Making Films In Latvia - First Motion

ones, immediately indicating with the help of colours that the character is now
operating in the context of their memories and internal reality while the on-screen
action stays realistic throughout the footage.
The use of various kinds of multiple exposure increased significantly; as often as not,
however, the method was not used as an element of spatial consolidation – more as a
fusion of different states of consciousness. Two, three and even more exposures were
produced with the camera, using extremely exact technical calculations: creating
overlapping exposures at a lab meant risking the quality of the film stock. One of the
superb examples where cinematographer succeeded in this process was Days of the
Human. Film is based on a story by prominent Russian writer Andrei Bitov and tells
about a man in two different stages of life – in his youth and in his mature years. His
mother and his older girlfriend, later his wife and daughters accompany his strange
journey through life that mixes dream, awake, different levels of reality rendering the
film as a constant means of subjectivization. The finale of Days of the Human saw a
quadruple exposure demonstrating the unity of past and present with the
psychoanalytical world of the protagonist.
At the time we are concerned with here, expanded technical means and introduction
or borrowing of said filming techniques largely placed the aesthetic value of the
cinematographic image on equal grounds with the narrative, perhaps even allowing it
a dominant position. The stage was comparatively short, however, coming to halt with
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of centralised movie production.
Shortage of funding meant that movies were no longer normally shot on 35mm film;
the use of video formats expanded. The introduction of video aesthetics to filmmaking
made it impossible to use the previous means of expression. The old principles of
lighting could no longer be used: the video formats had a small matrix; interpolations;
a very limited colour range; a large depth of focus-range, etc. All of that made it very
difficult to speak of the visual techniques used by the Soviet-era cinematographer in
more recent Latvian films; individual cinematographers, the likes of Gints BērziĦš or
Jānis Eglītis, borrowed separate techniques to create a filming style of their own.
Finally, we can safely conclude that, in all, the entrance of new untraditional visuality
into the Soviet Latvian filmmaking was a slow process. Only separate early modernist
attempts and the presence of abstraction and stream of consciousness in a number of
movies produced during the final years of the Soviet era can be traced back to
adoption of new filming techniques. Thanks to the introduction of aero filming,
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