The Dud Effect

Deimantas Narkevičius graduated sculpture at Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts. Since the late 90s he mostly works in film and video, experimenting with the film structure and thematizing the weight of subjective memories and personal revisions of the History.
The 2008 film The Dud Effect by Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius is a “reenactment” of something that has never happened but was planned and prepared to the smallest detail: the launch of a nuclear rocket from the Soviet Union. The artist shot the frightfully precise scene at the original location according to the memories of an ex-Soviet soldier who used to serve at a now-closed nuc-lear rocket base in Lithuania and still knows by heart the protocol of launching such a rocket. That Cold War might have ended but does not this only mean that the “enemy” changed name?
Art critic and curator Eric Baudelair says:: „This film simulates the launch of R-14 nuclear missiles from a Soviet base in Lithuania in the 1970s. The Dud Effect is the inverse of The War Games from a narrative standpoint (depicting the launch instead of the impact) but also in terms of style: every effort is made to render the action ordinary, bureaucratic, methodical. The aftermath is suggested by shots of surrounding nature, the sound of strong wind, and a series of long takes of current Soviet-era nuclear installations in an advanced state of decay. Is it a post-apocalyptic world, or simply the spoils of time, the reassuring evidence of the end of the Soviet empire?“