VMU to Host Public Lectures by Lithuanian-Origin Film Professor Dr. Gabriel M. Paletz
“A sense of the absurd united [Eastern European] nations as a shared response to coercive regimes. In literature, the absurd touches questions of human existence—including what resistance is possible to powers that overwhelm us. These films engender laughter that can reconcile people to their fates but also keep alive the sense that an authoritarian system based on flawed logic and fallible institutions cannot rule forever”, says film professor of Lithuanian origin, graduate of Yale University Dr. Gabriel M. Paletz who will hold a series of public lectures at VMU dedicated to film history, screenwriting and other topics.
On 10-16 May, Dr. Paletz will hold public lectures in Kaunas as a Vytautas Kavolis Interdisciplinary Teaching Fellow at Vytautas Magnus University. He will discuss film history, screenwriting, media adaptation and present an original talk that celebrates the importance of Lithuanian “cultural smuggling”.
In an interview with the film professor, scholar, programmer and critic – a discussion about the silent-era Hollywood’s female screenwriters, Eastern European Cinema of the Absurd, interdisciplinarity, and his latest book, which is dedicated to the famous American film director, actor, and screenwriter Orson Welles.
How do you reflect on the interdisciplinary nature of your teaching visit? What inspired you to choose the topics outlined in the program? What core message do you hope to convey through them?
It’s a special pleasure and honor to have a Kavolis Interdisciplinary Fellowship at Vytautas Magnus in this period where an interdisciplinary understanding is integral to experience both inside and outside of a university. With increased ease of travel, online access to knowledge (despite its sometimes dubious truth) and range of people to encounter, interdisciplinarity is part of many everyday lives—especially for students and professors at institutions of higher learning.
I’m much looking forward to this visit as an exchange that broadens my scholarship as well as those of the different departments at Vytautas Magnus University. For each lecture, I‘ve designed creative exercises for VMU students and faculty to collaborate and share their knowledge. That‘s why the subjects are broad—„How to Adapt Anything“ „The Future of Film Storytelling in Film History and AI” „Cultural Smuggling—A Lithuanian Art“ and „Reinventing the Media.“ Methods of adaptation, past and future kinds of storytelling, a Lithuanian art and reinvention should bring scintillating discussions! I’m excited by these interdisciplinary lectures for the discoveries and connections we can make.
What do you think are the key qualities of a strong interdisciplinary professor? How can we cultivate this kind of thinking in students?
A good interdisciplinary professor spans the bridges between disciplines for students to cross for themselves. For example, the coming lecture on the strategies of adaptation can generate ideas on how to adapt Lithuanian and international classic texts into current media. And the lecture on cultural smuggling, inspired by Lithuanian film documentaries of the Soviet period restored by the Lithuanian arts organization Meno Avilys, has broad applications on how to integrate unexpected materials into popular media. May these lectures provoke new scholarly conceptions and artistic creations in your culture, which has given much of both to the world.
What is interdisciplinary about films?
Film is a science, a business and an art. The medium comes out of centuries of scientific discoveries. It’s an international industry with an intimate economy in our daily life of the time we spend in theaters and online. And film depends on individual and collective artistry, from the history of the written word to how words and images are being transformed by developments in AI—among other interdisciplinary aspects. Each of these aspects are reflected in the lectures.
How is interdisciplinarity approached in Prague Film School, in your experience?
Among other things, teachers at the Prague Film School can create new courses without a long administrative process. This freedom and the varieties of the teachers‘ expertise create a natural interdisciplinarity in the school‘s curriculum.
For example, in developing my course „Learning from Awful Films,“ I thought of a way to have students grasp the importance of sound in film by spoiling the effect of a famous scene. The scene that came to mind was the celebrated balcony encounter between Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare‘s play. Students have the opportunity both to change Shakespeare‘s language to contemporary youth slang—so Juliet would praise Romeo‘s „rizz,“ and to think of an aural environment around Juliet‘s balcony. When Romeo urges „Speak, bright angel!“ past students have intermingled her lovestruck words with the roar of planes overhead—by setting her balcony near an airport—or with orders for hamburgers and fries, by setting her balcony next to a fast food drive-thru. With the chance to change Shakespeare, and respect that comes from close scrutiny of his scene, interdisciplinary connections are highly entertaining.
What would you say to students who are hesitant or afraid to engage in interdisciplinary work?
Fear not—and build your own individual interdisciplinary architecture from what engages you. You’ll strengthen the structure as you realize the research you need to do and new subjects you should learn, but don’t hesitate to develop intrepid and original scholarship. Because no one knows what combination of fields will prove most fruitful in the future. Get going!
How do you personally manage to integrate such different disciplines — as a film professor, scholar, programmer, and critic? What helps you find coherence in such diversity?
As a humanities major at Yale, I took a freshman year course that blended philosophy, literature and history of the same periods—a formative experience. At the University of Southern California, I petitioned to earn the first PhD in film history and theory with a minor in film production. This first doctorate proved that just because certain creative decisions come out of specific production conditions, they can have larger cultural, social and political meanings that transcend their contexts.
These adventures in higher learning demonstrated that a technique or an idea that comes out of a certain time and place can have novel applications in very different situations.
In this period, as Václav Havel said, everything is possible and almost nothing in certain. The retreat into bubbles shows how scary uncertainty can be. But then we can make unexpected meaningful connections. The film programs I did on Czech postwar history through its cinema and The Eastern European Cinema of the Absurd had particular appeal a decade ago to audiences in Hong Kong, because of the future citizens there felt that they were facing.
What can we learn from Eastern European Cinema of the Absurd?
I‘m curious to know the opinions of your readers on the differences between your country‘s culture and the ones of the Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Latvia. The point of the film series, „The Eastern European Cinema of the Absurd,“ which featured a film from each of these countries, was to find a point of commonality between them: how a sense of the absurd united these nations as a shared response to coercive regimes. In literature, the absurd touches questions of human existence—including what resistance is possible to powers that overwhelm us. These films engender laughter that can reconcile people to their fates but also keep alive the sense that an authoritarian system based on flawed logic and fallible institutions cannot rule forever…
In terms of cultural programming, the absurd was also an original way to unite all of these countries by a shared sensibility, rather than as is usually done by a particular group of filmmakers, technology or time period. Because of the meanings the absurd continues to have for us, the series resonated around the world where it was shown—in Hong Kong, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere.
What books or films would you recommend — especially for our students — to help broaden their imagination and thinking across disciplines?
Rather than recommending specific books, may I suggest that students continue to visit bookstores to support them as places where we find unexpected treasures of the imagination —there are particularly nice stores in your country—and that now and then, students open up to films that they would not usually watch, whether at festivals, in theaters and on streaming services that they haven’t tried before? In tribute to how Lithuania has inspired an intersection of cultures, I would recommend reading The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz. The book‘s bent is tragic, yet (among many other things) it makes you realize how precious it is to preserve the varieties of personality and lively mental life that authoritarian regimes seek to extinguish.
What led you to write a book about Orson Welles? Why do you think it’s important to revisit and reinvent Welles today?
I’m glad you ask since the idea of reinvention in my book on Orson Welles reinvigorates public life as explored in the last lecture on the lessons of the artist’s reinventions. Some film scholars wonder „Why Welles–hasn‘t he‘s been written about?“ But the non-academic public never asks this question, since Welles‘s works continue to fill theater, podcasts, films, TV and new media. Welles remains a maker of classic works like The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane and ones that continue to be rediscovered and restored, from Touch of Evil to, more recently, the films of Too Much Johnson and Netflix‘s The Other Side of the Wind.
Welles‘s career is relevant even beyond his own achievements since it shows us how exciting works get made at the centers of entertainment—from radio to current podcasts, TV to modern streamers, in popular genres like film noir and in the careers of individual artists. When culture gets stuck in a rut, Welles‘s career illuminates how it revives. Despite great obstacles, he found ways to recover the conditions from his sensational youth in his later creative life, in ways we’re still discovering 40 years after his passing. If we‘re reinventing Welles, his career shows us how to reinvent our culture!
Who would you name as the top five female screenwriters of the Hollywood silent movies? How has their work influenced your work?
In contrast to Welles’s brilliance, the work of these talented screenwriters remain largely hidden from the public yet their contributions are of enduring value to the craft of filmmaking. With their ambition, these writers encouraged and supported one another’s scripts. So rather than rank them, I‘d cite the screenwriting virtues that overlapped between them. I think of the verbal wit of Anita Loos, the elegant, eloquent visual storytelling of Clara Beranger, the comic pacing from words to screen action of Agnes Christine Johnston, the empathetic sensitivity for characters (including a horse and alligator!) of Dorothy Yost and Katharine Hilliker, the ability to elaborate short stories, condense novels and translate plays into feature film of Beulah Marie Dix and Sada Cowan, the outdoor and boudoir spectacles of Grace Cunard. The wry understanding of the screenwriter‘s place in filmmaking of Sonya Levien and enduring professionalism of Frances Marion. Contemporary screenwriters owe much to them as predecessors and should emulate their screenwriting strengths.
Although each had her storytelling personality, these screenwriters shared wide professional experiences—both in other fields and in other crafts of film—as well as generous collaborative impulses. They employed their many talents in the dynamic era of cinema before synchronized sound, which all filmmakers should revisit and whose spirit we should renew. These women’s works, with ones of talented contemporaries, fill me with a renewed sense of the possibilities of screenwriting.
What has your diasporic experience given you, both personally and professionally? What values were shaped by your Lithuanian identity?
When I discovered some of the history of our family in the Lithuanian National Archives, the information brought home how much our individual accomplishments are born from the decisions of past relatives we never meet—an appreciation of an essential history in Lithuania.
It‘s also important to say that identifying with Lithuania and living in the Czech Republic balances the „big country“ mentality one inherits from the United States. Growing up in a dominant nation carries all kinds of assumptions—that its politics determine global politics, that its literature is world literature, even that our national baseball championship is the World Series! It‘s crucial to understand the experiences of countries that have lived, at least in much of the 20th century, under the diktats of empires. The lecture on „Cultural Smuggling“ is particularly inspired from the opportunity of this professorship, a tribute to Lithuanian imagination and creativity and my family‘s origins here.
What would you say is your connection with Kaunas?
I’m looking forward to creating those connections to VMU people and departments—thanks and see you all soon in Kaunas!
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Dr. Gabriel M. Paletz is film professor, scholar, programmer and critic of Lithuanian origins, a graduate of Yale University and the first PhD in film criticism and theory to minor in film production at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He teaches cinema courses including “Learning from Awful Films” to students from five continents in Prague, Czech Republic. Among his publications, he has won the best essay prize from the Screenwriting Research Network for his article “Writing Sound in the Screenplay: Traditions and Innovations” and his book The Reinventions of Orson Welles is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He has penned film criticism for Variety and the magazine of the Cinémathèque Française while his latest film programs include a tribute to the great female screenwriters of Hollywood silent movies and “The Eastern European Cinema of the Absurd,” a series screened around the world that features restored films from eight national film archives, including Lithuania’s.
As a guest of Dana Gedvilienė foundation, under the Vytautas Kavolis Interdisciplinary Program dedicated to the Lithuanian diaspora, Dr. Paletz has designed creative exercises for each talk and invites the participation of Vytautas Magnus University’s teachers and students.
All lectures are conducted in English and open to students from other Lithuanian universities as well as the general public.
