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.
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
Aleksievichs 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 Theatres Reflexion
Elena Gordienko
The Sociology of Contemporary Russian Documentary Film
JeremyHicks
Melodrama, Truth Telling and the Memory of War in the Soviet Cinema of the
Thaw
Violeta Davolit
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 Tuuliks In the Way of the War (1974)
Eneken Laanes
Ludmila Ulitskayas Novel in Documents, Daniel Stein, Interpreter
Fiona Björling
Cognitive Overload and the Documentary Mode in Maria Stepanovas
Anja Tippner is a Full Professor of Slavic Literatures at Hamburg University. She works on concepts of documentation and life-writing as well as representations of the Holocaust and extreme experiences in Russian, Polish, and Czech literature. Her current research focuses on documentary and collaborative (life-)writing. 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.
