Self-Portrait

Overview

A 1972 short film by Latvian body and performance artist Andris Grinbergs, is both a singular artifact of Cold War-era Soviet dissident culture and an addition to first-person quasi-documentary cinema's experimental vein. Hailed by filmmaker-critic Jonas Mekas as ‘one of the five most sexually transgressive films ever made,’ Pašportrets is a selfie avant la lettre and a prototypical sex tape. It shares similarities, both in editing style and visual content, with certain films of the so-called American underground, Western European auteurs and various East European New Waves, although Pašportrets lacked their access to audiences. Narrowly escaping confiscation by the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (KGB) shortly after its completion, Pašportrets remained hidden until 1994–1995, when it was restored and premiered at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.