Invazija

What do you think about the death of cinema? A young journalist of a cultural weekly asks; no way it will die, Laura Garbstiene and Arturas Bumsteinas, the founders of the interdisciplinary group G-LAB answer: the cinema will not die even if there is no electricity and one has to watch television in the candle-light.
“The geographical centre of Europe is situated just few kilometers behind the borders of this fabulous capital of Lithuania, a country of amber, linen and home of one of the oldest living languages of the world. We are in Vilnius, …” out of a sudden starts an uncommonly extrovert blonde walking down one of the main streets in the Old Town. People rush sideways to pass her by and look back with curiosity to meet the eye of a professional TV camera, to see the whole of the scene of a seducer and a seduced. A week later hundreds of international journalists gather to cover the trial of Bertrand Cantat, a French rock star who confesses to being guilty of death of a French actress Marie Trintignant (daughter of legendary French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant). She dies after a violent argument in a hotel room during the shooting of a TV film about a writer Colette last summer. Frederic Beigbeder who’s visiting Vilnius Book Fair tosses interviews where a line “and then I will for sure go clubbing, get smashed, go to a hotel and kill someone” becomes a casual wit addressing both media and it’s users and it feels like a big hug. Three of his books are on the shelves of 10 bestsellers in all Vilnius bookstores.
Laura Garbstiene and Arturas Bumsteinas got hold of the hybrid formations of perception, representation and sublime already in their first collaborative work, The Trace. It was a constructed video ruler that would act as a thermometer, indicating the degree (the duration, the position) of the plane’s presence on the screen. The audio track supported the dimension of expectedness of this presence.
For the Invasion they asked a celebrated Lithuanian composer Antanas Jasenka to compose a soundtrack for a slowed down slice of footage from the filming ground. The ground belongs to the Lithuanian Film Studio, or, to be more exact, to one of the foreign movies that the Studio survives on and that create multiple implants of fictional sceneries of the world wars, the middle ages or the indefinable times of Xena the warrior into the city and surrounding woods.
On the screen, an assistant of a filming ground closes the door of a white minibus giving way for a military van; young soldiers share Coke and exchange silenced words with women who have accompanied them to the film studio; deep white flashes of strong resting light endow the silhouettes with features, expressions, and relations. It makes the eye truly dance of excitement, but what keeps the eyes open is a permanent mutation of characters, meanings, and rules that come together and vanish with each recognizable lead towards a possible reading.
The footage is shot during the intermission on the filming ground. The break also becomes an axis of the game played in front of the pressingly determined viewer (note the last episode where the young soldier is frozen and taken away by the light and the music in front of the camera) of the Invasion. The video is overcrowded with gaps that produce ornaments of meanings and emotions by recalling scenarios imposed habit by habit onto the mind of a viewer. Reading into them leads into a continuous flow of deformations of complex structures of differentiation: viewers, onlookers, performers, actors, acts, images of acts blend.
The spectacle ceases to have anything in common with the historical facts, leaving with a strong feeling of exaltation and a sense of being deceived. There are no more causes but the anxiety is here. However sore are the topics of war, of memorial and however complicated ethically is addressing these issues, once the notions of a break, an intermission, a gap are introduced, the reality and fiction have no chance to take over one another. National identity and pride appear as one more amusement in the continuity of coping with personal time.

„Invasion“ consists of many different themes and confrontations inside them- historical time, personal time, social types and images, variance between cinematographic cliches and the real action, the „observer-participator“ definition.
In the begining you see the faces of casual observers of the film shooting process. On this first scene there is one old woman and some young girls and it is visible that they are following something. This short scene is very conected with the next images of the film. Apart from the difference between people‘s age, you understand that there is some action going on in front of them and that inside the structure of the film there exist a definition of observer and participator (this same definition appears in the end of the film when strong spotlight is pointed to the watcher‘s eyes). The next material is from the action that goes on after the shooting of epic movie about the Second World War. This long scene is a meeting point for many different types and images with their own meanings. The main subject here is the confrontation of historical time. It is revealed through the contrast of the characters and their costumes. The central characters (soldiers) are surrounded by filmming crew and casual people from the street who have completely different visual representation. All people with their own signs of historical, social, age, sex etc. etc. belonging are whirling arround the small area while slightly moving towards the invisible objective. The image of the closing prop box opens the last minute of the film: while the scene in the background is slowly demounted, this pseudo invasion becomes the real disarming. Everything is slowed down to the needed tempo and sinchronized with emotionally strong music with the aim to create the epic, almost metaphysical feeling of the action. That is our intention.