| Abstract [eng] |
Gender Order in Cinema Narratives on Partisan War: Films by Edmundas Zubavičius in the First Decade of Independence is a master‘s thesis by Indrė Bručkutė, which uses narrative analysis to examine what gender order is being constructed in documentary films. After regaining independence, the cultural memory of the imagined community was highly debated – new narratives started to appear that were a part of nation-building and the construction of Lithuanian identity. Partisan war became one of the essential narratives in the cultural memory, closely tied to militarism, which also includes creating a concept of citizenship closely related to manhood. Because national narratives tend to project the nation‘s character, destiny and citizenship drawing from the past, the traditionalist gender order is often reinstated. While some works have analysed cultural memory about the partisan war, they have yet to focus on documentaries as one of the crucial ways to form cultural memory. Therefore, seven documentary films by director Edmundas Zubavicius were selected as the material for the analysis, as they were closely tied to the national institution, and the director was nationally acclaimed and awarded for them. The analysis is made through three different axes. First, it focuses on the use of archive – remediation of the soviet archive, family archive and the image of archive construction mainly through the works of Anna Woodham, Laure Wexler, and Natalija Arlauskaitė. Analyses of witnesses and witnessing as an act are applied as films includes multiple women partisans who have witnessed the war and use their stories to construct the narrative. The theoretical background of this approach is presented by Felman Shoshana, Dori Laub and Giorgio Agamben‘s work. Finally, the theory about the construction of national narratives and gendered citizenship is applied using Nira Yuval-Davis‘ and Benedict Anderson‘s ideas. The conclusion of this thesis suggests that men have individualised relationship with the community – citizenship – that depends on their will to choose to sacrifice themselves. Women‘s citizenship is closely tied to family construction; their relationship with the state has a mediator – the man. Women are constructed as responsible for the symbolic reconstruction of the nation – they are the ones that are responsible for the archive; they are gathering stories and retelling them to the community. A new historical and mediated role is created in this narrative – „the daughter of the partisan“, which carries in her a Lithuanian gene, also constructing women as biological reproducers of the nation. The family archive reinstates the social structures of the partisan war, tying women to the private sphere and men to the public. The chosen framework helps to analyse ways in which the use of family archive and witnesses tie the narrative of imagined community and the notion of citizenship to militarism and the concept of manhood, leaving women as representing the nation but not actively participating in it as individuals. |
