Making Films In Latvia - First Motion

Viktorija Eksta Group Portrait of an Empire
„235 000 000” ( Rīgas Kinostudija, 1967, 108 min, black and white)
Script: Herz Frank,
Director: Uldis Brauns
Music: Raimonds Pauls.
Filming groups (“Cameras”): Herz Frank and cinematographer Rihards Pīks -
Camera 1
Laima Žurgina and cinematographer Valdis Kroăis - Camera 2
Biruta Veldre and cinematographer Ralfs KrūmiĦš - Camera 3
Cinematographers Uldis Brauns, Ivars Seleckis, Ruta Ubaste - Camera 4
Towards modernist manifestation
40
After World War II the aesthetics of Latvian cinema was defined by the rules
of Socialist realism. To a certain extent we can talk about the emergence of a
background of modernization in Soviet - also Latvian - cinema beginning with the
second half of the 1950s. Instead of the imposing heroic style, a more intimate mode
of expression was sought after. Filmmakers tried to move closer to reality and
represent it through the subject, characters and environment became more humane.
At the beginning of the 1960s, trends of modernization in Latvian documentary
cinema manifested as pursuit of reflexivity and subjectivity. Young documentary
filmmakers started to explore the essence and possibilities of their medium first of all
researching visuality. Claims to authorship emerged, emphasizing one’s personal style
and perception of the world. Today films made by Ivars Seleckis, Aivars Freimanis,
Ivars Kraulitis, Uldis Brauns and Herz Frank in the 1960s are known as Riga poetic
documentary cinema. Gesamtkunstwerk „235 000 000” stands out of this group by its
epic scale and mixture of heroical pathetics with intimate lyricism. It is an essentially
modernist experiment, a simulation that retained a close relationship with actuality.
Herz Frank, a scriptwriter of this and other documentary films and later also a
director, writes: “When dealing with an event and wishing to portray it poetically,
following its natural dramatics, the task of a documentary filmmaker comes close to
that of a scriptwriter in a fiction film, the only difference being that in documentary
cinema the roles are written not for those to be shot but for those who will shoot,
namely, cinematographers.” 14
14 Франк, Герц, «Карта Птолемeя», Искусство, 1975, p. 143