The Role of a Lifetime
The work of Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius deals with the experience of collective—mostly Eastern European—history.
Narkevicius’s films reinterpret historical events by playing with different genres and narrative structures, such as memoir, documentary or drama, he constructs history out of active relations with individual biographies. Socialist realist sculpture is a recurring subject in his work.The Role of a Lifetime was commissioned for St Peter’s Church in Brighton as part of Art and Sacred Places, a national initiative for which contemporary artists are invited to make new work in sacred spaces. The Role of a Lifetime (10 min., 2003) is a single-screen video installation, which can be projected onto a wall or a screen in a darkened room. This work brings together three different but interwoven elements: firstly, an interview with the British filmmaker Peter Watkins -known for his innovative and politically-charged documentaries - recorded in Lithuania, where Watkins lived in self-imposed exile for several years; secondly, landscape drawings of Lithuania’s Gruto Park, where various socialist sculptures of the postwar era are kept; and thirdly, Narkevičius combines these elements with found footage from the early 1960s by an amateur filmmaker showing everyday life in Brighton. In The Role of a Lifetime, the interview with Watkins on the sound level is joined and related to the drawings and the found footage on the visual level. Watkins and Narkevicius share a distrust of the conventions of the documentary genre and its claims to authenticity. While Watkins speaks programmatically of the relation between reality and fiction in his work, Narkevičius underlines the political nature of his words, partly by focusing on the broken remnants and their lost representative function, and partly by using found footage to question the representative value of the documentary approach per se.