Pirmoji Banga/Film Festival is the first film festival in Lithuania entirely dedicated to archival pre-war films, splitting its program between silent films and early sound films. It has been taking place for the past three years at the cinema center “Skalvija” in Vilnius with increasing popularity.
Pirmoji Banga/Film Festival Founder Aleksas Gilaitis
The Peeping Archivist has met with its founder and head curator Aleksas Gilaitis. Aleksas is a freelance film archivist and curator with expertise in the long-term conservation and management of nitrate film collections. In recent years he has worked at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, the Ltd “Lithuanian Cinema,” and the Jugoslovenska Kinoteka in Belgrade.
An avid festivalgoer, he also reports on archival and silent festivals for The Peeping Archivist.
Silent and archival film festivals have been undergoing a worldwide resurgence these past years, with new festivals popping up every year. Why did you think it was important for Lithuania to have its own archival film festival?
Even though archival films are regularly screened in Lithuania, it is very rare (if ever) for pre-WWII works to be shown. Archival/classic/cult cinema thus probably means for the regular Lithuanian cinemagoer the most successful films of the last 30-50 years. We are talking about films that 40+ year-old people remember – although they may have missed some due to strict soviet censorship.
Retrospectives in various film festivals are not rare either, but most of them relate to directors or actors who have just passed away or have recently made the news again (Ingmar Bergman’s 100th birth anniversary for instance).
The pre-WWII era, which very few remember, is also forgotten by the theatres. The First Wave (Pirmoji Banga) is exactly about this era, whose memory only lives through documents, prints and cinematographic objects.
We believe that the early cinema and early sound periods are as, if not more, important as the subsequent ones to understand film history as a whole. Our mission is to show it to the public and educate our audiences.
Can you describe the film culture in Lithuania?
A lot of Lithuanian cinema is connected with soviet cinema. The 1960s-80s are considered to be the golden age of our national cinema, and the majority of the best-known Lithuanian directors have worked and made their masterpieces during the Soviet era.
We are hoping that the First Wave festival will also help revive technological knowledge and skills in the country.
Unfortunately, from the films pre-dating the Soviet period (Lithuania was independent between the wars), only very few survived. Among those we can count animations, documentaries, and newsreels, but no feature films.
I am not an expert in contemporary Lithuanian film culture, but I can tell you that documentaries have always been an important genre of our national cinematography. There is currently a boom of young Lithuanian film directors. Just to name some of the most famous Lithuanian filmmakers, I would highly recommend: Arūnas Žebriūnas, Šarūnas Bartas, Raimondas Vabalas, Andrius Blaževičius, and Marija Kavtaradzė.
The film culture is thus incredibly rich, and Vilnius can be proud of the amount of festivals it hosts. The absence of a cinémathèque gives more space for film festivals to exist, although their programming is often (but not always) commercially oriented. Festival turnover is very quick in Vilnius, some appear and disappear each year, or radically change their curatorial stand.
Regarding film archives, Lithuania has a national archive with a department dedicated to film heritage. However, due to a shortage of staff and money, the institution is only able to do passive preservation.
Furthermore, given our Soviet past, copyright and the legal use of the film prints that have survived are quite complex. In this context, it is not much of a surprise that film preservation is dragging behind in the country.
What were the main challenges of setting up Pirmoji Banga/Film Festival?
Finding financial support has always been (and still is) the major problem. We aim to rehabilitate and keep the tradition of projecting archival films alive for the audience of course, but also for the professionals – film projectionists, film accompanists, and historians. Unfortunately, screening archival films, and especially silent cinema, is not an established practice in Vilnius.
For this reason it is incredibly hard to find individuals or organisations that recognise the value of screening archival films. It has quickly become quite clear for us, the festival’s organisers, that screening a silent film is costly due to the many expenses, such as those of film accompanists, their training, and the logistics involved. It is simply impossible to make a profit from these screenings and we could not exist without financial support. Even though we are lucky to be partly funded by the State and the Lithuanian Film Center, we still rely on professionals who either help us voluntarily or despite a low remuneration.
The lack of awareness and knowledge of silent cinema and curating silent programs has also been a real challenge. On the one hand it opens many opportunities but at the same time offers no tradition or steady audience to rely upon. Now in our third year, we are happy to attract a growing interest in pre-WWII cinema. But this success comes with very hard work and many months of preparation and outreach.
Another issue is film formats. We struggle for instance to project archival prints. Generally, archive loan agreements for prints demand the name of the projectionist and some sort of proof that s/he is able to project an archival print. This may be difficult to provide if you are not a FIAF member or affiliate, or, as is the case with Lithuania, no institution in the country is. Archives then tend to be reluctant to confide you their print – there is no trust.
A 8mm projection at the 2017 Pirmoji Banga/Film Festival
They also generally require the cinema to be equipped with a two-projector changeover system. Working projectors are rare enough in Lithuania, let alone those equipped for changeovers!
Furthermore, any other non-standard film formats (small gauge, DigiBeta, films with slower frame rate) are difficult to play back due to the lack of adequate equipment. This year we will be really challenging our host cinema on four occasions: with a DigiBeta copy (playback technology is almost non-existent on the whole Lithuanian territory), DCPs with non-standard frame rate, 8mm projection, and a magic lantern show.
We are hoping that the First Wave festival will also help revive technological knowledge and skills in the country, and that in the future, at least one cinema will be recognised by other archives as a venue capable of projecting archival prints.
What kind of support (and from whom) is needed in helping to grow and sustain initiatives such as Pirmoji Banga?
It is a very difficult question due to the financial pressure. But really, the best support comes from the understanding and appreciation of what we do for our current and hopefully future audiences.
What are the festival’s biggest achievements?
Our achievements are quite different every year. Last year we had a magic lantern show, which had probably been the first one in Lithuania for the past 50 years. We also set ourselves a difficult challenge that turned out to be very successful: projecting a 8mm print of a silent feature film accompanied by two brilliant musicians. And it all happened in a real theatre!
Film accompanist at the 2017 Pirmoji Banga/Film Festival
I am also very happy about our pianists with whom we have worked several times already. Their remarkable performances, and their growing love for silent cinema and its music, is a great achievement for us as well as for them and our audiences.
This year should also set new milestones: the first proper program catalogue, the first public projection of a 9,5mm print in the country, international guests, and many more ….
What are the highlights of this year’s festival?
With 10 exciting screenings in Vilnius, it is hard to highlight only one or two. The festival does not last long and is not packed with films, so each screening is very carefully curated. Every film will be screened only once, and each one is highly recommended.
The festival starts with a Third Reich comedy “Glückskinder” (Paul Martin, 1936, starring the brilliant Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch), and ends with Victor Sjöström´s “Berg-Ejvind och Hans Hustru” (SE, 1918), a captivating Icelandic medieval saga with beautiful Swedish mountain sceneries. Yet these two films are as much highlights as any other screening in between!
Interview by The Peeping Archivist.
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