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New Video, New Europe

A Survey of Eastern European Video
January 11 – February 22, 2004

 
Egle Rakauskaite
(Lithuania)
Days of Being Pathetic, 2002
9'
 
In this video diary entry, lyrically expressed thoughts and feelings are either intensified or poignantly offset by footage of a summer day at a seaside park. Leisure offers her no respite from reflections on the nature of being. For Rakauskaite, images of sun, surf, and family bliss do not yield nostalgia but instead a meditation on the body as "separate pieces of meat ruled by the brain." (Think Proust suffused with a Baltic bleakness.) The listlessness of her recitation would have us believe the French patent on ennui has all but expired. The unfathomable psychology of a young woman, shot in extreme close-ups, sums up the union and disjunction between emotion and perception. To ponder whatever fleeting thoughts might be revealed in her gaze is unwittingly to use this portrait as a mirror.
 

   
   
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