Liūtai, bokseriai ir kiti Vilniaus gyventojai

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Mitinės būtybės; Gyvūnai; Fantastical creatures; Animals.

ENArticle analyzes the depiction of animals on the urban landscape in Lithuanian documentary film, focusing on Robertas Verba's Senis ir žemė (The Old Man and the Land, 1965), Almantas Grikevičius' Laikas eina per miestą (Times Walks the City, 1966), and Artūras Matelis' Dešimt minučių prieš Ikaro skrydį (Ten Minutes Before the Flight of Icarus, 1990). The article examines the portrayal of animals according to categories of scope, scale and shot framing, comparing them against the contexts of proximate fields, first and foremost feature films, art and photography. Such a construct of the body of these films helps demonstrate how the depiction of animals - wild and domestic - against an urban background during a period of rapid city growth all the way through the end of the Soviet era adhered to the visual logic of animals as out-of-place beings, typically through the creation of tension between animals and the urbanistic/modernization context, formally expressed through a medium shot. In other words, this type of animal depiction in documentary works, which can be broadly ascribed to the genre of poetic documentary films, signifies the visual contemplation of urbanization and modernization that characterizes this chronologically defined type of filmmaking. These cinematographically perceived out-of-place animals within an urban space become exceptions or anomalies, misunderstandings, mistakes or miracles. They require an interruption of the usual flow of time, a suspension of inertial rhythm or the questioning of the continuity of time. Animals in the city and out-of-place animals are neither part of the untamed nature that films are constantly relocating depending upon the oppositional, allegorical or symbiotic understanding of such nature, nor do they comprise any arsenal of Dantesque symbols or completely fantastical creatures. [From the publication]