Exhibition
In his films Narkevicius combines disjointed elements in order thus to develop surprising moments of formal intersection and content-related extension.
In The Role of a Lifetime, 2003, the artist interweaves three complex narrative elements into a single strand: the soundtrack level features an interview with the British filmmaker Peter Watkins, who for many years used to live in his self-chosen exile of Lithuania. On the pictorial level, landscape drawings of Lithuania and drawings of sculptures from the era of Soviet occupation are conjoined with found footage shot by an amateur filmmaker at Brighton seaside resort. It is this principle of montage that affords the films of Deimantas Narkevicius their special kind of skewed perspective - from the documentary report to a complex, open-ended, but also poetic, discussion of the issues at hand. Taking his point of departure from the architecture of the CAC (Contemporary Art Centre) in Vilnius, Narkevidius shot the film Scena, 2003, as a meticulous presentation of the past and present of the place where the artist has been working for many years.
Legend Coming True, 1999, starts out with a narrative about the founding of Vilnius and proceds to show four sequences of locations in this city that were shot with fixed camera settings. The voice-over narrative of an elderly woman, telling her life's story in Russian tinged with a Yiddish accent, is superimposed on the pictures and hence also the four locations of the story. In this way, their significance and the woman s relationship to them is explained: as the street she grew up in, her school, the location of the ghetto at the time, and the swamps where the partisans used to live in hiding.
