The main hero of this film is the city of Vilnius. Vilnius is also a metaphor for the historicity of Lithuania. This film, however, is unique not only for its cinematographic reflections on the history and statehood of Lithuania but also for its treatment of the history of cinema - it encompasses both Russian (Soviet) montage techniques and the first traces of cinéma-vérité in Lithuanian cinema.
Early in the morning, the children start their journey to kindergarten, hand-in-hand with their parents. There is no shortage of activities for the little ones here - under the supervision of the kindergarten staff, they play sports, have health checks, dance, sing and play, and lunch and bedtime are not forgotten. Despite the common activities and the abundance of children in the frame, the different characters and interests of the children are slowly becoming apparent - from the closed-minded sensitives, to the company souls and the naughty ones who don't want to go to bed, from those who are fascinated by medicine to those who are interested in the hairdressing trade. They are all individuals, and each one of them is observed by a silent camera.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
The characters of Verba’s movie are at least one hundred years old; they were born in the 19th century and are living in the same ancient spaces. They share their memories in front of the camera; they speak about their youth, romantic relationships and hardships they have survived. They shed some tears, celebrate birthdays with many beloved family members and even become entangled in some comical situations. At the same time, Verba includes some shots of young faces near the wrinkled centenarians, silently highlighting the ideas of the flow of time and the connection between different generations.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
This film continues the tradition of Lithuanian poetic documentary. It details the dismantling of Lithuania’s old railway “Siaurukas” and the construction of its new modern replacement. The old railway and its modern counterpart become the symbol of the clash between the archaic rural Lithuania and Soviet industrialization. The film was often considered as an expression of the archetypes of Lithuanian character.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
The film about the city of Naujoji Akmenė is regarded as one of the first Lithuanian attempts to liberate itself from the stereotypes of the Soviet documentary. Even though the remnants of the “Socialist prosperity” are clearly perceptible in the movie, the process of directing is obtaining more freedom: the voiceover is losing its canonization, and the power of the narrator is given to the main character, a small child Virginijus.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
The story about the director of the Vilnius Children's Home Nr. 1, an award-winning teacher named Viktorija Kaupelienė and her co-workers reveal a theme that was rather taboo in Soviet cinema, which were children that had been taken from their parents or abused. One can hear the uneasiness that is indirectly formulated in the questions about the situation of problem families, which did not fit the official reports very well. However it is not only social problems that the director was concerned with, but the stories of the children of the home and the experiences of the women that could be said to be working as mothers at the children's home.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
“Reflections” is a film by Henrikas Šablevičius that was made for Lithuanian Television. It is a surrealist etude that doesn't have a clear narrative, and is courageous in the context of Lithuanian cinema at the time. The film was banned and put on the shelf for almost twenty years. H. Šablevičius used the work of forgotten graphic artist Stasys Krasauskas. In the conditional spaces of the film, he creates a story about the dual character of a man, the search for himself, his liberation and his life with the past.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
This film is Robertas Verba’s directorial debut. According to film critic Laimonas Tapinas, “it rarely happens that the first film is successful [...] and it is even more unusual a phenomenon that the first film changes trends in cinematography. Verba’s first film “The Old Man and the Land” had exactly that kind of influence.” As film critic Živilė Pipinytė puts it, “this film was the “ice-breaker” who broke through the ice of Soviet ideology to form the peculiar stylistics of Lithuanian documentary film.” The hero of the film is the bright Lithuanian villager Anupras whose archaic worldview becomes a symbol of the ethno-cultural Lithuanian identity that was often opposed to the identity constructed by the Soviet propaganda.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
The focus of Grikevičius’s film is Tomas Petreikis, a senior machine constructor of Dzeržinkis’s factory in Kaunas. Instead of creating a conjunctural narrative about a hero of Socialist work ethic who exceeds the norms of production, the director depicts another part of his personality. During his leisure time, Tomas is a ballroom dancer, teacher and a judge in competitions. “Construction and dance? No, they have nothing in common”, Petreikis replies to a journalist’s question. However, the movie is rich in parallels which reveal the precision of both the constructor and dancer; his pursuit not only to control the machines perfectly but also to be a master in teaching ballroom dance pairs composes quite a different view than is claimed by himself.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
In the feuilleton of the director Zubavičius, we observe the absurd reality; it unfolds in the practice of reacting to an imitated nuclear attack of “an enemy behind the border”. The characters of the film are the inhabitants of a small village in Samogitia. They are participating in civil protection exercises and preparing for a civil defence competition. However, although the danger of a new war has been escalated and the civil protection exercises have been organized regularly, apparently no one has taken the danger seriously for a long time now.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
The focus of attention in one of the earliest films by a highly prolific documentary director Edmundas Zubavičius is a veterinary clinic in Kaunas; the observation of its daily routine reveals the longing for human sympathy as if yearning for a prayer. Quite a sophisticated relation between the visual and the sound is outweighed by the junctions of poetic film language and realistic shots. They invite to contemplate the relationship between nature and man.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
As film director Audrius Stonys puts it himself, “the film came into reality while trying to answer a question: how can one film the invisible?”. The film subtly interweaves together moments of interaction between people, animals and their surroundings. Long shots, absence of words, and meditative images interplay with music, opens up to the viewer a haptic and philosophical realm which is beyond the visible. In 1992 the film received the FELIX Award for the Best European Documentary Film.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
This film by Kornelijus and Diana Matuzevičius is a portrait of Lithuanian Jewish writer and literary critic Jokūbas Josadė (Yankev Yosade). The film subtly transcends this individual story and is able to unlock the broader context of Lithuania, which had just regained its independence. The thoughts of a generation that was fading into oblivion, which are portrayed with abstract images, are akin to the way of life of the contemporary person.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
With this film a cinematographer Rimvydas Leipus made a debut as a documentary film director. By casting its gaze to the periphery of Vilnius, Užupis, the film follows the tradition of the first generation of independent filmmakers. The result is the mute portrayal of a furnace caretaker Jonas Valeiša and a graphic artist Šarūnas Leonavičius.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
In this experimental documentary, film director Algimantas Maceina reveals the theme of the exile of Lithuanian society from a very personal perspective. He films the repatriation of the remains of his grandfather from Siberia to Lithuania. This personal approach to societal tragedy – the genocide caused by the Soviet regime – links personal to collective memory and erases the boundaries between personal film archives and publicly acknowledged films.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
Film is about immeasurable loneliness of child, only loneliness and nothing more. Story was shoot without any manipulation means. Trip to prison, meeting, way home. That’s all. Movie is dealing with ethical problem and how deep into person’s pain we can interfere or a documentary can interfere.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
With this film, Audrius Stonys continues the theme of man's peripheral experiences. In Earth of the Blind, he tried to "see the unseen" with the help of a mix image and sound, while in Antigravitation using the camera to break the laws of gravity, giving the objective heavenly power of seeing from up above, and getting closer to an unhearthly experience. "How does the world seem from such heights? What keeps man between the heavens and the earth? How does everything seem from the roofs of the churches?" These are the questions that became the impetus for Stonys's film.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
"Autumn Snow" (Lith. Rudens sniegas) is an allegorical story about an eternal cycle of nature and life. The camera slowly captures the days in the village, its inhabitants and daily routine: livestock pasturing in the fields, a stray dog and a funeral procession walking towards the cemetery in the distance. Even death fails to disrupt the routine life of the village. And only the first autumn snow symbolically accompanies man during the final moments of his life.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
"The Brick Flag" (Lith. Vėliava iš plytų) is a documentary about Soviet army private Artūras Sakalauskas who, having grown tired of constant humiliation, shot his fellow soldiers in a train carriage in February 1987. Even though the film traces the tragic event, the psychological portrait of the defendant is placed at the centre. By looking intently inside the young man, the director poses a question, what had actually happened that such a fatal, life-changing decision was made.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
"We Were at Our Own Field" (Lith. Pabuvam savam lauki) is a symbolic memory of the Lithuanian identity uprooted from the spaces of the old villages. Once a year, the inhabitants of the village destroyed during the Soviet times gather in the field where their homes once stood. They meet, visit the graves of their relatives, have a festive lunch and, while walking over the bare ground, see their past: the images of every well and blooming cherry are still vividly imprinted in their memories.
Rūta Grišinaitė-Bernotienė
In her 1967 documentary The Birth of a Character, Antanina Pavlova looks back at the mundane life of children in the late Soviet era. The film captures the life of a preschool educational institution, where the attributes of Soviet childhood, the daily rituals of a child, and the surrounding environment are interwoven. On the other hand, watching the tape, one can feel that the film is not just a flat set of Soviet slogans about childhood. The director invites us to explore the topic of childhood, which has a special status in Soviet society, in a slightly different way. Why was the theme of childhood so crucial in the Soviet Union, and what (not) new does Antanina Pavlova tell in her film?
Throughout the history of modernity, children have often been associated with visions of the future of a given society. It is, therefore, not surprising that the child and childhood, as social constructs, have been and continue to be seen as a fundamental force capable of bringing political, economic, and social change to societies in rebuilding. Such a view of children was not unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, where children had a special status – they represented not only the innocence of childhood but also the promise of a "communist tomorrow." When properly ideologically and politically prepared, they had to become guarantors of socialism. Children were seen as the driving force of Soviet modernization, inseparable from technological progress, the dominance of science, and work as fundamental values. The child and childhood represented the future and prosperity of the system. Therefore, the great project of Soviet pedagogy was to educate the "new man," who would become the bearer and spreader of completely new values and a new order. Achieving the goal during the entire Soviet era was not limited to repeated reforms of the education system, which included not only changes in educational guidelines but also affected the diversity of educational institutes and their prevalence in society. The regime's attempts to reform traditional (dangerous) childcare practices and "free" women for the labor market manifested themselves in the creation of early childhood care institutions.
The kindergarten recorded in Pavlova's documentary had a crystal clear mission during the Soviet era – it was one of the first stages of systematic education, which had not only to begin to "mould" a citizen of Soviet society but also ensure the establishment of a woman in the Soviet system as a working mother. Despite the new ambitions of the education policy of Soviet Lithuania to reshape everyday family life by introducing collective access to raising children, in reality, the network of pre-school education institutions was not universal and sufficiently developed. In 1965, the number of children attending kindergartens was only 22.5% in cities and less than 12% in rural areas. The number of kindergartens was significantly too small, and the queues for them were enormous. Sending a child to kindergarten was more of a "luxury service," often used by parents with more significant work positions or privileges. The shortcomings of the pre-school education system once again confirmed the gap between the publicly declared approach to the child and the family, on the one hand, and their reality in the Soviet system, on the other.
Rituals of Early Soviet Childhood
Nevertheless, some entered kindergartens, and their daily life differed from home education strategies. Pavlova’s sketch of the idyllic day-to-day life of the kindergarten documents the goals of Soviet pedagogy set for children in pre-school educational institutions, all related to the realities of the system: participation in the collective, the introduction of foundations of ideological education, the importance of work and technical progress, the cultivation of habits of hygiene and a strict regime. In other words, it contains all the essential attributes of the ideal late Soviet childhood.
The collective, as an essential Soviet educational strategy, remained relevant for the entire Soviet period. Of course, we can notice that while the concept of collectivity also went through modernization, it always acquired similar expressions in the pedagogical reality: group activities and encouragement not to stand out, to be like one’s groupmate/classmate. Being and acting like everyone else (and simultaneously) was the accompanying leitmotif of Soviet upbringing. The day-to-day life of the kindergarten group drawn by Pavlova talks about the strict routine of the kindergarten team, organized according to a specific rhythm for everyone by alternating periods of more intense activities and rest, mental and physical activity of children. Group rituals such as sitting on the potty, sleeping, playing, or having health check-ups testify to the popular practices of a "framed child" in the time and space of the day. The strict regime was supposed to ensure the skills of rational time management and distribution necessary for the future worker.
Imitating work in games was a usual part of the practice of work education in the environment of the Soviet child. In public discourse, childhood is often compared with preparation for adult life, in which work was supposed to be the principal value and the tool for self-identification. So, it is not surprising that children’s toys have become another herald of labor professions and technological progress in children’s day. Technological inventions, industrialization, and agricultural modernization took on forms familiar to children as constructors, trucks, or rockets, visible in Pavlova’s documentary. The early introduction of children to technological processes represents the colossal ambitions of the Soviet education system to develop a technologically educated new generation at any cost. Such noticeable and disguised carriers/symbols of ideological content were abundant in the children's everyday lives: they ranged from rockets, tractors, and constructors to the flags of Soviet Lithuania or portraits of little Lenin on the kindergarten walls. After acquiring positive associations through play, these symbols were supposed to create the ground for further indoctrination.
Little Lilė’s poem about a rocket recited in the tape illustrates the phenomenon of "space fever," characteristic of the late Soviet era. Since the early 1960s, the topic of space has been widespread in the everyday lives of Soviet children - in schools (in the form of murals), in children's playgrounds, in literature, and the press. The space cult, associated with childhood, was used to reinforce the vision of a brighter, more technologically advanced communist tomorrow. Quite curiously, the motifs of childhood and outer space simultaneously were seen as an opportunity to “reload” socialism after Stalin's death. The popular representation of space in public space was supposed to help the Soviet government to rehabilitate after the Stalinist repressions and regain its power, as it demonstrated the actual achievements of socialism for the first time, which, intertwined with the construct of childhood, were supposed to strengthen the positive image of the Soviet system.
However, by skilfully constructing the main story about Soviet-era kindergarten practices and emphasizing all the essential aspects of an exemplary Soviet childhood in the foreground, Pavlova unlocks another side of the child, only vaguely explored in Soviet documentaries.
A Seen Child
At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, general trends of modernizing pedagogy and the consistent integration of Lithuanian pedagogues into the pedagogical discourse of the entire Soviet Union can be observed in Lithuania. At that time, the ideas of modern pedagogical psychology began to emerge, and the changes in the concept of the child were being recorded. An image of a psychologized child came into view, drawing attention to the individuality of a child and the complexity of the psychological processes associated with it. The image of the child as a subject consciously participating in the upbringing process becomes apparent. Of course, the change in the concept of the child in the public discourse did not mean that the reality of the child is changing in the same way. These changes in pedagogical thought responded more to the general "warming" tendencies of the politics and social processes of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death when many social, humanitarian, or exact sciences that had until then been banned were rehabilitated.
The wording of the title of the 1967 short film in question, The Birth of a Character, seemingly responds to the change in perception of the child taking place at that time in the public discourse, emphasizing the need to observe/know the child. In Pavlova’s coverage, behind all the attributes of Soviet (un)reality, the camera captures the natural children's experiencesand their relationship with the surrounding reality. Here, in contrast to what is usual in Pavlova’s other films created for the film magazine Lietuvos Pionierius / Lithuanian Pioneer, there is no omniscient behind-the-scenes voice, nor the impression of an (obviously) rigidly staged idealized reality, characteristic of her other works. We could say that Pavlova takes half a step further from the portrayal of a feeling and acting child, which appeared for the first time in Soviet-era documentary cinema in Viktoras Starošas’ films. Unlike in Starošas’ films, the child is not provoked by questions and interrogations in Pavlova’s films (I Love the Director, 1978), which dictate children's answers and thus create a desired narrative and a specific image of children. Likewise, the children's lips do not seek to tell and imagine reality (Don't Get Upset, Virginijus!, 1962). The age range of the "character" chosen by Pavlova allows her to simply observe the child with a curious gaze, giving the child himself the opportunity to create a story with his presence and presenting the viewer with the chance to hear the authentic "voice" of the documented child. Alternatively, the recorded curiosity, emotions (both positive and negative), and reactions of the child are concurrently a response to the Soviet reality, which plays one of the leading roles in this film. Pavlova’s film partly becomes the source of the story, where we observe how sincerely the child accepts and experiences his surroundings with all their content and implications. Together with Pavlova, we observe not only The Birth of a Character but also the birth of a seen/shown child. I wonder if this is a coincidence or not, but the birth of a seen child in the Soviet documentary film occurs precisely in the first tape of a female director.
Recommended reading:
Catriona Kelly. Childrens World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
GRIŠINAITĖ, Rūta. Vaiko ir vaikystės sampratos ir jų kūrimas viešajame vėlyvojo sovietmečio Lietuvos pedagoginiame diskurse (1962–1984), Lietuvos istorijos studijos, t. 39, Vilnius, 2017, p. 84-104.
Grybkauskas, Saulius, Grišinaitė, Rūta. Inžinieriai Pagal Planą: Techninis Mokymas Ir Specialistų Rengimas Lietuvoje 1944-1990 Metais. Lietuvos Istorijos Institutas, 2019.
Marcinkevičienė, Dalia. Būti mama: vaikų priežiūros strategijos sovietinėje Lietuvoje 1945–1970-aisias metais, Liaudies kultūra, nr. 6, 2008, p. 31-39.
Daraškevičienė, Audronė. Vaikas Ir Viešoji Erdvė. Tėvų Nuostatos XX–XXI a. Lituanistica (Vilnius), vol. 61, nr. 2, 2015, p.
Sada Sliužinskė. Bendrieji ikimokyklinių ugdymo įstaigų raidos bruožai 1940–1990 m. Lietuvoje. Tradicija ir dabartis, nr. 10, 2015, p. 216-227.
Ana Mikonis, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė. Kinas Sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, Filmai, Režisieriai. Vilniaus Dailės Akademijos Leidykla, 2015.
Nadia, Teresė and Ramutė are the three heroines of this documentary. Although they are very different, they are united by their unusual work - for decades they have been making a living by posing for artists. For Janina Lapinskaite, it is not the exotic profession that is important, but the stories that have marked these women's bodies over time. The heroines of the film talk openly about their choice of work, their colourful, albeit difficult past, and their equally difficult present - they bare not only their bodies, but also their souls to the camera.
Venus with a Cat (1997) is the fourth short film by Janina Lapinskaitė. In this bright, witty, and sensitive work, weaving the elements of documentary and feature film in a traditional Lapinskaitean way, the gaze is directed to three older sitters – Nadia, Ramutė, and Teresė. Director Janina Lapinskaitė talks to film critic Monika Gimbutaitė about the creative process of this film, her transition from television to cinema, and the search for themes and characters. The conversation occurred over a cup of coffee in March 2023, with a blizzard raging outside the window.
– Before entering the world of cinema, you worked in the television. Did you feel at that time that television was a space that attracted you, or was it a choice conditioned by more prosaic reasons?
– It was absolute prose! Our course was the first one training directors, although we also went through four years of Acting Studies together. The program was not structured yet, and we did not know who we were after graduating. But the plan was to assign us to Lithuanian Television, and during our studies, we already realized that when we got there, we would not be able to be artists with our heads in the clouds.
At first, I worked in the children’s editorial, and later on, in the youth editorial office. Honestly, working in television was a stepping stone to documentary filmmaking. Sometimes, the people I met during the TV shoots would open up to me, and not necessarily about ideological, but human issues. Such moments led me to the show Province, which already had its own documentary structure, and then to the first documentaries I also began making while on television.
However, when I started making films, there weren’t many female directors at the time: it was a man’s world. I was so afraid of that world of men. Maybe this is why I did not join it for a long time. My husband Algimantas [Puipa] lived in it – I saw how terrible, how destructive that world is. And at that time, we already had a family, small children, etc.
– What did work in television and the experience gained teach you as a film director?
– Work in television prepared me for a certain rhythm and order, material selection, and editing. But not only that. We had a great teacher, [Henrikas] Šablevičius, who virtually created the tradition of poetic cinema. He was a man in whom you could not detect any signs of that era. Generally, one cannot say that the Soviet era was integrated into everyone like a firm backbone. People of that time knew how to speak in metaphors - I felt it even during my studies, and it continued when I worked in television. We all understood where we work, knew the limits of our possibilities, and were aware that both the creator and the person can remain within any limits. For me, it was important when I worked in television and, later, in film.
– What were those first steps leading to the film?
– When I began making movies, I started addressing topics unexplored yet in Lithuanian documentaries. No one was focusing on the theme of marginalized people then, in contrast to nowadays. Maybe that's why my first works were accepted so diversely.
When I began making the film From the Life of Ants at the Antaviliai Nursing Home, privatization was undergoing at the beginning of independence, and some elders involved in these processes were being deceived. Many people thought I had to address such issues, but I wanted to make a film about love after coming there. It seems you can take everything away from these people, but if you take away their love, well, one is alive as long as one loves.
After the restoration of independence, when the film From the Life of Elves was created, which was travelling around foreign festivals, some doubted whether now was the time to represent ourselves to the world in this way by talking about it. After all, they would say it is better to rejoice in our independence! And it seemed to me that I was talking precisely about it – ultimately, the people I film have both freedom and love within.
It is probably also important that I grew up in the village with my grandparents before arriving in the city to study. The city oppressed me; here, everyone was talking about higher-level concepts. When a neighbour visited my grandmother in the countryside, they would speak in such a warm human language. In my films, when I meet ordinary people, I feel that we find common ground, and it feels good to me. Maybe that's why some would be surprised that I manage to get so close to my characters.
– How did you find the characters of the film Venus with a Cat – elderly sitters? Why did you decide to tell their stories?
– I kept hearing snippets of stories about the sitters of the Academy of Arts from my husband’s brother, the artist Audrius Puipa. I quickly realized that they were not only posing for money – they were different beings whose lives were intertwined with creativity and alcohol.
The theme of a naked body came to my work in a specific way. When I was studying, I lived with different landlords. There were no amenities, and we would go to the sauna in order to shower. And that image of naked women sitting in the sauna was so eerie to me! Back then, it seemed to me that life ends when your body loses its previous shape.
When I heard about the sitters, I felt like a curious little girl hoping to find a harmony of age and body in these women. And I have actually managed to achieve it. When such harmony exists, the aging body no longer generates negative emotions.
With the three sitters – Nadia, Teresė, and Ramutė – we followed the same path as we did with the other characters. First, we had to get to know each other. And after we found camaraderie, we started playing the film.
– What is it like to create a connection with the characters even before shooting the film? And how do you balance making the film and interacting with its characters outside of the filmmaking process?
– If I came to my characters’ home and said, “I'm a director, and now I'm going to make a film about you,” maybe we would have a cup of coffee, but nothing would come of it. And at the beginning of my acquaintance with the characters, I wouldn’t talk much about the film.
As for Venuses, they were used to the fantasies of artists, so they needed a companion above all. We would talk, drink wine, and sing romances (laughs). I would return from work and receive a call, “Janička, we have gathered, but we really need you too.” And I knew that if they truly needed me, well, they needed me (laughs).
Later, that connection does not disappear. In the very first shift, we filmed the students drawing Nadia. I put her in an empty tub, and it was cool enough. She was hastening me, but by then I already knew that if you start talking to Nadia about love, she talks, even while standing barefoot in the snow. And so it was.
I was very grateful to my characters for accepting me because it was possible to say at any minute – I don't want this anymore.
Their life stories are complicated. I have been to Ramutė’s apartment a couple of times. High-heeled shoes and an ironed dress would always be there as if she was always preparing for a banquet. She wanted a high life, and life was pressing her hard. Teresė’s body was covered in bruises. She would trip and fall and perhaps sometimes stumble, not entirely sober. I came up with the idea of dressing her in a super thin garment for the film and getting it wet. She would have posed for me naked, but she felt comfortable with the clothes under which the signs of life were not so visible.
When I finished the film, I was asked to give the phone numbers of the characters – the idea was to invite them to a TV show and talk to them without me. I would see how people sometimes look at them in the corridors of television: life had already written particular signs on their faces at that age, and it was clear that they were not intellectuals. I saw that distasteful attitude and refused to give their phone numbers away. Another might have wanted to dig into their social problems, but I wanted to see them the way I depicted them: without throwing anything out of their lives, but at the same time sifting some things through.
– Would you keep socializing with the characters of your documentaries after the premiere? How was it in the case of Venus with a Cat?
– Yes, for a while, but communication with Nadia, Ramutė, and Teresė after the film release lasted shorter than in the case of the protagonists of my first film.
I had no prior experience. I would socialize with the characters of the movie From the Life of Ants long after the premiere. One day, I told them I was planning to make a new film, and I realized how much I hurt them. I saw how they thought: why are you suddenly interested in others?.. Then I realized that one should say goodbye to the characters just like one greets them. Because the number of characters keeps growing - I cannot give them the same thing I used to offer on set anymore when we were in that fun, magical, immersive game of moving image.
However, the sitters later participated in filming the mass scenes of Puipa’s film Process. I followed their lives. For instance, I saw Teresė in the TV show Dviračio žinios / Bicycle News, and her acting talent began to burgeon. It was fun to see her on the screen.
When we were shooting the last scenes of the film, Ramutė took off the rabbit wool scarf she was wearing and wrapped it around my neck, and after the shift, she offered me to keep it. Teresė gave me a Polish cross. Many years have passed, and I still have these little talismans - signs of love and understanding.
– Your films From the Life of Ants, From the Life of Elves, Venus with a Cat, and From the Life of Lambs form a kind of series. Did you know right away that these films would become part of it?
– No, I did not know that. After finishing a film, there is a "downtime", a purge, and then you somewhat immerse yourself into another subject. When this happens, it seems that some characters and some material are already coming your way. But first, you must be clear about the topic you want to cover.
– The theme of the body, which is relevant in Venus With a Cat, you later explore in your other films, Nude and Woman Dancing on the Roof. But in all these films, you approach this theme from different perspectives.
– When I made Venus With a Cat, there were criticisms that I somehow looked down on women in this film. I was asked, how can you pour water on a character’s head or show a wet body? I didn't have such thoughts, as I was only looking for a suitable way to represent the female body, which came from my fears of that time, such as how terrible it is when the body withers. It was the tragedy of my youth.
After releasing Venus With a Cat, there was a desire to talk about the male body. By the way, the husband of Ramutė, who also used to work as a sitter, is filmed in Nude. Photographer Snieguolė [Michelkevičiūtė] shows men’s bodies in her photos, only without heads. I wanted to talk about the man’s body in the film while talking about the creator and her model and the struggle between the two.
As I matured, I no longer feared that the body was withering. Then, it began to seem that a person does not love his body only when the feeling of lovelessness is encoded in his or her head. In Woman Dancing on the Roof, I show a body destroyed, cut, and ravaged by numerous operations, all in pursuit of beauty. Through the topic of the body, I began to look for the roots of all this: why is this woman striving for beauty so much and destroying her own beauty all the same?
– In your documentaries, just as in Venus with a Cat, some elements of feature films appear. Early in your career, you seemingly have been criticized for that. But today, cinematic hybridity is on the rise. Don’t you feel a bit ahead of your time?
– You can't quite call the films of Šablevičius, my teacher, pure documentaries. In my films, such impure stylistics also appeared, and people were not always sure where to assign them: is it a feature film with non-professional actors or a documentary with elements of feature films? I wouldn't say everyone was squealing with delight until I found my place. I remember the painful criticism of the respected Saulius Macaitis for the film From the Life of Elves very well. But I understand that, at the time, it just was not clear where to assign me. And when my films were recognized abroad, I became interesting in Lithuania, too.
Now, of course, hybrid cinema is definitely on the rise. For me, when I was going in a similar direction, the most important thing was to get closer to the person; otherwise, creating a hybrid or any other kind of film would not have been possible.
At the same time, it is crucial to keep reminding ourselves that each of us has a “snake circle” around us: we can approach, but we must not forget that there is a line, and after we cross it, the snake will bite. Locating that line was both the most complicated and, at the same time, the most curious part of my work.
– Have you ever crossed the "snake circle"?
– No, I haven’t. I had a good gut feeling, and I always followed the rule: It is better to go a little less than cross it because it will be very problematic to return.
I could feel the moments when my open-hearted characters would forget they were in front of the camera. Sometimes, I had material that, I imagine, would be golden to today’s journalists. But I realized I would not be the only one watching this movie; those people have acquaintances, neighbors, and relatives. Sometimes, when the openness reached a critical limit, I would refuse to put those scenes into the film. It was very significant to me that my characters would not feel harmed after the premiere so that they would not be worse off than before.
– Venus with a Cat not only includes some elements of a feature film. Here, you go even further and break the fourth wall in its finale - the audience sees the film crew and you yourself in it. How did this idea come about?
– Such a finale, as well as the design of the set, was dictated by the protagonists. The song they are singing - we would also often sing it together, as it was from our repertoire (laughs).
– In these shots from the film ending, you look happy and seem to have had a lot of fun. Do you often feel that way when you are on the set, directing?
– I honestly can’t remember feeling any negative emotions about Venus with a Cat. I was afraid until the shooting started: Will it work, will I be accepted, will I be able to operate the way I have conceived? And then, after cracking the code, it was truly fun.
Other movies had everything, including tears. However, I think that showing your emotions on set is not an option, especially in a documentary film. Because if you are unhappy, scared, and timid, it will automatically be transmitted to your protagonists. They are not actors, so they will not play a scene for you, and they may even want to take the blame for your emotions.
The euphoria you see on set – it’s not acted out, but I knew it would be unavoidable. But after getting home, I can’t say I would feel strong. Actually, I would be exhausted… (laughs)
But having the love of those people meant the world to me. Many of my characters are no longer alive. But when I watch my films and when other people watch them, nobody thinks that the ones we see on the screen are already gone. They live on in my films. They are alive in them.
Hilda Spalviene, a resident of Šakininkai village, is a German from Klaipėda region. The cheerful old woman, who draws a cigarette with a mouthpiece, recalls her life: before the war she lived in Germany with her husband, after the war she was exiled to Siberia. Later, she was able to go back to Germany, but she returned to Šakininkai - to the land of her parents. Although the film focuses on Hilda's story, it also subtly invites us to consider the issues of multiethnicity and national identity of the inhabitants of Klaipėda Region. Hilda, who speaks with an accent, stubbornly calls herself a local: she was born here and is ready to spend her last days here.
Živilė Pipinytė
Ever since its inception, documentary cinema has been one of the most crucial actors in forming the collective identity. Both openly propagandistic films and seemingly neutral film chronicles displayed people who were defined by belonging to one or another ethnic group, social class, profession, and, ultimately, continent. In the interwar Lithuanian film chronicles or postwar documentary films, people were ‘representatives‘—they represented the army, the collective farm, women, workers, intelligentsia, artists, and athletes, i.e., the part of society that was important to the rulers. In films, people were displayed as pars pro toto—a part that represents the whole. Of course, sometimes they also were shown as representing the evil condemned by society.
Until the mid-20th century, only a few film documentarians asked their heroes who they were. Along with the films by Robertas Verba and Henrikas Šablevičius, the Lithuanian documentary film began to feature people representing only themselves: oddballs, elders, nature observers, keepers of the past—people from outside the officially recognized social circles. It suddenly became clear that their identity is troublesome to define in the lexicon of newspapers or television. In the Lithuanian film, the language of Aesop began to take hold, known for its abundance of poetic metaphors, associations, and allusions.
Diana and Kornelijus Matuzevičius started making films when the first signs of the coming political and social transformation began to appear. Before that, Kornelijus Matuzevičius filmed several documentary films, including the one on Henrikas Šablevičius, so it seems he knew how important it is to preserve elements of the Lithuanian identity formed in the interwar period on the screen. Soon, the history that had been pushed out of official life during the Soviet era became the starting point of the newly independent Lithuania. In Matuzevičius’ films, this history is told by people of different opinions and destinies. Their films are characterized by a unique atmosphere, born out of communication with the film protagonists, a careful yet poetic gaze, full of associations, directed at the life changes which are in their turn reflected in the details invisible at first glance. There are many close-ups in the films, but the creators try not to violate the boundaries of the intimacy of their protagonists, encouraging the audience to concentrate on their words.
Matuzevičius’ are drawn to conflicting but inner-harmony-seeking personalities. They want to capture the revelations of their protagonists, in which difficult life experiences, openness to God, and reconciliation with fate coalesce. Those often wordless confessions in Matuzevičius’ films manage to become definitions of Lithuanian identity. It is perhaps the most obvious in Throughout The Ages (1992), a film about feast day in Žemaičių Kalvarija, where kneeling or knee-walking women merge in religious ecstasy not only with God but also with the natural world or their living and dead relatives. During the interwar period, the idealized village, Catholic values, nature, and hard work largely shaped the understanding of Lithuanianness. This understanding was destroyed neither by post-war exiles nor by difficult living conditions or loneliness. Ringing church bells helps Damutė Gaižauskienė, the heroine of the film Beyond the Threshold (1995), to come to terms with her painful memories and losses.
The Lithuanian identity that began forming in the years of the restored independence appeared to be a projection of the idealized interwar ‘golden age’ into late-20th century Lithuania. It seems that a complex and often contradictory reflection of the modernization of the society and the country that lasted for several post-war decades is almost abandoned, and efforts to avoid confrontation with historical truth that is not necessarily always acceptable, or even surrender to hypnotic myths about heroic resistance to the Soviets are made, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge both public and personal defeats and guilt. It is a painful process, but it allows us both to appreciate the past and take a step toward the future.
From this point of view, Matuzevičius film Illusions (1993) is exceptional. The film protagonist is a writer, publicist, playwright, and literary critic, Jokūbas Josadė (1911–1995). His fate mirrors the path of an ordinary East European Jewish intellectual. Having received an education in interwar Lithuania and written in Yiddish, he fought against the Nazis in the Lithuanian Red Army division in World War Two after losing all his relatives during the Holocaust. Afterward, he returned to Lithuania and worked in the press, and when the USSR banned publications in Yiddish, he started writing in Lithuanian. His dramas and prose are interesting and eloquent examples of the modernization of Lithuanian literature, reflecting the influence of contemporary Western culture on Lithuanian writers in the 1950s and subsequent decades.
In Illusions, the writer hardly talks about the facts of his biography; he speaks elaborately only about his daughter’s choice to emigrate to Israel in the 1970s. Josade opens a window to his inner world for filmmakers, so it’s no coincidence that images of windows become the film leitmotif. The writer openly talks about his depression and losses but refuses to settle a score with the past, as he does not want to make excuses or feel like a victim. Josadė merely looks at himself and admits that he has never met a free person, and the only moments of freedom he experienced are related to creativity. However, he remains convinced that he has worked in vain and that his work is not needed by anyone.
Matuzevičius film the end of Josadė’s life path – a writer’s monologue, resounding at a specific moment in the present, a monologue which combines personal confessions, stories, and reflections on the Holocaust. He admits that he has felt lonely and misunderstood since his youth and talks about a homeland within himself. Matuzevičius film the writer’s revelations in his home, where shelves of books in various languages, paintings, and old photographs together create an intimate space that at the same time is conclusive. This environment is both unique and identical to that of most European intellectuals, dominated by books and memories of the past. It is a specific space of identity formed by art and culture promoting moral discourse.
The present exists nearby – outside the window. It is frozen like the snow covering the city, fragmented: the camera captures people crowded in trolleys, a drunkard lying on the ground in the street, an abandoned city where cheap fireworks light up now and then, and a little girl learning to play the violin. Time seems to have stopped; it does not belong to anyone, or perhaps it belongs to those people whom Matuzevičius’ camera observes from above as if they were aliens, although sometimes it peers into their faces as if looking for obvious signs of their new identity.
Postmodernists like to talk about such fluid identity, emphasizing that its formation is influenced not only by adolescence and puberty-related crises but also by what sociologist Zygmunt Baumann called the fluid present – a space in which identities can be changed like clothes. From this point of view, the heroes of Matuzevičius’ films are like inclusions from another time, showing that the perception of identity is often determined by external conditions and situations provoked by the great history.
It is apparent that Josadė’s identity was shaped by European literature, Jewish family traditions, the experience of his family’s assimilation with Lithuanian culture, and World War Two. However, the motif of identity in Matuzevičius’ films is inseparable not only from personal experience and time lived through but also from the landscape with which they identify their heroes. The landscape in Matuzevičius’ films often becomes a metaphor for ideas, beliefs, views, and religiosity, thus emphasizing the connection of the protagonists with the environment and traditions.
The camera observes the slow life of the village, seemingly inseparable from the decaying landscape: the space of identity in A Local (2001) is principally defined by the landscape – it is no coincidence that Matuzevičius‘ camera turns 360 degrees around its axis at the very beginning of the film, recording the gray morning of the village, the water tower, the sower scattering seeds in the ground, roadside trees, fields, crooked roads, abandoned houses, burning grass, a tractor and lingering fog, big puddles, people rushing to the milk purchase point with canisters and other containers. They look sheepishly at the camera, and only curious country puppies seemingly feel at home here. In that gray (even in the literal sense of the word) unsophisticated space filled with sounds of a waking village, Matuzevičius capture not only the signs of everyday life that died away, such as a dead crow hung on a pole to scare the birds, or ‘symbols’ of the new age – ‘XXL Love’ scrawled on the dilapidated walls, or a poster of a politician ready to work for the residents of Šakininkai. Details and nuances are always crucial to Matuzevičius, and sometimes they represent the film’s protagonist more accurately than words. In A Local, their attempts to get closer to the film’s protagonist are marked by roads, paths, and tracks that wind throughout the film.
Hilda Spalvienė, the heroine of A Local, may at first glance appear to be a simple village woman, a village resident in the Klaipėda region. She doesn’t talk much about herself, but judging from the way she sticks a cigarette into the mouthpiece or gracefully holds theater binoculars in an abandoned stadium, the way she sets the table or decorates her head with a turban, you understand that she has experienced all kinds of things in her life. Hilda Spalvienė calls herself a local and speaks Lithuanian with a noticeable accent. Having grown up in a land colonized by Germans for a long time, having spoken mostly German as a child (although her grandfather hardly spoke German), and later marrying a German, she and her children ended up in Siberia in post-war years. Afterward, she returned to her native village of Šakininkai. It is the land of her parents. Her family has scattered around the world, and now the film’s heroine lives alone with her, as she puts it, ‘little beasts,’ a stripy cat and a puppy. After learning that her husband is no longer alive, Hilda never moved to Germany, where others sharing her lot went.
Matuzevičius show their heroine’s face from close up – her deep wrinkles, her open gaze, which can be both thoughtful and self-ironic, admiring its movements. Matuzevičius want to reveal not only Hilda’s inner world but also the beauty of her disappearing everyday life. It is as fragile as that moment when the film’s heroine sits on a bench near the house and looks at the flowers swaying in the wind. The sounds heard outside the frame emphasize her connection with the environment. Hilda is better off keeping quiet because she doesn’t want to comfort herself or share burdensome memories as if she’s afraid of sympathy she does not need at all. Great history is always unjust to such people, so they do not want to identify with countries, states, or ethnic groups, only with the place where they are locals. There are no more illusions and buzzwords here, but the homeland remains. It is dearer to Hilda. That is why she says, 'As long as I live here, it is enough.'
Sinemateka.lt is a project, which has been maturing for several years on the initiative of NGO Meno Avilys. The project aims to give access to restored films and the context they were made in.
The development of our website was inspired by the desire to present expanded forms of cinema, contextualize the audiovisual heritage and to make it easily accessible. The cinematheque was developed by the new generation of cinema historians, curators, educators, restorers and archivists.
The idea
The website offers digitalized and restored documentary films and video art works. All the restored films constitute the result of long-term focused activities of NGO Meno Avilys. In 2012, we started to digitalize and restore documentary films trying to provide them with the possibility to circulate freely in national and international cinemas. A new stage started in 2018, when the video art works preserved in the VHS format were digitalized.
In 2014, following the transfer of the works from an analog medium to a digital format, the need to develop an internet space emerged. At the moment, the website includes 19 digitally restored documentaries and 40 video art works; the cinematheque is constantly supplemented with new works. Each film or a group of artworks is given an interpretative context – cultural, historical, social or creative. The website content is viable and updated regularly.
How to use the website?
Our website is fairly simple to use – just choose any film you wish to see from the list. If you are interested in the film production or historical context, select the tab “Read.” If such possibility is not available, be patient – we are still preparing the texts, looking for videos and developing the site. We recommend using Google Chrome browser.
All films can be provided for distribution and screenings.
The idea: Gintė Žulytė, Lina Černiauskaitė, Gerda Paliušytė, Jonas Zagorsas, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė
Project curators: Gerda Paliušytė, Giedrė Burokaitė, Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė
Video Art Section: Gerda Paliušytė
Documentary Films Section: Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė
Curated Programs Section: Ona Kotryna Dikavičiūtė
Film distribution: Giedrė Burokaitė giedre@menoavilys.org
Texts / Interviews: Natalija Arlauskaitė, Marija Drėmaitė, Elena Jasiūnaitė, Gintė Žulytė, Mantė Valiūnaitė, Dovilė Grigaliūnaitė, Gerda Paliušytė, Dagnė Vildžiūnaitė, Giedrė Beinoriūtė, Brigita Kulbytė
Text editors: Edita Šatkauskienė, Rūta Lazauskaitė
Translator into English: Monika Kisliakovaitė-Čaplikienė
Design and web development
Sponsors ant partners
The Office of the Chief Archivist of Lithuania, The Archive of the Photography of Antanas Sutkus
We would like to thank
Jonas Zagorskas, Vytis Puronas, Algimantas Apanavičius, Ivenija Jakštaitė, Audrius Stonys, Vidmantas Kazlauskas, Živilė Pipinytė, Antanas Sutkus, Algirdas Tarvydas, Kornelijus Jaroševičius, Goda Grigolytė-Lučiūnienė, Giedrė Selenytė, Aurimas Švedas, Robertas Nevecka, Marija Kavtaradzė, Augustas Bidlauskas, Irma Stanaitytė, Gintaras Šeputis, Sonata Žalneravičiūtė, Danutė Gambickaitė, Mindaugas Ratavičius, Natalija Arlauskaitė, Mantė Valiūnaitė, Dagnė Vildžiūnaitė and each and every one who has contributed to the project!
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