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Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Musical Borrowings in Songs about the Holocaust by the Jews of Greece

Chryssie Scarlatos — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This article deals with songs about the Holocaust. Most of these songs have remained almost unknown until today, and this article aims to bring them out and to highlight the fact that they serve as evidence to the sufferings of the Greek people during World War II. All songs were written in Greece, and the practice of contrafactum (borrowing melodies and changing the lyrics) was applied to all of them. The borrowed melodies originate from Western music (e.g., operas), Western and Greek popular songs of the time, and from Greek folk and urban folk music. The variety of musical borrowings reveals cultural interactions between the ethnic and religious groups of the Greek land. It is also indicative of the increasing role of the mass media (radio, cinema) at that time. The lyrics of the songs are usually written in Greek and, in some cases, in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish of the Eastern Mediterranean area). Apart from having musicological interest, the songs are also important from the historical point of view. They were written either before the transportations to the extermination camps, or in the camps, or after the Holocaust. Their lyrics depict aspects of the living conditions of Jews during World War II. Moreover, these songs acted as a way of expressing feelings and thoughts.

The Other Vilnius: The ‘Proletarian’ Territory of the Photographer Algirdas Šeškus

Margarita Matulytė — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The article analyses the works of the photographer Algirdas Šeškus in the 1970s–1980s highlighting the iconographic aspect of Vilnius. Created in a style alternative to the humanistic documentalism developed by the Lithuanian school of photography, the photographs expand the visual characteristics of the city and disrupt the stereotypes that symbolise the status of the capital. Emphasising ‘the proletarian’ character of artistic expression, the article discusses the distinctive vision of the photographer who devalues the representativeness of the city’s memory sites, ignores the grand narratives, and reveals the ideological contradictions between the schools of photographic expression and the conceptions of the city’s identity.

Resorting to a metaphorical association with the concept developed by China Miéville’s in his novel The City & The City, where the mode of coexistence of two cities on the same territory is ‘invisibility’, the article unveils the ideological contradictions between photographic expressions and notions of the city’s identity.

Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias is advantageous for marking the border zones of intersecting socio-cultural interests. By entering representative spaces, the photographer expropriates and demolishes them: he ignores the sacral aspects of Vilnius’s ‘places of memory’, de-romanticises the capital’s emblematic sites, and decrowns the city’s monuments and heroes.

The artist suppresses the aggressiveness of the art of photography and the art in photography, imparts a ‘proletarian’ spirit to the image, and transforms any part of the city into a ‘proletarian’ territory.

Precariat in Lithuanian Cinema: Representational and Thematic Tropes

Renata Šukaitytė — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Based on the concepts of the precariat and precarity formulated by Andrew Ross and Guy Standing, this article discusses the insights of Lithuanian filmmakers into various manifestations of social and economic vulnerability of society and provides an overview of the most distinctive representations and narratives of the experiences of precarity in Lithuanian fiction and documentary films. The author suggests that only a small number of filmmakers deal with the new precariat as a social class, and this theme attracts the younger generation of documentary film makers rather than the established fiction auteurs or popular film makers. Therefore, no codified or universal representations and narratives of precarity and precarious have been established, although certain key tropes can be traced in the films, such as, for instance, systemic deprivation and social insecurity of the working class and the underpaid middle class or domestic migration and emigration in search for employment abroad prompted by regional inequality in Lithuania.

Contemporary Circus: The Conception of the Genre and Its Aesthetics

Monika Citvaraitė-Lansbergienė — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Compared to other performing arts, contemporary circus is quite a young phenomenon. With the birth of new wave circus in France, the culture of contemporary circus has been rapidly evolving in Europe and globally. Contemporary circus rejects traditional aesthetics and the structure of performances. It creates a discussion, a narrative that can be interpreted, and encompasses a wide variety of dramaturgical material. Contemporary circus of the Baltic region is mostly presented at international circus festivals, yet authorial circus art has been rising in the region, although the community of circus creators is still limited. The purpose of the article is to clarify the concept of contemporary circus and to explore the aesthetics characteristic of the genre.

Menotyra

Title

Contents

Musical Borrowings in Songs about the Holocaust by the Jews of Greece

The Other Vilnius: The ‘Proletarian’ Territory of the Photographer Algirdas Šeškus

Precariat in Lithuanian Cinema: Representational and Thematic Tropes

Contemporary Circus: The Conception of the Genre and Its Aesthetics