|
|
|
As seen in issue 52 of Closer Magazine, published on 2008-05-10 in the "Fashion" section.
Ballad for Estonians
How music and people power defied an empire
By: Brandon K. Thorp
Tentative prediction: nobody you know will ever see The Singing Revolution. It’s a documentary, which is a bit of a problem, and it’s about a tiny little country (Estonia!) that only a tiny number of Americans (transplanted Estonians!) ever think about.
As a third-gen American Portagee, I’ve certainly never thought about it. If I did, I assumed the place was filled with Eastern Orthodox Catholics and sheep’s milk. I am not proud of this. I am simply acknowledging my status as a dumb American; one whose interest in other countries is limited to those that might bomb me, steal my job, invent trendy cuisine or make for a decent tourist destination.
Estonia meets none of these criteria, and The Singing Revolution isn’t sensational enough to generate the kind of fascination that Yanks have developed for Rwanda or Sudan. It is, however, a great movie about what may well be a great country.
Estonia is an unlucky little piece of land on the Baltic Sea. It is about _ the size of Florida with roughly the same population as Greater Fort Lauderdale. The land is verdant its geography is ideal for the mass transport of goods around Europe. This has made Estonia’s bigger, stronger neighbors covetous. Prior to the 20th Century, Estonia spent hundreds of years under competing Livonian, Polish, Swedish and Russian rule. Independence movements came to fruition in 1918 with the signing of a Declaration of Independence, followed by two years of war with Bolshevik Russia, then twenty years of peace.
This is where The Singing Revolution digs in, presumably because of the scarcity of pre-20’s Estonian archival footage. The 20’s and 30’s Estonia of the film is simultaneously bucolic and modern; filled with song and happy people. If this is propaganda, it doesn’t look like it, and probably doesn’t feel like it to those few Estonians who remember those years. Even if life wasn’t idyllic, it must have seemed that way in retrospect, given the events to come.
In the provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, Soviet Russia reclaimed Estonia. Ignoring the pact, the Germans took Estonia in 1941. The country shifted back to Soviet control in 1944. In all the chaos and bloodshed, Estonia lost 25% of its population, including a great majority of its intellectuals and political leaders.
Histories like this one are almost always pornographic. Think long, slow pans of starved masses behind chain-link fences in liberated concentration camps; mass graves with stick-like limbs poking up from piles of undifferentiated flesh; terrifying Wagnerian footage of huge military columns. The Singing Revolution isn’t like this, isn’t about misfortune and misery. It’s about grace.
Even if the Soviet Union hadn’t disappeared in 1991, The Singing Revolution gives you the sense that Estonia would still be its own country today. After dispatching with the ugly history of the 40’s in its first 20 minutes, the film illustrates the long musical traditions of Estonia, focusing especially on the country’s recurring Song Festival; a tradition founded in 1869, in which thousands of Estonians congregate every five years in Tallinn and sing traditional songs of the land and new pieces composed for the occasion.
In interviews with conductors and singers and archival footage of old festivals, The Singing Revolution shows how the singers defied Soviet censorship, dispensing with Soviet songs and moving on to songs of fealty to their home country. The emotion in the footage is almost unbearable. The natural beauty of the music seems too pretty to contain the singers’ emotion. To hear nationalist music sung so purely and with such conviction will overwhelm viewers in any nation where patriotic songs come cheap. For the Estonians, the music could have cost everything.
It didn’t. In slow and thoughtful interviews interspersed with passages of that gorgeous noise, filmmakers James and Maureen Castle Tusy tell a story of peaceful subversion that is singularly weird in a world where nearly all protest is violent. They employ few cinematic tricks: they give you the information via unobtrusive narration from actress Linda Hunt, stand back and roll footage; they allow the story to tell itself in quick shots of concerts, concerts that turn into protests, protests, and finally long columns of Soviet tanks rolling in as the music-fuelled drive towards independence becomes intolerable to the Kremlin. Then it shows those tanks pulling back, the Soviets having no stomach for the bloodshed it would take to subdue a united population. Estonia won its independence with zero shots fired, zero casualties, and it did it because of music’s transcendental capacity to unify people.
To know this is interesting. To watch it happen, to feel the joy of the event as it radiates from the Estonians, is to be re-enfranchised. Not just as a moviegoer, and not just as a citizen of the world or anything so sappy — it is to be re-enfranchised as a political subject. If you’re an American, it’s to be re-enfranchised as one of those, too.
This is a vivifying moment for Americans, but not for all the right reasons. In a way, the candidacy of Barack Obama is a sad one. It shouldn’t be so novel to see people pulling together in service of an ideal higher than mere expediency. The notion that there are powerful spiritual, emotional, and philosophical connections between people’s lives should need no rediscovery. But it does, and we’ll take what reminders we can. Obama’s a good one, and the Singing Revolution — the event, not the film — is even better. In a country where we no longer really believe that history is ours to make, The Singing Revolution goes a long way towards proving us wrong.
The Singing Revolution is playing at Cinema Paradiso from April 18th – 20th.
Call 954-525-FILM (3456)
or visit:
www.fliff.com
|
|
|
|
