Looking Back on Perestroika: Three Eras in the History of Latvian Cinema

• In Event: Imagined Memories of Liquid Transitions: Manifestations in (Post-)Soviet / Post-Socialist Popular Cultures and Visual Arts

Abstract

Using three Latvian-language films as case studies, this paper compares representations of civil resistance during the Perestroika era in Juris Podnieks’s Is It Easy to be Young? (1986) with retrospective films in the Republic of Latvia and the United States. The films share an understanding of rock music and youth subcultures as sites of protest. This archive enables a synchronic comparison of protest tactics in the Soviet Union and the North American diaspora as well as a diachronic comparison of protest goals in the 1980s with present-day outcomes.

Author

• Vincent Kancans, U of Minnesota