Making Films In Latvia - First Motion

people from the topical issues of life, spread the bourgeois ideals, propagate
pessimism and disbelief in the powers of man, etc., while the Socialist art and
Marxism-Leninism aesthetics declared that their task was to help to get to the essence
of life, to affect it actively, to form a personality of wide-ranging knowledge and
learning – the man of communism.
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Ābrams Kleckins, too, in the 1977 symposium mentioned, deems that the
main criterion in film art is its relationship with reality, which, naturally, may seem
logical, provided that we accept the term documentary cinema. But what the young
filmmakers’ did with the filmic material disclosed the fact that art cannot be
documental per se at all. Documentary cinema particularly clearly demonstrates that
“reality” is defined by an artistic concept, reality is an artistic production, subjected to
the possibilities of the medium. This theory was the point of departure for director
Ansis Epners’ modernist film career, but his attempts were soon stifled. As Ābrams
Kleckins explains: “From the very beginning, Epners built his films as an artistic
structure, his opinion was that he was free from the specific reality he shot. He created
a new form out of it. (..) In this way, it was as if he destroyed the very nature of
documentary cinema itself.” 7
In my opinion, in the Soviet period, in professional, official cinema, directors
that came the closest to the aesthetics of modernism were Aivars Freimanis and Herz
Frank. Further on, I will describe some of the modernist features of the works of Herz
Frank.
Being a documentary cinema scriptwriter and later also a director, Herz Frank
was forced to retain a relationship with actuality, which sometimes had a very distant
connection to reality (for example, in the films Year in Review or 235 000 000), in
fact, it was a simulation. It is possibly why Frank’s and his colleagues’ essentially
modern experiments were permitted and even highly esteemed. To a certain extent it
was accepted that such postulates as friendship of nations, bloom and advancement of
life could not be represented by realistic techniques.
In his book Ptolemy’s Map, published in 1975, Frank offers a conceptual
structure, which could be called a pulsation theory. 8 Frank writes that film, regardless
of whether it is a fiction or documentary film, in order to stir the spectator, has to have
filmpulse. The pulse is formed by symbiosis – fact/image/fact/image. “Pulsating, the
7 Matīsa, Kristīne, Redovičs, Agris. Dokumentāls logs uz Eiropu, p. 120
8 Франк, Герц. Карта Птолемeя, Москва: Искусство, 1975, p. 58-59