Download (“Baltic Cinemas: Past and Present”, Riga, Latvia 10.–11. 09. 2008

(“Baltic Cinemas: Past and Present”, Riga, Latvia 10.–11. 09. 2008.)
Artist vs the totalitarian system as portrayed in Priit Pärn’s “Luncheon on the Grass”
Mari Laaniste
Estonian filmmaker Priit Pärn’s most notable work, the drawn animation “Luncheon
on the Grass” (Eine murul), first taking the shape of a finished, but unapproved script
in 1982 and finally completed in 1987, brought him international renown in the late
1980s. What the international festival audiences took for a refreshingly dark, postmodern absurdist comedy, was in fact a powerful “statement” film striving for no less
than a brutally honest portrayal of an artist’s everyday existence in the Soviet Union.
Beneath the surreal surface of this tour de force of avant-garde animation lies the most
realistic, even autobiographical work of Pärn’s entire career.
Although he works in the medium of drawn animation, Priit Pärn is perhaps the
greatest “auteur” of Estonian cinema, whose renown within his home country could
be compared to the likes of Jaan Kross or Arvo Pärt. This film, in turn, is the high
point of his career as well as one of the best ever made in Estonia. Pärn’s most famous
works may be animated films that rely on team effort, but his self-image could be
described as that of an old-fashioned singular creative genius, and he is unfazed by his
belief that the Estonian artistic establishment has never really embraced him as one of
their own. (The reasons for this lie in the internal hierarchies of the Estonian art world
– Pärn is not a trained artist, he started his artistic career in so-called “low” artforms
as cartoons and illustration and he has never quite fit into the mainstream of Estonian
contemporary art. Even now, when Pärn is one of the “grand old men” of Estonian
culture, there is a tendency to see his efforts in printmaking as just a hobby, and his
prints and drawings as little more than glorified, large-format cartoons.)
So even though it could be said that during the making of the film, the Estonian
artworld may have questioned whether Pärn was really an artist or not, Pärn himself
had no doubts in this matter. Furthermore, he saw himself as a repressed artist,
because of having to deal with the censorship of Goskino in his filmmaking efforts.
“Luncheon on the Grass” was his way of summing up the existential experiences and
endless frustrations of an artistically inclined individual living under Soviet rule – in a
rather sophisticated manner.
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Pärn approaches the issue at hand in his usual manner: through multi-layered
metaphors (that I’ll attempt to dissect below) and grotesque exaggerations, but despite
the occasional humor, this film is first and foremost a serious work on a difficult
subject. However, considerable effort went into presenting the depressing subject
matter in a way that would be exciting to watch, to keep the visual aspect of the film
away from boring heaviness and to make it multi-layered, rich in different moods and
ironic instead. The narrative structure of Pärn’s 27-minute film is similar to a liveaction drama (although one without much spoken or written text), blending different
storylines and well-rounded characters with plenty of background detail, undertones
and gags. But the film’s sombre score by Olav Ehala and the drab colour scheme
serve to underline the message that this is no laughing matter. The purpose of the film
is to tell the truth about the world surrounding its making, it is an existentialist
reflection of an unbearable situation without any chance of a positive outcome in
sight. Pärn succeeds in making this message rather universally understandable at least
within the former Eastern Bloc mindframe.
The film begins with a sarcastic dedication to “the artists who did everything they
were allowed to do”, meaning, in Pärn’s words, “the artists who chose not to try to do
everything they were capable of”. The irony of the situation is, Estonian animation, a
profoundly marginal, although highly reputable field, was allowed much more
creative liberties than the animation of other Soviet states, not to mention live-action
films. Most filmmakers in the Soviet Union could never have seriously planned a film
about how the Soviet system suppresses and punishes people for expressing artistic
creativity. The rebellious Pärn actually had more creative liberty than the vast
majority of artists and directors working in the Soviet Union.
The structure of the film is, according to Pärn, simple to the point of being primitive
(even though it should be noted the relations of space and time in the film are actually
rather complicated). There are five chapters. The first four present four characters,
two women and two men. There are some indications of the characters being
connected to each other, but in their respective episodes each one operates alone, in a
vicious, cruel environment filled with anonymous, repulsive and hostile extras. (This
was an artistic choice, as having sympathetic background characters or pleasant
environments would have undermined the logic of the film’s narrative.) The fifth and
last episode ties the four characters together in a strange group venture. They are
going to recreate Édouard Manet’s painting “Luncehon on the Grass” (Le déjeuner
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sur l’herbe, 1862-63) in a park. This also explains their efforts in the previous
chapters. All the individual stories are built up around the characters’ quests to get
something needed for the recreation of the picture, despite the degradation and
humiliation these tasks entail. In order for this to work, the surroundings of the four
characters, including the background characters, must be presented as unlikeable and
hostile.
The heroine of the film’s first chapter is a young woman named Anna. The martyrlike Anna is a silent sufferer amidst the humiliations omnipresent in the grim, hostile
Soviet everyday life. Her part in the recreation of Manet’s picture is to pose on the
background, and she has also been given the task of buying the food for the still life in
the foreground. She wakes up in the morning, realizing she has overslept, and rushes
out into the dreary city with a shopping list. Among the items she needs are apples. It
is desperately hard to find them in the Soviet-style grocery stores and markets, and
Anna’s pursuit leads to her getting caught in a downwards spiral of bad luck, insults
and humiliation. In the end, Anna allows a stranger to grope herself just to get one
apple.
The hero of the second episode is Georg. According to his calendar, the date is
August 2nd, 1987, and in the beginning, his morning looks a lot more promising than
Anna’s. Georg’s home is an oasis of beauty and overall well-being, but soon enough
the reality of the surrounding world finds a way in and brutally tears this mirage
down. Georg hasn’t got the outfit he needs in order to pose on the picture – an elegant
suit consisting of a black jacket and white pants, and he heads out to town to find it.
He experiences insults just like Anna, as well as direct violence, but his journey is
seen from an anecdotic angle and the cityscape around him, showcasing the everyday
irrationalities of Soviet economy, comes across as playfully absurd.
The third and most delicate episode covers several years in time and presents Berta, a
young mother raising a child. Her role in the picture is to pose as the smiling woman
on the foreground, but she has literally lost her face and is unable to make her features
reappear. She sinks into a deep depression and can barely relate to her daughter.
However, her features and her smile eventually reappear when she finally has
something to give to the child.
The fourth chapter, which is also the sharpest in tone and the most obviously political,
focuses on Eduard, who travels to a big city in order to get the permit for their picturere-enactment. His story is told as an absurd anecdote, with many visual gags. At the
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beginning of his journey Eduard is a giant, but his physique shrinks alongside his selfassurance, the closer he gets to the bureaucratic institution he’s heading to. He is a
terrified midget by the time he enters the kafkaesque office building, and his pursuit
seems hopeless, until an obnoxious, patronizing female bureaucrat takes pity on him.
Her help and some blind luck lead Eduard to getting the signature and stamp of
approval against the odds.
The fifth episode takes place after all the four characters have managed to find what
they needed, and captures the brief moment of accomplishing their goal. They present
the permit and get the key to a park that will serve as the setting of the picture. Once
there, they arrange everything and find their poses. The image suddenly comes alive
in colourful brushstrokes, the score hits a crescendo and the viewers catch a glimpse
of Manet’s painting. But it only lasts for a brief moment, and once it’s over,
everything morphs back into the same old dreary reality. The characters eat the food,
leave the park and head home.
Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” is one of the most significant works in the history
of modern art, but Pärn’s film doesn’t touch that aspect at all. In the film, the painting
represents an image of an unreachable, paradise-like state, and it’s colourful painterly
freedom is in sharp contrast with the bleak, depressing looks of the rest of the film.
Pärn actually came across the painting by chance while working on the script and
realized this would suit his plans perfectly, as it is universally known and depicts four
people, two men and two women. His solution for depicting his experiences as an
artist trying to work under the Soviet rule was to divide them in four and create four
characters to personify each aspect.
The four aspects are further divided between genders that are intentionally presented
differently: the men are laughable, dealing with ridiculous situations, while the
women are seen suffering to evoke sympathy in the audience.
The silent but persistent Anna, in search of apples, has become near-completely numb
to the constant onslaught of insults, humiliation and hostility from the surrounding
environment, has apparently given up on her potential as well as all ambition in life
and appears to be sleepwalking towards small everyday goals instead.
Georg, in search of a nice suit, personifies the matters of self-perception and selfrespect. He tries to hide away in a fantasy world and when that fails, he prefers to
approach the constant challenges of Soviet reality as a kind of a surreal game, playing
along and taking risks, stubbornly refusing to give in.
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Berta at the focus of the film’s most intimate and touching chapter has lost all sense of
identity and purpose as an individual (represented by the loss of facial features) and as
a result, cannot even relate to her own child.
Eduard, the hero of the story’s most grotesque chapter is a frightened, self-doubting
David against the Goliath of Soviet bureaucracy, seeking permission to commit an act
of creativity. (The parallels with Pärn’s own experiences at the Goskino headquarters
in Moscow are obvious.) Eduard is foolishly trying to rely on reason in order to get by
in a nightmarish, irrational world, where any chance of succeeding only depends on
blind luck.
And when said act of creativity, the re-creation of the painting finally takes place
against all the odds, it is hardly a triumph. After all, this is only a brief re-enactment
of something that somebody else has already done long before, and as we see, it really
changes nothing at all. If the film had ended with the re-enactment, it could have been
regarded as a semi-happy ending. Pärn however is known to prefer ambivalent
endings, and he says this would not have been true to his style – and also, it was the
year 1987 and there was no such thing as a “happy end” in sight.
The depressing moral of this story about crushed ambitions is perhaps best embodied
in the fifth notable character of the film, a hapless painter who doesn’t have a
storyline of his own but lurks on the background of all the chapters of the film. He is
called “Picasso” by Pärn, because his face is similar to some of Picasso’s selfportraits. He doesn’t have a clear purpose in the film, and is presented as a complete
outcast, and on several occasions, dragged away by fish-faced men in uniform. Pärn
says that one of the reasons for adding this character was to spice things up, so to
speak, not to convey some distinct meaning, and also, Picasso is supposed to highlight
the irrational quality of the environment the story takes place in. However, in the
film’s context, “Picasso” can easily be interpreted as a kind of avatar for raw urge of
creative self-expression that refuses to die even under the most hostile circumstances.
An episode early in the film makes it clear that in the film’s environment, all his effort
is futile, as his works are seen as worthless (instead of picking up the painting that
Picasso dropped, a bystander chooses to rob him of a shoe). In the brutal and yet
poetic final scene of the film, we see Picasso admiring the wings of birds flying in the
sky. Indeed, his own hand, previously used for holding a paintbrush, has also taken
the shape of a wing – because it has been run over by a steamroller.
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