7 - Representing and Escaping the Crises of Neoliberalism: Veiko Õunpuu’s Films and Methods

Summary

We will have to get used to living with the crisis.

Because the crisis is here to stay.

Carlo Bordoni (Bauman and Bordoni 2014: 7)

On 28 December 2018 a press release from the Estonian Film Institute, the country's principal film fund allocating public subsidies, announced triumphantly that 2018 had been a landmark year for Estonian cinema – domestic productions, including 14 new narrative features, had attracted over 650,000 admissions (compared to about 347,000 admissions in 2016 and 282,000 in 2017), with the market share of domestic films reaching over 16 per cent (compared to 10.5 per cent in 2016 and 8 per cent in 2017). This self-commendation, based primarily on statistical values, exemplifies well how Estonians have internalised the neoliberal ‘Newspeak’, which determines quality in terms of quantitative dimensions (cf. Mitric and Sarikakis 2019: 428) and follows the logic of the marketplace, reducing ‘all facets of human life … to their economic aspect, quantified in monetary terms and assigned a barcode’ (Bauman and Donskis 2016: 15).

A closer look at these popular films indicates a tendency towards accessible productions targeted at the ‘average’ audience, frequently combining nodal points of the ‘national narrative’ (Tamm 2018), which presents the past as a teleological struggle towards the independent nation-state, with the toolbox of the so-called ‘orthodox chronotope’ of ‘Hollywood Aristotelianism’, characterised by ‘dramatic realist aesthetic’, ‘seamless diegetic continuity’ and emotionally satisfying finales (Stam, Porton and Goldsmith 2015: 225, 226–7). In the Estonian context, this constellation becomes politically loaded because the particularities of the Estonian version of neoliberal capitalism stem from a combination of an uncompromising laissez-faire philosophy, a fierce rejection of the Soviet legacy and an ardent quest to build the nation-state. Inspired by Milton Friedman, the political elite of the early 1990s equated economic freedom with national independence (see, for example, Bohle and Greskovits 2012: 125). As a result, Estonia has become one of the most liberal market economies in the European Union, frequently applauded as a success story of rapid neoliberal reforms, while paying for it with steep inequalities in distribution of income, precarious conditions of employment, erosion of the social welfare system and severe ethnic dispossession of the sizeable Russian minority (a legacy of Soviet colonisation) (see, for instance, Kideckel 2002; Notermans 2015). Most recently, these imbalances have led to an extreme nationalist backlash (see Tuch 2019).