Aesthetics of the Baltic Sea in Documentary

• In Event: Reimagining the Baltic Sea in Cultural Productions

Abstract

One of the most arresting audiovisual images of the Baltic Sea comes from footage of the rescue
mission during the MS Estonia disaster in September, 1994. We see images of two- and three-
meter waves from the perspective of television cameras mounted in helicopters, the wind
whitening the waves, four-meter orange life rafts flipping across the surface. The sea churns
under an autumn storm; this is not the tranquil summer archipelagos of the Baltic coast. “What
sway do [human metrics] hold against the roaring maw of the eternal sea, whose movement and multispecies wonders elude pretensions to a “God’s eye view”?” ask the authors of a multi-
disciplinary study of how we comprehend the sea bottom (Pratt et. al. 2020: 173). Yet, the
helicopters seek the God’s Eye view, as they try to master the sea to rescue victims of the
doomed vessel. The sublime power of the sea is evident in the images of the rescue, as is the will to mastery of the sea, which typically aligns more with images of the beautiful. The Baltic is
most often aligned with the beautiful, in its tranquility, as well as the picturesque, in images of diminutive sites of inhabitation, a cabin on an island here a fishing boat there. The Baltic Sea is also frequently depicted as outside aesthetic categories, as what Marc Augé would call a non-
place – a functional throughway, like a highway or an airport. The ubiquitous ferries are the
image of the non-place. This paper seeks to build on discussions of crossings of the Baltic (Roos
2015), by asking how the Baltic Sea itself is constructed in audiovisual imagery of the sea since 1991. The paper studies images of the Baltic Sea in documentary cinema about the sea, in
particular Our Baltic Sea (2009-2020) and Estonia (2020), seeking to describe and theorize the
predominant aesthetic categories that are invoked, not only conventional Kantian aesthetics, but also in relation to recent discussions of emergent aesthetic categories as well (Ngai 2012).

Author

• Andrew Nestingen, University of Washington