an artist

Fall, 2005, single-channel video, 4 min
(from the video series Stages)

The video starts with a short story about the Ozo video rental – an employee tells us about the oldest video rental in Lithuania, mentioning the declining quality of videotapes. As new tapes do not find their way to the archive, the video rental can expect the same sad future as the Ozo cinema —a once popular and famous venue.
A detail of the video rental archive is shown while the employee is telling her story, and is replaced by an image of the empty Ozo cinema hall. The cinema and video rental are related, as films from the video rental archive are used in the cinema program. Ozo cinema is still functioning, but other newly built multiplexes in Vilnius have drowned this small shabby art-house cinema.
Sound-bites from the monologue by the heroine of The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) played by Sophia Loren, in low-quality Russian-dubbing taken from the video rental, appears as a concluding soundtrack. It helps us draw a parallel between the fall of the Roman Empire and the ‘golden age’ of old cinema theatres in Lithuania, which is near extinction.