Making Films In Latvia - First Motion

ensured the credibility of the pseudo-documentary love story and helped the viewers
connect with the screen. New lighter cameras equipped with zoom options and
adaptable focusing distance also helped the director Uldis Brauns in his quest for
visual innovations in his fiction film debut The Motorcycle Summer (Motociklu
vasara, 1975). The cinematographers, documentary filmmakers Ivars Seleckis and
Kalvis Zalcmanis, made ample use of the POV shot principle, hitherto rarely seen in
this part of the world; hand-held camera pan shots, as well as, thanks to the mobility
of the camera, completely non-traditional high and low angles. In all, it was the
uninterrupted ‘lightness’ and natural movement of the camera that allowed to create a
feel of simultaneous activity and fragility of the two main characters. Footage shot
with hand-held cameras were also often used, creating a presence of explosive and
sporadic consciousness in the subjects of the films.
In the late 1960s and in 1970s the Riga school of poetical documentary developed and
became the driving force in search for extraordinary visual forms in cinema. In this
period documentaries in comparison with feature films had relatively lesser control on
the material, so they strived to determine the way how to overcome the content
parochialisms of the commissioned topics. Visuality became the main condition of
these films; in some occasions it was even possible to completely avoid the presence
of ideologically charged voice-overs. The most striking paradigm of the period’s
visual Gesamtkunstwerk is 235 000 000 (1967), film created by the most significant
documentalists of the era. It was shot by four different crews in the whole Soviet
Union under the supervision of script writer Herz Frank and director Uldis Brauns.
Film contrastingly captures various moments in the life of an individual as well as the
society (rites, ancient traditions, official ceremonies, daily activities), seeking the
mysterious link between individual and the masses. The cinematographers Uldis
Brauns, Rihards Pīks, Valdis Kroăis, Ralfs KrūmiĦš approached the event and the
environment, employing all their skills to add artistic values to their realistic
observation. The novelty was not solely in the fact that the film combined visual
styles of different cinematographers but also in the employed techniques – the film is
dominated by search for particular graphic structures in the mundane activities of
individuals, as well as images of abstract industrial or urban details in order to bestow
a completely new metaphorical meaning. To intensify the level of subjectivisation the
camera focuses on close-up portraits and records to the utmost the minute emotional
changes in the human facial expressions. In this kaleidoscopical film were are no text
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