Bartas: Time of Utopia Will Never Come (Yaroslav Vasiutkevych)
I've invited Yaroslav Vasiutkevych to introduce us to another book of his, about Šarūnas Bartas:
Yaroslav Vasiutkevych writes :
Šarūnas Bartas: Time of Utopia Will Never Come (2026)
This book has a very specific point of departure. In 2016, in Kyiv, I interviewed Šarūnas Bartas while he was preparing to work on the film Frost. By that time, I had already seen his early films, which made a strong impression on me precisely as captured time. In those works, there is a record of a vast historical rupture, the collapse and death of the Soviet empire, not as an event explained retrospectively, but as a condition directly experienced by people, spaces, and reality itself. I wrote the first two texts on Bartas’s cinema at that time, while preparing for our meeting. Years later, when I returned to them, I not only saw Bartas differently. The historical context in which his films are perceived had also changed. For that reason, I deliberately chose not to rewrite those early texts completely. It was important for me to preserve the distance between the way I saw his cinema then and the way I see it now.
The book gradually grew out of this temporal gap. I was interested not so much in the plots of Bartas’s films as in what returns from film to film: silence, arrested time, transitional spaces, the loss of home, human faces, landscapes, non-professional actors, and the fate of people caught between a vanished past and a future that never arrived.
One of the most important concepts for me became that of transitional spaces, places where history has already destroyed the old order but a new one has not yet taken shape. Many of Bartas’s characters exist precisely within such spaces. These spaces leave people almost no hope. They live out their lives there, grow old, and die, yet even the possibility of escape does not necessarily mean the possibility of beginning another life.
Even those who seem fortunate enough to break out of these spaces and enter a world that appears more prosperous from a post-Soviet point of view are often unable to free themselves from the past. This is what happens to Gena, the drug dealer in Eastern Drift. He moves between East and West, between former Soviet territories and Europe, but geographical movement does not become the beginning of a new life. The old spaces continue to pull him back. More than that, they remain inside the person himself and prevent him from leaving the past behind inwardly. One can leave a space, but it is much harder to remove that space from oneself.
I understand their silence not as the absence of communication, but as another possibility of dialogue with another person, with memory, and perhaps with the future. It is the silence of people for whom the old language already belongs to a vanished world, while a new language has not yet emerged.
Over time, the original interview with Bartas was joined by new research and two conversations conducted especially for the book: one with production designer Jurij Grigorovich and one with cinematographer Rimvydas Leipus, both of whom worked on Bartas’s early films. In this way, the book became for me not simply a study of an individual filmmaker, but an attempt to trace how cinema can preserve the experience of disappearing spaces, people, and time.
Yaroslav Vasiutkevych
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