border-crossing in Eastern European Cinema
- 6 Shadows of Unforgotten Ancestors: Representations of Estonian Mass Deportations of the 1940s in In the Crosswind and Body Memory
- 7 The Holocaust and the Cinematic Landscapes of Postmemory in Lithuania, Hungary and Ukraine
- 8 Hesitant Journeys: Fugitive and Migrant Narratives in the New Romanian Cinema
- 9 Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions
- Part 2a Form and Narrative in Journey Genres
- 10 The Sense of an Ending: Music, Time and Romance in Before Sunrise
- 11 Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films
- 12 Gothic Journeys: Travel and Transportation in the Films of Terence Fisher
- 13 Transnational Productions and Regional Funding: Bordercrossing, European Locations and the Case of Contemporary Horror
- Part 2b The Politics of the Road Movie
- 14 Colonialism in Latin American Road Movies
- 15 Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the US Indie Road Movie
- 16 Sic transit: The Serial Killer Road Movie
- Index
Summary
Introduction
From time immemorial, wars have been a major engine inducing massive waves of dislocation. While Europe, including Estonia, currently stands at the receiving end of one such tide, the most recent armed conflict that propelled extensive emigration from Estonia was World War Two. This chapter examines two cinematic representations of one of the most dramatic collective journeys of Estonian history – the massive Soviet deportations of Estonians in June 1941 and in March 1949. Belonging to an emerging wave of Baltic films inspired by the tragic events that uprooted tens of thousands of natives in these countries, both Martti Helde's feature-length debut Risttuules/In the Crosswind (2014) and Ülo Pikkov's animated short Kehamälu/Body Memory (2011) stand out for their inventive audiovisual design. In the Crosswind mesmerises its audiences with a stunning image track. It is composed of a series of tableaux vivants, with the camera roaming the three-dimensional spaces around human figures frozen in moments of despair. Body Memory is equally penetrating in its minimalist visual form, which is employed to present an experimental and abstract narration of the memories related to this traumatic journey, inscribed into the collective body and mind of the nation. While Pikkov's Body Memory is an allegorical tale of the collective bodily memories of past sorrow and pain, Helde's In the Crosswind concentrates on the story of a fictional twenty-seven-year-old Estonian woman named Erna Tamm who was deported to Siberia in June 1941. Helde draws on the letters of his relatives, but also on other memoirs and archival material documenting the deportations (Bencze 2014). Based on these, he offers a powerful account of the nightmarish journey that lasted for Erna until 1954, when she was finally allowed to return to Estonia, only to discover that her husband Heldur had died in a Siberian prison camp shortly after their separation.
This chapter investigates how Body Memory and In the Crosswinds engage with the Stalinist deportations and (collective) memories of them, concentrating in particular on the ideological aspects of narrating national history and identity.
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- Journeys on ScreenTheory, Ethics, Aesthetics, pp. 103 - 117Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018