Johannes Pääsuke, the founder of Estonian filmmaking, was born in 1892, and at an early age dedicated himself to photographing daily life in Estonia. Commissioned before World War I by the fledgling Estonian National Museum to photograph local culture, his work forms an invaluable visual record of life before independence. Filmmaking was his other passion: having first fashioned a motion picture apparatus from a photo camera, Pääsuke made nearly 40 films, ten of which survive in the Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia. He collaborated with Pathé, Gaumont, and Éclair, and founded the studio Estonia-Film in 1912 when he was twenty (a later company with the same name was active between 1919 and 1932). Drafted into the army in 1915, he became an official war photographer, but in January 1918 was fatally injured in a train crash in Belarus, and died at just 25 years old. Notwithstanding his early demise, his legacy cannot be underestimated: Swedish film historian Lars Kristensen has argued that Pääsuke’s pioneering vision and attention to detail shaped the way documentaries were made throughout the Baltic nations.
While his first documentary, Utotškini lendamine Tartu kohal (Sergey Utochkin’s Flight over Tartu, 1912), is lost, the negative as well as a tinted nitrate print with Finnish intertitles of a film he made one year later, Retk läbi Setumaa (Travels through Setomaa), miraculously survive. Shot in the Setomaa region, on the south-eastern border between Estonia and Russia, the film is a unique record of the people and traditions of this area, whose population maintain a distinct identity and language. Though Russian Orthodox, they’ve held on to a number of pagan customs and beliefs over the centuries and are now considered the last remaining traditional folk culture in Europe. Although Pääsuke was not a local, he managed to get unusually close to the people, who appear remarkably relaxed in these images – under any other circumstances, a strange man with a camera would have gotten very different results. Among the sites in the film are the Petseri Monastery, a church in Värska, a spring fair, Easter customs, crop harvesting in Matsuri, Võõpsu hamlet, and Seto folk dancing.
The first version of Retk läbi Setumaa was released on 12 December 1912, in the Imperial Cinema of Tartu. Pääsukese returned to the region in April 1913 to film the Easter celebrations, incorporating that footage into his earlier film, and it’s this version which is being screened. The Finnish intertitles appear to have been added for release in Finland, but the outbreak of the War prevented distribution in that country.

Maria Mang