Making Films In Latvia - First Motion

emarkable performance by Ludmila Gurchenko) life with no hope and about her
teenage son (Valeriy Kargin), who his teacher is very worried about and in an
objurgatory manner says to his mother: „The boy is unordinary, he stands out of the
whole setting.” Both the mother and the son are people standing outside the system -
becoming nearly antisocial elements. At the end of the film the mother tries to commit
suicide – it is shown indirectly because suicide was a taboo subject in Soviet cinema.
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Family Melodrama could have been an unfulfilled dream about a family. An
essential feature of such films was ”a lonely woman” that is a common character in
Soviet cinema in the 1970’s and the 1980’s. In Latvian cinema, a woman’s loneliness
during the so-called developed socialism period, in other words, the time of
prosperity, was portrayed in Dzidra Ritenberga’s film Three Minute Flight (Trīs
minūšu lidojums, 1979). This piece of art steps over the well-known chamberstyle,
typical of such stories about loneliness, because Justīne, just like Aloizs Brenčs’
Marta, is also a symbolic character whose fate shows the political events in Latvia.
Ritenberga’s next film, Evening Version (Vakara variants, 1980), already was a
typical story of a woman’s unfulfilled feelings, same as in Varis Brasla’s film Wish
me Bad Weather for the Flight (Novēli man lidojumam nelabvēlīgu laiku, 1980),
Rainy Blues (Lietus blūzs, 1982) and a few other films where the issue of loneliness
appears not so directly but is hidden within stories about relationships.
One of the very few directors who were not afraid to use the name melodrama
and who plainly stated their wish to work in this genre was Gunārs Cilinskis. He,
together with director Varis Brasla, who admitted himself an adherent of
chamberstyle and spiritual crochet, created the most distinguished piece of Latvian
melodrama – the film The Lake Sonata (Ezera sonāte, 1976). Its special significance
and durability in Latvian culture is achieved by balanced combination of character
systems and nationaly tinted archetypes with global melodrama structure and
precisely used language of classical cinema. The film clearly showed that within the
artistic character system in Latvian culture many universal gender constructions
prevail, very little influenced by the particular socio-political situation.
As a repulse to the current colonization politics and, at some point, as a
counteraction to cultural commercialization, during the 1970’s an intensified interest
in Latvian identity arises, and the clearest examples of this phenomenon could be
observed in Latvian folklore and etnography. Folklore in both the republics of the
USSR as well as in socialist countries of Eastern Europe became the indirect