Embodied Point of View: The Turn to Personal Expression in Late Soviet Baltic Documentary Cinema

A notable stylistic tendency that emerged in the post-1990s period of regained independence in the Baltic countries is a personal mode of filmmaking, in which directors construct narratives through subjective engagement and often appear on screen as characters in their own films. This phenomenon has been examined by regional scholars, yet the late Soviet period remains insufficiently explored from such perspective. In the Western context, the rise of personal and autobiographical filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s has been associated with growing identity crises and technological changes that enabled filmmakers to record themselves and question their own identities alongside broader social and political issues. In the Soviet documentary context, by contrast, the highly regulated production system and technological resources did not readily foster similar tendencies. Nevertheless, certain films reveal a more pronounced authorial presence, with filmmakers constructing narratives from a personal point of view and with their own voice, especially in the narratives of political domain. This article therefore seeks to identify early instances of participatory and performative approaches in documentary films at the late Soviet period in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that anticipated the later turn toward personal filmmaking.