You can easily notice that the fashion on the memories is changing – it comes on waves, then fades, then returns again. After great changes, revolutions, wars, tragic events, taboo zones appear that are not accepted in society. Censorship and propaganda try to influence what we can and want to remember. The sharp dividing lines also tempt us to remember “as it was then” and compare it to “as it is now”. There are periods in the life of the nation and the state when the commemoration of specific events forms the mood of a whole period of history – we did so with the “Ulman Times” on the one hand and the “Fatherland War Feats” on the other. But then suddenly it takes more than a decade of rapid change and a generation grows up that remembers the times, the objects, the aesthetics it never experienced – the furniture designs and color slides of the eighties. In the second decade of the 21st century, we suddenly remember the Forest Brothers and Czech agents, hold discussions and stage theater performances.
–
Content will continue after the ad
Advertising
–
Memories are of paramount importance. Private memories shape us as personalities, collective memories build national identity, formalized, discussed and recorded memories we call history. From memories – real or fictional – we put together practically everything we are.
Ilze Burkovska-Jakobsen animated film “My favorite war“already in the title the main contradiction or, more precisely, the confrontation, which irritates the viewers’ perception in a direct and emotional way, is a personal (” my “) story of memories, in which many can see motives close and familiar to them, but at the same time the period of the history of a certain region, nation and country.
While watching the film for the first time, I drew attention to a seemingly insignificant detail – the faces of children drawn in animation technique, or rather, the eyes, which, although stylized, each have been turned to a different, individual angle. As if a simple and subtle technique by which the artist has achieved diversity with limited means, but it leads to an important conclusion – each child’s “eyes” are different, each person’s childhood memories are different. As we grow up, write down, talk, agree, we begin to compare them with other people’s memories, accept some fixed and verified facts, interpretations and explanations of history, equate our experiences with others, and thus become a nation. But the child who looks at the world in his own special way, who constructs his understanding of the order and regularities of things first and foremost from what he himself has experienced, is still alive in us. Well, or at least in some of us.
–
Remembering the process of making the film, the director mentions disagreements with German producers, who were not satisfied with the script – they demanded more, even more personal details. In the end, this led to the German side leaving the film project. The problem seems to have been just too personal: they did not see it as a vision of history at all, but as a private life story. But as such, it again contains too many generalizations and conclusions. In other words, the contradiction was in the sense of genre, not in the structure of the script. “My favorite war” in a way announces a new genre of cinema, in which the objective history can be shown through accidental, intimate, at times confusing details.
Also important in Ilze Burkovska-Jakobsen’s film is that it is a woman’s view, or rather a little girl’s view of history and events. The view of women has been too little to be seen not only in cinema, but also in a cultural and historical situation in which patriarchal understanding of things has dominated for centuries. “My favorite war” offers an unusual order of things, the children’s film “Four Tankers and a Dog”, strawberry soap, a row after butter, cows falling from the sky, which German soldiers tried to kidnap Kurzeme people, bones in a sandbox, plowed borders began to play a historical role. sand. The feminine vision here is revealed not by the mundaneness of these things – not by the fact that only women stood in line for products or paid attention to something as “feminine” as the soap scent – but by the subjectivity of the selection itself. The man would have thrown out of the script or fact list details that do not fit into the finished schemes and regularities, details that require further confirmation or explanation: “Where did the post-war devastation strawberry soap? I don’t remember any strawberry soap! ! ” Or, for example, “How did the German occupiers intend to take those cows by plane to Germany? For what? Why do I hear about something like this for the first time?” A man’s view of history traditionally involves a vertical, hierarchical mechanism of truth-checking – what does not fit into this scheme is discarded as false, irrelevant, or unnecessary because it cannot be verified. For women, these details matter even if they are false, misleading or confusing.
The second difference is related to the masculine notion of historical justice – in any conflict, one of the parties wins. And in any conflict, one side is right. There is always a winner and a loser in a war, good and bad, ours and the enemy. In Ilze Burkovska-Jakobsen’s film, these contrasts dissolve, although at times there is an attempt to adhere to the principles of traditional “martial art”, explaining in the behind-the-scenes explanation of what “how” was, but the film’s visual message does not allow it to create a bony structure. “, which the viewer can try to tie together already.
“My Favorite War” is a necessary and disturbing film that promises one thing but does something completely different. It allows us to remember our childhood, to rejoice in shared memories, to arrange a collective understanding of history, to put on shelves again the basic principles of historical justice. But it does not stop and entangle our Third Awakening winner generation with short stories about the director’s classmate’s suicide attempt, mother’s decision to leave everything and become a farmer, the grandfather’s first painting exhibition several years after his departure. And all these stories are no less important, or perhaps even more important, than the deaths of Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov, the Baltic Way and the restoration of independence.
–
