Film About an Unknown Artist

Laura Garbštienė’s Film About an Unknown Artist (2009), for example, is a multilayeredwork that formally and conceptually meanders its way from an art academy in Vilnius to the streets and metro of Paris. Her film, shot on 8mm but transferred to 16mm, mines thearchaic qualities of an older cinematic technology, all the while remaining aestheticallyfresh and of the moment. The plot concerns an artist played by the filmmaker herselfwho comes upon a forgotten plaque at the Vilnius Art Academy that commemoratesthe unknown artist. The commemorative statement is ambiguous as to the nature ofits homage: is it to those artists who were anonymous because they practiced their artwhen the concept of art did not exist, does it refer to the artist who was excluded from thecanon, or is it a reminder of those who never achieved success in their lifetime, who toiledin, and into, obscurity? Not knowing whom this marker refers to, the protagonist seeksthe unknown artist as a way to counteract historical amnesia and the cult of the artist,but it is also possible that it is an archetype that that plaque solemnly acknowledges. Asthe artist undertakes a peregrination that begins in Vilnius, the ostensible secularity ofthe film’s gravitas gives way to a pilgrimage-like journey, as the artist arrives in Paris insearch of the unknown artist as other. Emphasizing the philosopher Emanuel Levinas’notion of the other as constitutive of the self, the artist is both same and other; she isboth the subjectivity of the artwork’s author and the object of the artwork itself. The filmhas a poetic circularity that folds in on itself as the artist decides to make a film based on the unknown artist. Memory and place, both historical and personal, are seamlesslyinterwoven in Garbštienė’s laconic film. —Raúl Zamudio, http://www.scribd.com/doc/45306897/City-Without-Walls-catalog