Eastern Europe secret police educational photography

 Over the last few years, photographic albums, monographs and films based on classified, official, educational materials used by the socialist/Soviet secret services to train a network of agents and operatives and develop their specific skills, have been published. The strictly institutional use of photographic and cinematic images is replaced by public and unrestricted access. But what does the publication of such images (e.g., in the form of a film or a book), their display in museums (as seen at the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius), and their use in art projects mean? What is so special about the publication of documents from such repressive institutions in Eastern Europe? What are the ethical and political implications and limitations of such publications? How meaningful is it to talk about the aesthetics of the secret police? This lecture draws on photographic albums and films from the Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian and Hungarian secret police.

Image: movie still; Maciej Drygas, A day in the Polish People's Republic (Jeden dzień w PNR), 2006

Natalija Arlauskaitė is a researcher of visuality and cinema and a professor at the Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science. Her main areas of interest are visual and media theory, the historical imagination, Soviet studies, World War II memory, and medical imagery. Her books include A Brief Handbook of Feminist Film Theory (2010), Olymp of Us and Others: Screenings Between Narrative Theory and Cultural Criticism (2014), Fierce Peace: the Photography of Collapsed Regimes in Documentary Cinema (2020, all published by the Vilnius University Press). Together with Lina Kaminskaitė, she co-authored In Focus: Women in Lithuanian Cinema (Lapas, 2021).