Tühirand eesti kultuurimälus: kirjandus-, filmi- ja teatripärase esituse transmeedialine analüüs
Emptybeach in Estonian cultural memory: a transmedial analysis of the literary, the cinematic and the theatrical presentation

Summary/Abstract: The current article discusses cultural memory as beholding both mnemonic and creative function. Related to this idea are two possible ways of describing the existence of artistic texts in culture. First, there are separate individual texts, and secondly, texts always belong to some larger intertextual networks. This is especially relevant in the case of repetitive texts, when one story is represented in several versions. These different representations evoke in the cultural memory a new mental whole, in which we can distinguish between invariant and variative aspects. In the case of several representative media, we can analyse the new mental text applying the notion of transmediality (Herman 2004), which is defined by Torop (2008: 725) as the mental aspect of the existence of texts in culture. In Estonian culture, “Emptybeach” (“Tühirand”) is one such repetitive text. The prototext is a short novel by Mati Unt (1972) which is the basis for a cinematic and a theatrical version. The article focuses on the central figure of the emptybeach, which is both a narrative space and the mental state of the protagonist, and through that, also the philosophical dominant of the texts. The texts are first described separately, concentrating on each author’s ways of mediating the emptybeach. Secondly, they are discussed as forming a new multilingual transmedial text. According to Lotman (1999) the languages of visual and verbal media are not intertranslatable, differing already in the aspects of continuity and discreteness. Nevertheless, in cultural memory there is a constant dialogue between them and based on that, new meanings keep emerging.

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