Analysis of Interview with Gertrūda Gaidamavičiūtė
Conducted by Yasha Barth (interviewer) and Hannah Ray (camera and sound) in Vilnius in July 2023.
Transcribed and translated by Alina Uzak, Yasha Barth, Veena Larsen, Julia Norsworthy-Edghill, Greta Lin Risgin, Elena Soboleva in Fall 2023.
Analysis written by ??? in Fall 2023.
In July 2023, Yasha Barth and Hannah Ray interviewed Gertrūda Gaidamavičiūtė in Vilnius, Lithuania. The interview, conducted in Russian, was transcribed and translated into English by Alina Uzak, Yasha Barth, Veena Larsen, Julia Norsworthy-Edghill, Greta Lin Risgin, and Elena Soboleva during the Fall 2023 as part of the Russian Movie Theater Project.
Gertrūda Gaidamavičiūtė was born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania (former Lithuanian SSR) in 1981. At the time, her parents worked in the service industry and construction and they lived in a residential district outside of the city center. She continues to live in Vilnius today, where she is a senior librarian and the current head of the library at the European Humanities University. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Vilnius University in Communications and Information in 2003 and 2005, respectfully. A polyglot, Gaidamavičiūtė speaks English, Lithuanian, Russian, as well as Belarusian, Polish, and Spanish in a limited-working proficiency.
Much of her memory is split between her life during and after the Soviet occupation, as reflective of her recollection of Soviet-era films and tv shows.1 Gertrūda found it difficult to remember many details surrounding her movie-going experience from a young age, however, she remembers more clearly the changes that occurred since the Soviet era. She was unable to identify the name of the movie theater or which films she would usually watch, naming only one film by name: The Three Musketeers. Notably she remembers a mini-series made for television D’Artagnan and Three Musketeers (Д’Артаньян и три мушкетёра 1978), a television adaptation of 1844 adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas. The television production title remains in her memory while film titles do not. Gertrūda also remembers Soviet-era TV programs for children Good Night, Little Ones and Soviet-era Channel One evening news Time. Moreover, she clearly remembers the name of a local musical contest Song of Songs (Dainų dainelė in Lithuania). When she was asked whether she could remember any movies shown on tv during the Perestroika, she noted that all she could focus on were the memories from the Lithuanian Exile.
Gertrūda also remembers cartoons made out of plasticine (claymation), a common animation style during the 1980s Soviet Union and onward. Similarly, she made educated guesses as to how the theaters operated and felt at the time, highlighting the sound of the movie projectors and the differences between screenings (day versus evening).
As the interview progresses, it becomes evident that she begins to remember more detail from her teenage years and onward, noting how theaters transformed, films were given ratings, and how foreign films became more prominent. This comes to no surprise as film censorship decreased in the years leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and foreign media became more accessible.
1Gertrūda refers to the Soviet Lithuania era as an occupation. Many people in Russia still consider the occupation of Baltic nations not to be an occupation. The compilers of this oral history archive also view the Soviet presence in those nations as unquestionably an occupation.
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