Natalija Arlauskaitė – film and visual studies scholar, Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University. Her current academic interests include visual theory, forms of historical imagination, reflection on war atrocities in film and arts. She is an author of "Analysis of Hermetic Text: Structure of Semantic Space in Works by Velimir Khlebnikov" (2005), "Key-Concepts of Feminist Film Theory" (2010), "Native and Foreign Canons: Film Adaptations between Narrative Theory and Cultural Studies" (2014); editor-in-chief of book series "Writings on Film" (publishing house “Mintis”) and translator of works by Sergei Eisenstein into Lithuanian. Her new book in progress is on contemporary art and film projects dealing with WWII and socialist era image archive.

Tales of the instant: family photographs in documentary film

Being remediated, photography in cinema always questions the ways to look at it, the material traits of it, and its carnal relationship with the cinematic apparatus. Things get more complicated when photography is being “moved” in ways it’s not accustomed to. In this case, we’ll talk about combining animation and photography in documentary cinema, and we’ll discuss three main examples: “Genties išnykimas” [“Disappearance of a tribe”] by Deimantas Narkevičius, 2005; “Gyveno senelis ir bobutė” [“Grandpa and Grandma”] by Giedrė Beinoriūtė, 2007; “Močiute, Guten Tag!” [“Grandma, Guten Tag”] by Juratė & Vilma Samulionytė, 2017. Such collages of moving and still images are important to us if we accept that multifaceted interventions with the photographic image and/or the material surface of photography questions, disturbs, rearranges the stories that photos carry within them. Family photography is closely related to the imagination of the nation and state, so remediating it anew is rethinking not only the private stories but also the narratives circulating publically – those which are already established, official or unwanted.