This article compares two works of poetic documentary that depict Vilnius: Almantas Grikevičius’ Time Passes Through the City (1966) and Eitvydas Doškus’ Once Upon A Vilnius (2022). Employing a geocritical approach, the analysis investigates the interplay between the city and its cinematic representations. It highlights the thematic and aesthetic dialogue between the two films, contrasting Grikevičius’ modernist vision of Vilnius as a convergence of history and modernity with Doškus’ portrayal of a city in constant evolution, blending local heritage with global influences. The article aims to reveal the historically shifting strategies of Vilnius’ representation and to analyse the city’s resulting imagery and its impact. It argues that both films not only document transformations in Vilnius but also craft a distinctive perception of the city as a dynamic, intertextual, and intermedial space.

The article deals with the writing/production of space in Giedra Radvilavičiūtė’s essay “Rational Decisions”. In contemporary (literary) geography, the writing of space presupposes that space is perceived not as an empty container/stage where the action takes place, but as the space of relationships and networks of human and non-human characters which create the relational space or space as a place-event. The understanding of relational space comes from human geography, which also proposes a new ontology of the city, as outlined in Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. According to these authors, what continously happens in a city is life, made up of countless human and non-human activities, communication, networks and communities. One form of community, they argue, is everyday life itself, in which unpredictable human connections and their effects are realised. The paper argues that, in “Rational Decisions”, the narration creates a new mode of Lithuanian urban literature, in which urban space is written / produced as a place-as-event of everyday life. The concept of ‘domestic disorder’ used in this essay could be one of the concepts sought by the new urban theory to bring research closer to the reality of the contemporary city.

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Israel’s coalition effort (2023) to introduce a “(judicial) reform” was perceived by many Israelis as endangering Israel’s standing as a democratic state. The salience of silence as a theme and a form in the posters exhibited in the demonstrations supporting and opposing the coalition’s move triggered the examination of the semiotic roles played by silence in those posters and whether this use of silence differed by reform support/opposition. Two-hundred and twenty posters partaking in the demonstrations’ linguistic landscape were examined. Implementing an algorithm based on Ephratt’s (2022) model for identifying different types of silences revealed that fifty six of the posters alluded to one of the six categories of silence (stillness, symptomatic silences, silencing, pauses, the unsaid or verbal silence). These posters served as the data for a qualitative-thematic methodology, iteratively abstracting semiotic roles. Silences and silencing reoccurred as a theme concerning political discourse, particularly the matter of voice. The need for parsimonious use of crucial signantia on posters transformed into a semiotic strategy in which leaving out expected signantia served iconically to communicate absence, conatively activate the observers or express consent, metalinguistically convey the shortage of words, legally circumvent possible charges and create a hiatus that provides soothing qualities, enhancing in-group and out-group tolerance. The differing use of silence in the posters, depending on reform support/opposition, is explained in terms of horror vacui and motivation. Finally, the individual posters, as material texts, did not appear nor function in isolation: they took an active part in producing the demonstrations’ spatial semiotics.

The description of space in Greimas’ classical semiotics is based either on the subject’s narrative program and its relationship with the object of value or on the plastic properties of space, which determine the actor’s way of moving. In both cases, the relationship with space depends on the moving body; however, in literary texts, not only is motion important, but also the perception of space and the feelings it evokes. Usually, in literary criticism, the emotional relationship with space is regarded as a mental representation of the character. The analysis of Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė’s novelette “The Jasmin Chamber” highlights the limitations of this perspective, which assumes a one-sided link between the body and space. In the text, the character establishes a reciprocal bond with the home space. The home possesses corporeal properties, appears active and inviting, and the character functions as a sensitive and responsive body. In the novelette, a homology exists between the architectural structure and the individual body, both of which share the same category: continuous / discontinuous. The analysis of space shows that the characters connect only with family, driven by an unconscious desire for lasting relationships and continuity in their living space. Different characters’ interactions with space uncover the duality of desire: the wish to possess an object of value is intertwined with an unconscious pursuit of intense experiences.