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One of the most important centers of these cutting edge developments was Vanemuine Theater, once the cradle of Estonian national theatre during the national awakening of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, first amateur and then professional. In the late 1960s and early 1970s this became especially visible in the university town Tartu, the second-largest city of Estonia, where a new generation of intellectuals and artists, born largely after World War II, formed a thriving circle of young critically minded and forward-looking thinkers and authors. In this regard, cinema-which has often been treated by critics and audiences alike as a not fully qualified part of Estonian national culture-stood in stark contrast with the rest of the local cultural arena, which saw a true boom of creative innovation in literature, fine arts and theatre. According to Arvo Iho, “the 1970s were a time of stagnant water in Estonian narrative cinema many films were made which had no effect on anybody and no connection with actual life” (Iho 1991).
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Moreover, the mainstream of cinematic output in the first part of the 1970s is usually seen as a product of an era of severe stagnation. The following investigation of Tooming’s films will concentrate chiefly on the spatial representations and practices, with digressions into the domain of re/constructing identities, both personal and collective.Īlthough in the early 1960s Estonian cinema had seen a notable shift in content and style, away from the banalities and stereotypes of Stalinist socialist realism towards the emergence of both locally rooted and trans-nationally disposed film production, this development remained rather modest in its scope, both in terms of the force of its formally/narratively innovative impulse and its effect on the audiences, whether local or international. His controversial, stylistically and semantically rich output, composed of unceasingly intriguing visual utterances, provides a fascinating order of spatial representations, which reconfigure Estonian cinematic territories in several respects and, at the same time, re-evaluate and criticize quite provocatively the historical and conceptual framework of imagining national, social and personal identities. This author was Jaan Tooming, an actor and a theatre director, whose films constitute a fundamentally unprecedented phenomenon in Estonian cinema.
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Yet, in the midst of the ebbing waters of the early 1970s, a dark horse emerged, whose artistic contribution to Estonian cinematic heritage deserves to be identified as a new wave in miniature, a veritable diamond, albeit perhaps rough-cut. The true “Estonian New Wave” has been defined by local critics as born and burgeoning in the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s (Orav 2003: 54ff Kärk 1995: 117 Kirt 1980: 33-4), when a new generation of young filmmakers entered the stagnated cinematic stage with bravado, finally inverting the low ebb that had lasted nearly a decade. While the heyday of various new waves, both in Western Europe and in the Soviet bloc, is normally limited to the period between the mid-1950s and the ruptures of 1968, in Estonia, as the local literary critic Mart Velsker (1999: 1211) has accurately argued, the essence of the innovative 1960s “is manifested in its most vivid form some time between 19, that is, at the end of the decade and partly even beyond it.” Compared to other artistic genres, however, Estonian cinema was severely lagging behind, both in achievement and in reputation. Using the label of “new wave” in the context of Estonian cinema is highly problematic and controversial because, unlike in France or, to take a more similar socio-political framework, in Czechoslovakia, the (Soviet) Estonian filmic arena did not see a creative outburst synchronous with and comparable to, both in scope of innovative production and international acclaim, the cinematic practices adorned with the adjective “new” elsewhere in Europe. New Waves, New Spaces: Estonian Experimental Cinema of the 1970s By Eva Näripea (Estonian Academy of Arts / Estonian Literary Museum)