Art and the Liberation of the Film Image
	Karlo Funk

	The old man has stopped working for a moment and is looking up. His face expresses the same kind of soundless anxiety as the reflection of twisted trees on a quagmire in some other film. This composition and also its emotional charge correspond to a portrait in the art of painting. This is a typical scene of an Estonian film in more sense than one - there is no room for expression beside the economy of showing. Action manifests itself, and not the way it is expressed to the viewer. The camera seems to have raised an anxious eye, only to keep silent in front of what it shows. Whether to give this image the meaning of a symbol or understand it as a visual sign, depends upon what the viewer knows. This is not a matter of a missing aesthetics, but rather its denial in favour of another canon. Realism for film, and not only Estonian film, has meant almost the only manner of expression. The French film theoretician André Bazin understands this as the definition of cinema: "Cinema is devoted to communicating only via what is real."
	Fine art has, long before the invention of cinema, traversed through different stages, and its impact on the latecomer is obvious. No historical film would quite manage without relying on old paintings for details of costume and the household environment, depicted in pictures dating from various periods. The 19th century landscapes that have taught us to see nature, are not absent in film scenes where such views are supplemented by perceivable psychological comparison. Besides merely conveying facts or circumstances, one can use a more modernistic model in order to compare the connections between film and fine art: how something is depicted, what is the inner logic of the manner of reproduction of a film or a painting.
	When surrealists tried to free the subconscious in paintings and literature, then in film they first cleansed an image from logical and causal associations. Cinema was thus soon dragged into experimenting with the image, but the aims did not have much in common with the developments in cinema at the time. The postmodernist attempts of the 1980s to involve elements of painting in film, like the ideas of Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, were not widely accepted nor had they any impact on Estonian film-makers. Different areas of art have been reflected in Estonian cinema only superficially, rather as direct quotations than as carefully calculated positions regarding the art movement of that time. There are several examples from the 1960s of characters striking a posture very much like the heroic Soviet sculptures. These, however, are but superficial and obligatory phrases from the lexicon of the body language. Kaljo Kiisa's Madness (Hullumeelsus, 1968) stood closest to the independent and liberated expression. Images here do not live their own photogenic life; they follow instead the inner logic of the story, the need to illustrate mental chaos. There are, however, scenes in the New Devil of Põrgupõhja (Põrgupõhja uus Vanapagan; directed by Grigori Kromanov and Jüri Müür, 1964) where the Gothic transcendental threat overshadows the mostly realistic plot. These are in a sense revelatory: territories where the interior/story is transformed into external/image. The form has been characterised as a phenomenon where positivism blends with magic. The latter in particular has not been overtly popular in Estonian film; it has been used mostly to emphasise the effect of reality, and not to do away with it. The antagonism between the prevailingly realistic trend of Estonian culture and the free flow of reality can lead to a paradox. The documentaries of the 1960s depict life back then rather more poetically, interpreting the events via music and rediscovering the yardstick of casualness, with spontaneity that realistic art has closed. Andres Sööt's 511 Best Photographs of Mars (101 paremat fotot Marsist, 1968) seems the more topical today for melding, in its fragmentariness, one possibility that has been little used in Estonian film. When digital technology is going to blur the boundary between fine art and film, both probably find new starting points in the documentaries of the time.
	Animated cartoon with its freedom of representation has greater possibilities and, as a process, stands closest to art. Technically, animation has no contact with reality, and with a need to imitate objects adequately. One of the most typical examples of aesthetic expression is the cartoon Hell (1983, directed by Rein Raamat) where Eduard Viiralt's graphic sheet was brought to life. There the film director as a fine artist is seemingly of secondary importance, whereas the international recognition of Priit Pärn, Janno Põldma and Mati Kütt's films is largely based on their original style.
	Animation today seems to have developed its typical characteristics and situations. Several of these rely on the very disregard for the rules of the physical world, or on the ironic reversal of reality, in the name of the freedom of imagination. Nevertheless, animation keeps away from programmatic declarations or the criticism of tradition that accompany art trends. Against the background of Estonian cinema, they stand closest to the film-theoretical declarations of surrealists and impressionists concerning the liberation of the image and the automatism of consciousness.
	In narrative cinema, one can talk about the influence of the fine arts starting from where an attempt is made to bring more visual layers into a film than is necessary from the film's point of view. In the 1990s, at least two film directors have stood out for their strong visual expression. Sulev Keedus's Georgics (Georgica, 1998) relied on the criteria of the picturesque, and Rainer Sarnet's Me, Myself and I (Pauli laululaegas, 1999) added the abundant design of pop culture and fashion photography. In Sarnet's film, the images occasionally conquer the screen and halt the movement of the story. The same happened in his previous film A Chinese Fox (Libarebased ja kooljad, 1998), although in a different stylistic key. Disregarding their differences, the flashbacks and photographically presented places in Georgics on the one hand and the futurist design in Me, Myself and I on the other, both still carry the same photogénie sought by the impressionists of the 1920s.
	With the arrival of video art, cinema now has the chance to reinvest those previously absorbed images in art. Several video art shots, focuses and angles turn up like ubiquitous phrases from the early 20th century films. Digital cinema itself is moving towards greater fragmentation and more details - into narrower places, both in a physical and mental sense, where the camera could not fit before.
	| Estonian Art 2/00 (8) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2000 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |