Creative team
Written by Rimantas Šavelis
Cinematography by Rimantas Juodvalkis
Music by Juozas Širvinskas
Cast
Vidas Petkevičius, Kostas Smoriginas, Virginija Kelmelytė, Daiva Stubraitė, Vladas Tamošiūnas, Olita Dautartaitė, Povilas Budrys, Elegijus Bukaitis, Augustas Šavelis, Raimundas Šližys
- 1990 – The 33rd San Remo International Film Festival: Grand prize
About the film
Algimantas Puipa’s „Eternal Light“ (1988) based on a novelette of the same name by Rimantas Šavelis, is one of the director’s most beautiful works and one of the most original Lithuanian films, which bravely marked the first years of the liberation of Lithuanian cinema from Soviet censorship.
The story is told in the Lithuanian coastal village where the drama of the feelings and destinies of the four main characters of the film – Amilia, Anicetas, Zigmas, and Pranė is intertwined. In Eternal Light, Puipa and Šavelis do not talk directly about the consequences of post-war struggles, collectivisation, deportations, or primitive propaganda. They show an exhausted, spent space in which one cannot be oneself and feel anything other than existential emptiness, and thus create a much more convincing picture of post-war Lithuania.
More about the film
Algimantas Puipa brought to celluloid the works of both Lithuanian literary classics (A. Vienienis, P. Cvirka, B. Sruoga) and contemporary writers (J. Skablauskaitė, J. Aputis, L. Gutauskas). Especially fruitful was the director’s collaboration with writer Rimantas Šavelis, who wrote the script for many of Puipa’s films. The Eternal Light (1987), based on a novelette of the same name by Šavelis, remains one of the most authentic Lithuanian films, an example of auteur’s cinema par excellence.
The Eternal Light begins with footage of the flood on the Lithuanian coast. We soon enter an enclosed space – it is uncomfortable, cramped, colourless. Unkempt men are drinking, playing cards and commenting ironically on the promises of the Voice of America emanating from the radio. Later, a propagandist brought by boat will screen a film in this room and the collective farm surveyor Anicetas (Vidas Petkevičius) will become smitten with Amilia (Virginija Kelmelytė) who came alongside him. This strange young woman will captivate Anicetas’ mind. However, their marriage will not bring them the fulfilment of love. Frightened by Anicetas’ feelings, Amilia will become enamoured with the light-minded tractor driver Zigmas (Kostas Smoriginas), but their relationship will end tragically. The buffet lady Pranė (Daiva Stubraitė) will fail to win Anicetas back, and in the end, at a railway station adorned with fragrant herbs, he will leave for another reality, already appearing to him in vivid colours, beckoning him with eternal light.
The director narrates the events of the film in a fragmentary way, refusing a linear plot, and combines anecdote, irony and the ability to look at ordinary people in a way that reveals the tragedy of their situation. The drama of the characters of The Eternal Light is conveyed through the atmosphere. It is clear from the outset that they have no future, as if imprisoned in time that stands still. That time is once named precisely: the year 1956. The collective farms are poor, the representative of state security Piotras Sergejevičius (Povilas Stankus) no longer knows who is a friend and who is an enemy, only the chairman of the district (Eligijus Bukaitis) constantly prattles about percentages. What helps Puipa to bring to life that time, the anxiety of the characters and the uncertainty is the slow, somnabulant rhythm when the gaze is hypnotised by a bicycle rolling through a meadow or the views of the flooded village observed from above. The narrative is punctuated by Anicetas’ philosophical conversations with the local freak Barnasius, who dreams of being a stalk of grass.
The choice of stylisation of sepia, faded photography and black-and-white cinema by cinematographer Rimantas Juodvalkis creates not only a distance in time from the epoch seen on screen but also a mood of farewell, which helps to manoeuvre between dream-, vision-like images and a distinctively phantasmagoric post-war reality. The characters live in dilapidated, squalid houses, the sense of crampedness further emphasised by crooked details of window frames, doors and stairs that shape the image. The shots are often submerged in darkness, there are almost no close-ups of the characters, while medium shots only emphasise their hunching, stooped figures. We hear fragments of conversations, see fragments of bodies. The fragmentity of reality is also accentuated by the soundtrack created by Juozas Širvinskas. But the balance between the image and the narrative is maintained not only by the actors embodying the main roles; the episodic characters, too, are memorable because each of them has a unique story which adds another piece to the puzzle of post-war destinies in the film.
In The Eternal Light, Puipa and Šavelis do not talk directly about the consequences of post-war struggles, collectivisation, deportations or primitive propaganda. They show an exhausted, spent space in which one cannot be oneself and feel anything other than existential emptiness, and thus create a much more convincing picture of post-war Lithuania. In 1987, although Gorbachev’s “perestroika” had already begun, this film was a very bold statement, and it was doubtful whether censorship would allow The Eternal Light to be shown in cinemas. In 1990, the film was selected for the San Remo International Film Festival where it received the Grand Prix.
