Lotmani maailm / Lotman's World directed by Agne Nelk (review)

Agne Nelk's animadoc Lotmani maailm (Lotman's World, 2008) creatively reframes Iurii Lotman's significant contribution to cultural semiotics. In so doing, the film coherently reintroduces his central texts and theories, critically recovers his cultural contexts, and vividly correlates his work and world. Nelk's title suggests her documentary scope, yet this hybrid film also explores a broader cosmos, using documentary footage and soundtracks to recall personal and cultural crises, replaying conversations with Lotman and registering new commentary on his seminal scholarship. Yet when we see Lotman riding a rickety rocket towards signposts in outer space, we have moved beyond the bounds of conventional documentary and beyond Lotman's literal and literary worlds, though not beyond the horizons of his work, consciousness or conscience. Nelk's film makes clear that Lotman's work is rooted in a very particular reality—Soviet Russia and the Estonian edge of post-WWII Soviet empire—yet Lotman casts his ideas and ideals in universal terms. A semiotician, he is interested in the evolution of signs and systems in specific semiotic contexts or semiospheres, which in turn, operate within larger semiospheres. Nelk, in turn, takes Lotman's views not only as subject material but also as structuring model. The film's telescoping of history (which results in such distortions as Stalin's direct exclusion of Lotman from the faculty at Leningrad's State University), strange comparisons (such as that between Lotman's, Hitler's and Einstein's mustaches), and uncritical commemoration of Lotman's views might limit interest in the film as "serious" documentary or critical contribution. In fact, Nelk's creative direction directly incorporates and indirectly interrogates some of Lotman's most compelling claims about transformative cultural collisions. As an animated documentary, Lotman's World lies along those "extreme edges" of the semiosphere where dialogue is "incessant" (Lotman, Universe of the Mind, 136), disruptive, deconstructive, de-centering, and creative. Lotman's World reframes Lotman's impact on cultural semiotics—the semiotics of cinema in particular—as much through its mode of representation as through the material it presents.

Like Khrzhanovsky's animadoc on Joseph Brodsky (1940-1993), Полторы комнаты или сентиментальное путешествие на Родину (A Room and a Half, 2009), Nelk's film deploys visionary theories and practices of documentary cinema as well as revisionary cultural memory in its fictionalized recreation of an eccentric writer in exile. Both films draw on similar documentary sources—historical photographs, film footage, and the subjects' own words—to sketch the trajectories of exiled Jewish literati through Soviet and early post-Soviet history. More notably, through innovative animation, both films defamiliarize what Brodsky disparages, in his own work, as a tale too familiar to tell in its usual language. Nelk and Khrzhanovsky not only tell their stories in a foreign (film) language (while crossing between literal languages: Russian, Estonian, English), but also, like Brodsky, introduce new terms into that language. Khrzhanovsky plays freely with documentary conventions, for instance, interpolating photographs and recreated documentary footage of Brodsky's parents with realistic and animated footage of the crows that Brodsky associates with them since sighting the birds at the time of their deaths. Khrzhanovsky's crows take on forms that Brodsky describes seeing in his mind's eye. Thus, the filmmaker documents not only events, but also memory and imagination around them. Nelk's film likewise documents Lotman's imaginary, taking his discourse as point of entry into that universe of the mind. But like Khrzhanovsky's work, it also uses that imagination as point of departure for its own reframing of culture and cinema beyond its subject's purview.

In interviews, Khrzhanovsky admits to altering—or refracting—his own memory, as well as cultural memory, through the prism of Brodsky's biography. Focusing on flickering lights, mirrors, photographs, windows, door frames, fences, camera lenses, binoculars, glasses, masks, pages of books, objects as openings and obstructing views, Khrzhanovsky foregrounds the cinematic reflection and refraction—telescoped, distorted and disrupted perspectives—that Brodsky decries as a function of memory, of poetry, of transposition...