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Home>Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960-1990>Censored and Salvaged>Endless Day

**Introduction**

**List of Films Shown in the Series**

**History's Shadow**

***Innocence Unprotected***

***Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania***

**Documentaries with a Human Face****

***Gypsies*****; *One Day More***

***Black Film***

***Trace;**10 Minutes Older***

***235 000 000***

**Balázs Béla Studio (BBS)**

***Long Distance Runner;**New Year’s Eve***

***Four Bagatelles; Private History***

**City Scene / Country Scene**

**OHO Films**

***Game;**Litany of Happy People***

***Pression;**Centre***

***Self-Fashion Show***

***Hello, Berlin!***

***Death of Metalosaurus***

**The Workshop of the Film Form and Beyond**

***Winding Paths*; *Market;**I'm Going***

***Open Form;**1,2,3...Cinematographer's Exercise***

***Video A;**The Space Transmission; 30 Sound Situations***

***Clapper; Transformation*****

**The Enthusiasts Archive**

**Experimental Film in Croatia and Serbia****

***K3*; *Straight Line;**Encounter***

***Termites; Kariokinesis;**Twist-Twist***

***Acceleration; Ping-Pong;**Personal Cuts ***

***The Seal; Anthony's Broken Mirror***

***Raven*; *Vowels*; *The First Photo of Me...***

**Censored and Salvaged**

***Endless Day***

***Centaur***

**Artists, Collectives, Communities****

***Cinéforms*;*Somnambulists***

***Boxing*;*The Hands***

***White People***

***Groping One's Way*;*Puppets***

***Drawings*; *Transformations: Potter’s Bull*****

**Found Footage and Home Movies****

***The Flipside of the Coin***

**Medium Experiments: From Film to Video**

***The Square*; *Media*; *Kalah***

***Painted in the Air*; *Checkmate*****

***Searching for Balance*; *Prophecy***

***Video Manual*;*Image Is Virus*****

***DM/1978 Talks to DM/2010*; *Cut** ***

**Credits and Acknowledgments**

Banner stills L to R: *Centaur*, courtesy Tamás St. Auby; and *Endless Day,* courtesy Estonian Television Archive / Estonian Public Broadcasting

***Endless Day*****(*Lõputu Päev*)**Jaan Tooming and Virve Aruoja, Estonia, 1971/1990, 35 mm digitally restored and shown on Blu-ray, 30 minutes****

Still from *Endless Day*courtesy Estonian Television Archive / Estonian Public Broadcasting

This short—just half an hour—made-for-TV film, scripted by Paul-Eerik Rummo (b. 1942) and directed by Virve Aruoja (1922–2013) and Jaan Tooming (b. 1946), is doubtlessly one of the most remarkable cinematic endeavors to come out of Estonia. Its production started in the mid-1970 and was halted a year later after the Artistic Council of the Estonian Television Film Studio rejected the film’s initial (and only) screen version as “at odds with the principles of socialist realism.” The management of the studio regarded **Endless Day**as so great a political threat that the film was not only banned forever but slated for destruction. The people who were told to destroy it, however, secretly took the prints to Virve Aruoja, who hid them first in her own cellar and later, after marrying a Swede and moving to Sweden, in her brother’s shed. (Her brother, Vello Aruoja, had been one of the two cinematographers of the film along with Peeter Tooming, Jaan’s brother and a legendary Estonian photographer). Almost 20 years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Peeter Tooming brought the prints to light and completed the film in 1991. The film was fully rediscovered, however, only in 2006, when it received its unfairly belated premiere in cinemas (in March 2006) and on Estonian Television (in December 2006). In 2009, it was also released on DVD, along with a number of other forgotten Estonian shorts.

The uncompromising creativity that characterizes **Endless Day** is not surprising when one considers the artistic biographies of its authors.****Since the mid-1960s, both Jaan Tooming and Paul-Eerik Rummo were central figures in the so-called theater revolution at the Vanemuine Theater in Estonia’s principal university town, Tartu. There, Rummo’s **Cinderella Game** (**Tuhkatriinumäng,** 1969) captured the anxious atmosphere that both preceded and followed the spring of 1968. Virve Aruoja was also trained as a theater director, though she had started working for Estonian television in the mid-1950s. It was there that she produced **Between Three Plagues,** a feature-length TV-biopic about a 16th-century Estonian chronicler Balthasar Russow, on which Jaan Tooming assisted her and was also featured as one of the protagonists. Subsequently, Aruoja and Tooming formed a productive team where Tooming’s overflowing creative energies were channeled and balanced by Aruoja’s analytical mind. Peeter Tooming, who had worked as a cinematographer at Tallinnfilm, Estonia’s main film studio, since 1967, was one of the founders of the innovative STODOM group of photographers in 1964 and is best known for his self-consciously modernist imagery.

Archival materials reveal that Rummo’s initial screenplay was directed and filmed with unusual fidelity, which testifies to the strength and resonance of its underlying idea. In Rummo’s vision, the image track was to be complemented by an equally important sound track, composed entirely of songs (for which Rummo wrote the lyrics) and almost devoid of dialogue. Narratively, both the image track and the sound track conveyed the idea of a man in search of his voice and place in the world. In Rummo’s words, he yearned for the times when lyrics, melody, and performance had not yet been separated, and he wished he had the skills to not only write the words but also create the music. His lyrics were meant as a protest against both the ideological pressures of the “crude Communism” of Soviet authorities and the lame mainstream of popular music. Tõnu Tepandi, the performer and coauthor (with Olav Ehala) of these stunning tunes, was assigned to this role by Rummo from the start, as Rummo felt Tepandi’s style and outlook were close to his own. Tepandi was already known for his remarkable music in 1968, and he became affiliated with Vanemuine Theater in 1970. In 1969, he took part, alongside Jaan Tooming and others, in the much-celebrated **Suitsu-Night** at Tallinn Writers’ House, an important milestone of the “Estonian theater revolution” where six actors performed verses by Gustav Suits, an Estonian poet and literary scholar who had fled to Sweden in 1944.

Still from *Endless Day*courtesy Estonian Television Archive / Estonian Public Broadcasting

The media historian Peeter Linnap has argued that the “dynamism and expressivity of the formal language” of Tooming’s films resembles first and foremost the feel of the works of the French **nouvelle vague** directors (Jean-Luc Godard and many others), as well as that of the kindred styles adopted at the beginning of the 1960s by many filmmakers in the Eastern Bloc (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary) and Soviet Russia.[1] In my opinion, Tooming’s oeuvre should principally be situated within the conceptual territory and formal framework of experimental filmmaking in a broader sense. In particular, some of the images, visual juxtapositions, and constellations in **Endless Day** reveal strong surrealist undercurrents in the spirit of Luis Buñuel. Other frames of the film bear a close resemblance to early avant-garde films, such as Fernand Léger’s **Ballet mécanique** or René Clair’s **Entr’acte**(both 1924). Importantly, according to Jaan Tooming, these similarities are completely coincidental. At the same time, other references were quite intentional, mainly those related to the sequences filmed in Tallinn’s Old Town. One of the longest vignettes in the film depicts the shooting of a historical adventure film, referencing **Endless Day’s**officially endorsed Estonian film cousins (especially **The Last Relic** [**Viimne reliikvia**], directed by Grigori Kromanov, 1969), a USSR-wide blockbuster produced by Tallinnfilm. More generally, the sequence alludes to the fact that Tallinn—a Hanseatic town with strong historic ties to Northern and Western Europe—was systematically exploited as a ready-made set for countless Soviet productions that needed a “European-looking” setting. The most famous example of such a production was the last Soviet adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s **Three Musketeers,** which was made into a three-part TV miniseries/musical **D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers**(**D’Artagnan i tri mushketera**), directed by Georgii Iungval’d-Khil’kevich in 1978.

After the banning of **Endless Day,** Tooming made three more films—**Colorful Dreams** (**Värvilised unenäod,** 1974, Tallinnfilm), also codirected with Virve Aruoja; **The Misadventures of the New Satan** (**Põrgupõhja uus Vanapagan,** 1977, Eesti Telefilm; this film was initially a play that Tooming had directed in Vanemuine, adapting it for stage and screen from an Estonian literary classic); and **Man and Pine Tree** (**Mees ja mänd,**1979, Eesti Telefilm). These, too, created controversy—**Colorful Dreams,** despite being released, was disparaged as too eclectic and ambiguous; **Man and Pine Tree** was curiously banned after being denounced by Paul Kuusberg, whose short story **With a Little Bird**(**Linnukesega**) Tooming had used as the inspiration for the film. Only **The Misadventures of the New Satan** was welcomed rather warmly.[2] Disheartened by Soviet censorship, Tooming gave up filmmaking altogether but continued to direct for (and occasionally act on) the stage. In 2012, he received the State Cultural Award for his significant long-term contribution to Estonian culture.  — Eva Näripea

*The author would like to express her gratitude to Jaan Tooming, Paul-Eerik Rummo, Jaak Lõhmus, and Marko Raat for their generous assistance in her research on Endless Day. The series organizers would like to thank**Kadri Kanter, Heiki Männik, and Sirje Jõesaar at the Estonian Television Archive / Estonian Public Broadcasting and Maria Belovas at the Estonian Embassy in the United States for their assistance in making a screening of this film possible in Washington.*

 

1. Peeter Linnap, “Astu parteisse ja nõua! Jaan Toominga ekspressionistlikud resistance-filmid ENSVs” [Join the party and make demands! Jaan Tooming's expressionist resistance-films in the ESSR], *Teater. Muusika. Kino* 1 (2002): 62. (back to top)

2. Tiit Tuumalu, “Unustatud vana hõbe. Esimene valik eesti lühimängufilme DVD-l” [Forgotten old silver: The first selection of Estonian short films on DVD],*Teater. Muusika. Kino* 8–9 (2009), 148. (back to top)

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