Katalog 2013.pdf - Visions du Réel

atelier – laila pakalnina
171
A matter of
atmosphere
The cinema of Laila Pakalnina
“This film was created
to rejoice at the existence
of cinema. If cinema didn’t
exist, I would have
to become an ice-cream
vendor (that was my first
dream profession).
But cinema is better than
ice-cream!”
director’s statement for
“Picas”, 2012
Laila Pakalnina is not a rational filmmaker.
In her extremely thoughtful incoherence
she has directed and produced
more than twenty films. “A film is a film”
she says, no matter if short, mediumlength,
feature, documentary, fiction:
the process and the production methods
might be different, but certainly
not the attitude, which is one – though
constantly evolving – and permeates
equally all her films.
Her first works, especially the trilogy
Vela (The Linen, 1991), Pramis (The
Ferry, 1994) and Pasts (The Mail, 1995),
already reveal some of the particular
aspects and qualities of her future
works. Vela is her graduation work
at VGIK, the renowned national film
school in Moscow, where she met Gints
Berzins, the cinematographer who,
starting from these films, will become
her recurrent DOP, heavily contributing
in the creation of Pakalnina’s distinctive
visual style. The three films focus
on daily routines, we could almost say
they focus on nothing special. What
makes these three black and white
shorts extraordinary is that in none of
them words are the key point and maximum
relevance is given to the smaller
gesture, to the creative use of sound,
to the extremely stylish and meaningful
framing, finally: to the “atmosphere”,
possibly the most important concept
in the director’s filmic way of thinking.
These three films already bring the
marks of a complex and yet extremely
accessible universe, a unique mixture
of lightness, empathy, attentiveness
and depth, in which the often difficult
reality Pakalnina depicts becomes
utterly poetic. On a different layer we
could notice another recurring note
in Pakalnina’s cinema: her country.
Doms (The Dome) was filmed in 1991,
the same year of Vela, and is possibly
the most frantic film of Pakalnina. She
films the main church in Riga becoming
a shelter for the people who stood
up for independence during the barricades.
Pakalnina reveals a more direct
social and political approach, which she
will later develop as an editorial writer
for the most important Latvian daily
newspaper, “Diena”. The corpus formed
by the trilogy, Doms and all the works
of the early to mid-nineties could also
finally be considered as very personal
yet exceptional documentation on the
transition from Soviet Union occupation
to independence in Latvia.
In Ozols (The Oak, 1997) we notice a
more evident formal apparatus, based
on slow panoramic shots and frontal,
almost “suspended” presentations of
a complex and yet extremely
accessible universe,
a unique mixture of lightness,
empathy, attentiveness and
depth, in which the often
difficult reality Pakalnina
depicts becomes utterly poetic.
her characters, which we will later see
applied in several future works both fiction
and documentaries. We can also
find here a particularly intense sense
of nature – and man as a part of it –
which will become a distinctive trait of
Pakalnina’s poetic universe. Her first
fiction feature Kurpe (The Shoe, 1998,
selected at the Cannes Film Festival)
and her second, Pitons (The Python,