Third Generation Photo Stories

For a long time, the stories of World War II and the Soviet era sought to create a coherent narrative that would accommodate a variety of painful or traumatic experiences. Such stories are commonly referred to as secondary testimonies. Coming up in the last decade, comics, animation, documentaries, and video works that make extensive use of archival photography offer a different approach that no longer seeks integrity. It is them, created in different contexts (Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, USA, Russia, etc.) and in different media, that the author calls third-generation stories.

Natalija Arlauskaitė is Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Sciences of Vilnius University, where she researches literature, film, and visual media. Her current academic interests include visual theory, forms of historical imagination, documentary images of war atrocities in film and arts, and medicine on screen. She is the 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), Severe Peace: Photographs of the Collapsed Regimes in Documentary Film (2020).

Bear (Bär) movie directed by Pascal Floerks, 2014