Making Films In Latvia - First Motion

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The astonishing fact here is the topicality of these issues still today and the
inexhaustible opportunities for yet another and another take on the past, unraveling,
writing, and re-writing collective and personal histories with persistency which again
and again testifies to the deep-seated sensibilities of a nation undergone decades of
political, social, and individual trauma.
The second group of films also probes historical schisms dating back to the
decades before, during, and after WWII, but does so through a specific character. The
most intriguing here is the range of techniques used – reenactment, drawn animation,
collage, and animation of photography, compilations of archive footage – are all
employed in a specific way so that the the techniques and aesthetics would mirror the
very subject of the film. A curious film among these is the award-winning animated
documentary Little Bird’s Diary (Čiža acīm, 2007) by one of the most promising
Latvian animation directors Edmunds Jansons. The film is constituted by animated,
authentic hand-drawn diaries by a woman who has thus documented the story of her
life, from as early on as 1945. The humorous images, which could be described as a
kind of naïve art, are accompanied by the voice-over narration by the protagonist, thus
making the film all the more intimate and personal. Another two films, historical
“reconstructions”, deal with two significant Soviet propaganda-associated figures in
art, dealing with the uneasy subject of the artists’ willing or unwitting role as an
accomplice in the construction of a mass ideology. Klucis: Deconstruction of an Artist
(Klucis. Nepareizais latvietis, 2008) is a painstakingly elaborate film by Pēteris
Krilovs, a director of the older generation of Latvian filmmakers. A vivisection of the
life and art of Gustavs Klucis, the Latvian-born Constructivist avant-garde artist, who
created much of Stalinist propaganda with his pioneering work in photography. As a
film about an essentially modernist artist, Klucis: Deconstruction of an Artist is a
veritable deconstruction, wearing theories of early avant-garde on its sleeve, with
aesthetics mirroring the montage theories of another Russian avant-garde trailblazer –
Sergei Eizenstein, as the film dissects, assembles, and reassembles Klucis’ artworks,
persistently drawing movement and space out of the two-dimensional images, the
collage-like principle enhanced by the layering of staged events, historical documents,
archive footage, voice-over narration (partly done by the director himself), etc. Based
on the diaries of Klucis and his wife, fellow artist Valentina Kulagina, official regime
documents, and historical accounts, it is both an intimate story and at the same time
also a dissection of the grander historical narrative, exploring the irony of the fate of