QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Do they believe that there will be an end, or that there won’t be one? And what will there be after the end?”

These questions, posed by Ilmārs Tīrmanis to Anna Ginteri about her colleagues in astronomy, are the very same questions which director Māris Maskalāns is asking in his documentary The End. Maskalāns may be a keen observer of eschatological issues, but then so are his subjects. Naturalist and veterinarian Tirmanis likes to film the decomposition of animal carcasses in time lapse. Biologist and malacologist Edgars Dreijers likes to take his work home with him, preparing animal corpses not just for the Museum of Anatomy but also in his specimen-filled apartment, while going on field excursions to gather insects and invertebrates from cemeteries (and rearing a ‘pet’ medicinal leech with his own flesh and blood before putting it in a fomaldehyde jar post mortem). Artist and academic Kristians Brekte likes to incorporate bones and preserved bodies in his performances with the band +K +M +B (who also score the film) “to remind people that they are not immortal.” And Anna Ginteri, with her husband Arnis, occasionally slaughters livestock on their farm for the family’s dinner, while looking to the stars for more cosmic perspectives on our place in the universe, and on the meaning of eternity in a seemingly bounded system.

In other words, The End switches readily from the microscopic to the macroscopic, and from the entomological to the extraterrestrial, on a quest for meaning in mortality. For the most part, the film tracks these five people in their day-to-day routines, their work, research and hobbies, and their art, while letting them talk through their feelings about death and what comes after in biological, aesthetic, religious and astrophysical terms – whether in voiceover or in conversation with each other. All, apart from the the Ginteris, take trips into the primal woods and paludal ooze, and all, though seemingly leading separate lives, cross paths in different ways, with Brekte the glue that somehow connects them all together. It is also Brekte who discusses the rôle of his art as memento mori “maybe sometimes with a little humour”, in what serves equally as reflexive commentary on the documentary itself. Brekte’s principal motivation for exploring death’s edge would appear to be a deep-seated curiosity about life and the world. Indeed the same might be said of any of the film’s subjects, although Dreijers alone comes across as singular in his fixations, even if they extend from cadavers and death to bugs and slugs.

“Regardless of species or conditions, it’s inescapable,” says Tirmanis near the end of The End. “If we are born, then we will have a life, and then there will be death – after a few seconds, or 120 years, we pass away.” His words are underscored and ironised by the sight of him slapping and crushing a mosquito that is buzzing around his bare skin. Yet implicit in what he says is a recurring motif in the film: that death, for all its finality, is also part of an ongoing cycle of birth and life, in much the way that Breke recycles abandoned bodies and discarded art to create something new, or that a collapsing star provides the materials for an emerging one, or that a corpse feeds the larvae of flies, offers accommodation to beetles and fertilises the ground. So while the film’s title appears again at its end, like a kind of cinematic fin to close off the film and usher in the credits, perhaps this is, after all, just another beginning.

The End just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival