The March on Vilnius: A Film's Journey from Propaganda to National Memory
PhD project
My doctoral research, entitled "Film Documents of the Second World War in Lithuania" aims identifying, analysing, and comparing film documents shot on Lithuanian territory between 1939 and 1945 by Lithuanian, Soviet, and German cameramen. The films are analysed from four distinct perspectives: microhistorical, archival, ideological, and intertextual. They are conceived them as multilayered artifacts that can be investigated as historical sources, physical objects, gazes, and palimpsests.
This project, stemming from it, focuses on the shifting uses and meanings of a single film: The Recovery of Vilnius Region. This footage documents the Lithuanian army's march on Vilnius in October 1939, almost 19 years after the city and its region had been annexed by Poland. Presented to the nation as a historic victory but undermined by controversial circumstances, it was overshadowed by subsequent events: the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940, the German invasion in 1941; and the return of Soviet power in 1944, which would last until 1990. Nonetheless, its symbolic value has persisted to this day. The project explores the different stages that led to the transformation of this film from nationalist propaganda to a contested historical artifact that shaped national memory. By analysing its appropriation in Nazi, Soviet, and Lithuanian documentaries, it reveals how these moving images shaped—and were shaped by—changing political regimes and historical narratives.
During his stay at the ZZF Potsdam Giorgio Ruggeri is visiting fellow in Dep. I: Communism and Society in the project EUROPAST. Giorgio is a member of the EUROPAST team at Vilnius University and a PhD student at the Lithuanian Institute of History.