First exhibition of photographs by the Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas

Vilnius, Lithuania. In the forest bordering on the capital of this small Baltic country lies a chalet sheltering a dark room and a whole range of post-production equipment salvaged from a Russian studio shortly before the fall of the Soviet Bloc. This is where filmmaker Sharunas Bartas lives and prepares his films in a self-sufficient system that keeps him close to a certain idea of cinema as primitive, intimate and linked to natural surroundings. Since his first feature-length film, Three Days (1991), which revealed him to an international audience, he has offered a melancholic view of places and people tinged with a gravity often transcended by the gracefulness of landscapes and faces. Each film takes us to a forgotten fragment of the world, an unknown territory untouched by images, and leads us to its inhabitants, describing without universalism their modest lives and solitude.

Sharunas Bartas’s films are well known, but his role as a photographer is less familiar. Since Three Days, he has used photography mainly to lay the groundwork for his cinema, producing hundreds of rolls of film. What stands out in these pictures is his visual sensibility and his persistent attention to the relationships between nature and humans, which endow his photographs with a density that removes them from the initial film project and presents them as an entirely separate work.

Bartas embarked on his cinematic career in 1986, when he trained as a cinematographer at VGIK, the famous school in Moscow that has also taught Tarkovsky, Pelechian and many others. He had just directed a documentary on the Tofalars, Siberian hunter-gatherers forcefully settled by the Russians (Tofolaria, 1986). The shooting of this film, which involved numerous photographs, was critical to his work. In edifying natural surroundings that nonetheless remain on a human scale, Bartas develops a strikingly concise and yet deep visual language, which he goes on to use in all his films, speaking volumes against their characteristic silence and rare dialogues.

Reaching this valley is a real expedition, as Bartas calls each of his trips, with particular fondness for the places along the way. First and foremost, he links his photographs to precise locations in the world, which he likes to show on a map with the exact names: the village of Solyane on the banks of the Sea of Azov, east of the Crimean Peninsula; Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave tucked between Lithuania and Poland, on the Baltic Sea; the Saian Valley in southwest Siberia; the small Moroccan town of Imilchil in the heart of the Atlas Mountains… The landscape is central, an object of contemplation, yet it is an ecumene that is never detached from its people. He shapes these inhabitants, imposing on them a direction and time. In the photographs and films of Bartas, the narrative is subtle – less a story passed on than a series of possibilities, openings, scattered signs of life. We are left to imagine what lies beyond the frame.

This unfinished story unsettles the viewer. With their vanishing lines, the images produced by Bartas lead us deep into the distance: dark leafy groves, endless grassy fields, lakes as unfathomable as the mountains they reflect are high. Projection far ahead or into the past seems the only way out of these closed worlds. Never truly absent, people are evoked in details and clues. Somewhere, a bridge spans the deserted countryside and we wonder which passengers it transports and where to… A stone bench in a garden appears abandoned by a visitor from long ago. The visual world of Bartas is made of fragile but tangible relics.

Previously reluctant to explain his choices, Sharunas Bartas replied to a question one day after a screening on why there are always animals in his films: “There are two reasons. The first is that I like them, and the second is that they are there.” Any critical interpretation seems superfluous after this radical, gentle honesty. A man among men, among animals and landscapes, in frozen valleys or the burning desert, Bartas captures presence and absence, and through his photographs and films, offers us the pragmatic, poetic thread linking him to the world.

(Introduction to Few of Them, Filigranes Éditions, Paris, published in conjunction with the exhibition)

Also presented at:

Lithuanian Photographers’ Association, Vilnius
12 October – 4 November 2017