Twittering Soul

Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius’ period piece Twittering Soul is set in the late 1800s, yet it is haunted by the spectre of the twentieth century. Communities that do not possess political autonomy nurture parallel, alternative stories, refusing colonialism and the traumatic modernisation it entails. This, often labelled ‘wild’, indigenous condition ends with the formation of sovereign political institutions, in other words, nation-states. Twittering Soul reconstructs precisely the period before the establishment of the modern Republic of Lithuania.

The late 1800s is the dawn of automobiles, human aviation, psychoanalysis and of course, cinema. Indifferent to, but not ignorant of, these historical upheavals, a small wooded village in southern Lithuania prepares for doomsday. Two women discuss afterlife, an itinerant musician witnesses strange happenings on his journey, accounts of stones that grow in size and float in the air, a band of faeries weave busily away in a cottage, a feudal lord pores over an optical contraption as his daughter is warned about the witches that haunt a nearby tree. The nature of these events remains mysterious, the connection between them tenuous. Like Breughel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, the film weaves them into a sumptuous, mystical rural tapestry embodying a distinct, pre-modern conception of life and beyond.