<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>This text discusses Deimantas Narkevičius’s <italic>Legend Coming True</italic> (<italic>Legendos išsipildymas</italic>, 1999) and Sergei Loznitsa’s <italic>Reflections</italic> (<italic>Отражения</italic>, 2012), two films by contemporary artists and filmmakers that revisit war traumas – the Holocaust in Lithuania and the Siege of Sarajevo in Bosnia – indirectly, without narrative reconstruction of the events or use of the archival images to display their atrocities of these two tragedies. Instead, these two experimental films, I argue via Jacques Derrida, evoke spectres of the war in the contemporary urban setups to activate the half-mourning in the present. Aesthetic strategies used to expose the haunting past are closely scrutinized and compared in order to demonstrate the films’ aesthetic potential of walking the spectator through war traumas without departing the present.</p>
</abstract>

This text discusses Deimantas Narkevičius’s Legend Coming True (Legendos išsipildymas, 1999) and Sergei Loznitsa’s Reflections (Отражения, 2012), two films by contemporary artists and filmmakers that revisit war traumas – the Holocaust in Lithuania and the Siege of Sarajevo in Bosnia – indirectly, without narrative reconstruction of the events or use of the archival images to display their atrocities of these two tragedies. Instead, these two experimental films, I argue via Jacques Derrida, evoke spectres of the war in the contemporary urban setups to activate the half-mourning in the present. Aesthetic strategies used to expose the haunting past are closely scrutinized and compared in order to demonstrate the films’ aesthetic potential of walking the spectator through war traumas without departing the present.

Spectres of War in Deimantas Narkevičius’s <italic>Legend Coming True</italic> and Sergei Loznitsa’s <italic>Reflections</italic>

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Spectres of War in Deimantas Narkevičius’s  and Sergei Loznitsa’s 

This text discusses Deimantas Narkevičius’s Legend Coming True (Legendos išsipildymas, 1999) and Sergei Loznitsa’s Reflections (Отражения, 2012), two films by...

Spectres of War in Deimantas Narkevičius’s Legend Coming True and Sergei Loznitsa’s Reflections

Published Online: Aug 05, 2022

Page range: 17 - 35

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2022-0002

Keywords
trauma and film, Jacques Derrida, hauntology, mourning, half-mourning, artists’ cinema, documentary film, spectres, Sergei Loznitsa, Deimantas Narkevičius

© 2022 Lukas Brasiskis, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Spectres of War in Deimantas Narkevičius’s Legend Coming True and Sergei Loznitsa’s Reflections

Published Online: Aug 05, 2022

Page range: 17 - 35

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2022-0002

Keywordstrauma and film, Jacques Derrida, hauntology, mourning, half-mourning, artists’ cinema, documentary film, spectres, Sergei Loznitsa, Deimantas Narkevičius

© 2022 Lukas Brasiskis, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Keywords
trauma and film, Jacques Derrida, hauntology, mourning, half-mourning, artists’ cinema, documentary film, spectres, Sergei Loznitsa, Deimantas Narkevičius