Social Ties of Latvian Film Professionals in the Soviet Era and the Historical Situatedness of the Canon

Author

Elina Reitere

Abstract

Ewa Mazierska and László Strausz, in their opinion pieces in “Studies in Eastern European Cinema”, have opened a discussion about the diminishing critical relevance of feature films made in Eastern Europe (Mazierska 2023, Strausz 2023). I argue here that we have to differentiate between a canon as a discursive construction that, as Strausz underscores, is built on the East-West dichotomy, as well as on the actual personal ties and exchanges of experiences that took place between the filmmakers of different Eastern European countries, the Soviet Republics and the African, Asian and Latin American countries with which the Soviet Union maintained friendly ties. By paying attention to the different social contacts of the historical actors and how they construct an epistemic community, the “constructiveness” of the film canon as socially and historically situated knowledge comes to the forefront.

Keywords

Latvian film history, Soviet film history, Baltic film history, postcolonial critique, social ties, European documentary cinema.

Introduction

French film critic Serge Daney visited Yerevan in 1983. There he discovered the films of Artur Peleshian and urged the filmmaker to meet up later in Moscow. Fascinated by Peleshian’s personality, Daney asked a friend whether there existed other “authentic, unknown Soviet filmmakers”. Yes, the friend confirmed, but they are easier to find among documentary and scientific filmmakers because “when it is Science speaking, it is no longer the Party’s voice” (Daney 2012: 121). Daney’s friend further explained that in the Soviet Union, it is hard for information to circulate. Therefore filmmakers produce their films without thinking about the possibilities of film distribution. In order to get to know the filmmakers who are “really working”, Daney should visit the Soviet Republics and meet “a certain Franck in Riga, a school of documentary filmmakers in Tallinn, a certain Sokurov in Leningrad” (Daney 2012:122). Daney had no time to travel to all these distant cities on the periphery of the Soviet Empire. But now, some forty years later, this encounter between Daney and Peleshian and his reflection on the unknown Soviet filmmakers can serve as a starting point for thinking over the relationships between the filmmakers of the different Soviet Republics in light of the current move to decolonise the film scholarship on Soviet cinema, reinforced by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

My point of departure is the concept of “weak ties”, as coined by Mark S. Granovetter. Analysing the quality of interpersonal relationships, he argues that these networks have influence not only on a small scale – they affect large-scale patterns as well and translate their impact back onto the small-scale groups (Granovetter,1973:1360). Following Granovetter, I will reflect on how friendships and professional connections developed (or did not develop) in a particular time and space (Soviet Latvia), between the country’s film professionals and their colleagues from the other Soviet republics and the so-called “Third World” countries.¹ My research was driven by the desire to clarify how certain social structures foster the building and reception of film canons that differ from traditional Western film cultures and which factors may influence certain hierarchies of canons and taste.

In my article, I employ my research interviews and private correspondence with contemporary witnesses. Obviously, it is not possible to draw a full picture of different social ties between filmmakers of the different Soviet republics because many of these were informal contacts, information about which, for obvious reasons, cannot be uncovered. Therefore, this will be quite a small-scale study that is still eager to escape the feeling of total arbitrariness. It demonstrates instead how certain social ties can have (or not have) an effect on the lives of the different social actors. In this regard, it is worth noting that the desire of a historian to be a “homo narrans” (Fisher 1984: 1-2) is problematic. Such a desire aims to assign greater importance to those historical events that can be narrativised in a more complex way. Examples in this article demonstrate that personal encounters sometimes are simply that – nice time spent together. They are important for the historical actors personally because such encounters enhance the quality of their lives, but they hardly influence the course of history.

Today, the importance of networking is stressed when young filmmakers are taught how to build a career in the film industry. Taking this into account, it is surprising that there is little research on how personal connections have systematically influenced certain developments in film history. In a way, it runs counter to the usual power axis that characterised the film industry in the Soviet Union. Namely, the career developments of Soviet filmmakers were dependent, firstly, on decisions made in the republics (in the case of Latvia: those at the Riga Film Studio, the Union of Filmmakers of Soviet Latvia, and the Committee of Cinematography of the Latvian SSR), and, secondly, on decisions made at the censorship offices in Moscow (Goskino).

The inspiration for my undertaking comes from research done by Elena Razlogova about the impact of Soviet film festivals on the development of the film cultures in Asian, African, and Latin American countries (Razlogova 2020: 140-154), from the work of Gabrielle Chomentowski, whose research concerns African and Middle Eastern film students at VGIK (Chomentowski 2019: 189-198) and from the research carried out by Monika Talarczyk and Magda Lipska about international students at Łódź Film School (Lipska, Talarczyk 2021).

In regard to drawing relationships between the filmmakers of the different Soviet republics and beyond, my epistemic position has to be stressed. Namely, my knowledge about the different types of ties and how they influenced certain developments, is based on my research in Latvia and my knowledge of Latvian film history. The particular positioning of Latvia on the Western borderlands of the Soviet Union, with a vast multicultural country on the right, created particular hierarchies of power and taste that were reflected in cinema-related events organised in the region as well.

This article aims to open a new perspective in Latvian film historiography by grounding its narrative in the personal relations and interwoven pathways of historical agents in a particular historical period. Focusing on the personal connections of historical individuals aims at developing a more horizontal view of historical developments. Thus, it supplements Inga Pērkone's systemic perspective on the Latvian film of the Soviet period. Drawing on David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thomson’s influential book The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Production to 1960, Pērkone conceptualises Latvian film production from the mid-1960s until 1989 as the classical period of Latvian film. (Pērkone, Balčus, Surkova, Vītola 2011: 47-49). Similar to classical Hollywood, Soviet film production was based on the studio system with hierarchical job divisions; the basis of the shooting process was the continuity script (in the Soviet Union, it was the so-called director’s script, which meant that, contrary to Hollywood, the film director was the “author” in the filmmaking process). In the case of Soviet film production, we can also speak of a vertical integration because each film had a guaranteed audience. During the classical period of Latvian film, which Pērkone defines as the mid-sixties to 1989, films were made using a particular set of stylistics rooted in the socialist realist method. Another difference from the Hollywood model was that profit was not central, but rather, the reinforcement of Soviet ideology (Pērkone 2011: 47-49). In order to achieve this, a highly nuanced system of censorship (and pressure to self-censor) became an integral part of the Soviet system, which can also be regarded as a vertical distribution of power. In the US, this was achieved in the classic studio system through vertical integration, when the studios not only produced films but also distributed them through theatres, which were also owned by the film studios. According to Pērkone, the Soviet film system worked in the same way.

One might argue that today the best way to trace social ties between persons would be using methods from digital humanities. That could be a task for further research, in cooperation with colleagues and institutions capable of undertaking. But methodologically speaking, for my research it is more important to expose the quality of the networks and their embeddedness in the social world.

Personal Connections and the Ambiguous Interest in ‘Third World’ Cinema

When researching the ties and structures that influenced the contact-building and mutual appreciation between filmmakers of the different Soviet Republics, they lay bare certain attitudes and value hierarchies that suggest a different positionality between the centre and the periphery in contrast to the usual Moscow-periphery model. Let us consider, for example, VGIK, the Film Institute in Moscow.

When writing about Latvian filmmakers’ student years at VGIK, in Latvian film historiography, there is a tradition of mentioning other, more famous, Soviet filmmakers with whom a particular Latvian filmmaker studied. There were always directors or cameramen who later became more famous than the Latvian directors. Gunārs Piesis (1931–1996), one of the most gifted Latvian film directors whose films are characterised by their distinctive decorative aesthetics, studied together with Otar Ioseeliani and Larisa Shepitko at VGIK (Sondore 2003: 21). Andris Rozenbergs (b. 1938), who studied at VGIK in 1964- 1969, was in the same masterclass as Iriakli Kvirikadze. Note that in these narratives, famous Russian directors get mentioned less often because filmmakers from, for example, Georgia, are more famous in Latvia than their Russian counterparts.

Encouraged by the research of Razlogova, Chomentowski and Talarczyk and by the changes in the latest Top 100 of the Sight & Sound magazine, one of my research questions was to determine which Latvian filmmakers had studied with students from African or Middle Eastern countries. Rozenberg recalls that there were students from Syria and Algeria in his class (Reitere, Rozenbergs 2023a) whose names he no longer remembers. This is typical: even if VGIK students from Africa etc., later became masters of cinema in their home counties, their Latvian colleagues had lost contact with them and therefore were not aware of their later achievements.

I came across an exception. A student from the African continent, Costa Diagne from Guinea, left a big impression on his Latvian comrades. Diagne spoke French, and Rozenbergs was pleased to practise his spoken French with him. Diagne introduced him to African culture and arts at the African Museum in Moscow. In 1967, Latvian film director Ivars Seleckis and his cameraman Gvido Skulte were commissioned to make their first full-length documentary in Guinea, called Tikšanās Gvinejā / Meeting in Guinea (55 min, 1968, Latvian SSR ).² When they tried to meet Diagne there, as they knew him to be an intelligent and sympathetic fellow from student meetings at VGIK (Seleckis studied cinematography part-time from 1961 to 1966), Diagne was already imprisoned³ (Jēruma 2009: 104). My other research shows that, even though, for example, Latvian students kept together, at the same time, the VGIK communities of students were not based on nationalities. Common interests and sympathies prevailed. Often they continued to exist after graduation as well. (Reitere, 2023b) The intention of Seleckis and Skulte to meet Costa Diagne in Guinea was a wish to sustain social ties without an institutional framework because, as Zygmunt Bauman put it directly, “It feels good” (Baumann 2011: 1).

There is a scarcity of testimonials by Latvian film critics active during the period of the Soviet occupation about their interest in films from the African, Asian and Latin American countries with which the Soviet Union maintained friendly ties. Critics who today can still tell us about their cinematic preferences attest that they did not watch films from Africa when they were screened in the Soviet Union (either at the Moscow Film Festival or in regular film distribution). None of them had any interest in attending the Tashkent Film Festival, for example. In Latvia, there was only one film critic who regularly published texts about African, Asian, and Latin American films, as well as reviewed books (published in Russian) on these film cultures during the 1970s and 1980s. This critic was Vents Kainaizis (1937-2022). As he cannot be asked about what motivated his interest in African, Asian and Latin American cinema anymore, I am left with conflicting facts. Kainaizis was not respected by his colleagues, in part because of his spreading falsehoods about Latvian film history in his books, which he continued to do even after they were debunked by his colleagues. Furthermore, Kainaizis had previously worked for the communist party newspaper Cīņa (1959-1965) and had been the director of the Film Culture Propaganda department at the Union of Filmmakers of the Latvian SSR (1965-1968). His later positions at the Committee of Cinematography of the Latvian SSR and the Ministry of Culture of the Latvian SSR, among others, were no less ideologically charged.⁴ Kainaizis’s career coincided with the period of the Cold War, which was characterised by the Soviet bloc’s desire to promote the Soviet socialist model for modernity in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America (Roth-Ey 2023: 2). Thus, due to his job positions, Kainaizis’s colleagues viewed his opinions on film with scepticism and reproach due to Kainaizis’s conformity with the Soviet regime. Thus it would be far too simple to explain the indifference of Latvian film critics towards the cinemas of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America as a matter of racism. In the colonial situation of Soviet Latvia, the acceptance of the official Soviet narrative regarding these territories would have meant accepting the colonial perspective as well.

This case study reveals that sketching the multiple ways that social ties (i.e., friendships, acquaintances, social status et al.) and communities contribute to canon building is also influenced by the desire to belong to a community that ascribes certain values to certain works of art. I suggest that film canon can be described as a community of our dreams (Baumann, 2011, 4). Bauman asserts that such a community cannot be established in real life. But, using Austin Williams’ taxonomy, this is a virtual community connected to specific circumstances. (Clemens et al., 2008: 4) My research shows that among Latvian film critics active during the Soviet occupation, there was a prejudice against films from the socialist Global South. The reasons for that seem to be manifold. First of all, the person who promotes the film is important. Apart from that, hierarchies grounded in different colonial and racial factors have influenced the recognition of the films from other regions. Thus, Masha Salazkina's assumption that the Eastern European countries - Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia - had an even more complicated relationship with Soviet cultural and political hegemony than the Soviet republics (Salazkina, 2023: 14) needs to be adjusted by including Latvia (and the other two Baltic republics). For us, the urge to belong to the European community was important even during the period of Soviet occupation. Further in my paper, I will offer a completely different example of a successful canon building, where persons who were in high esteem and with a broad network of social ties served as organisers of an institution that further defined the canon of the Riga School of Poetic documentary.

Meetings of Baltic Documentarians

In the Soviet Union, meetings between documentary filmmakers, where they screened each other’s films and discussed them, were quite regular. In the Baltic republics, the first such event took place in 1971 on Saarema Island in Estonia as an initiative of the Estonians. In 1973, a similar meeting was hosted by Lithuanians in Palanga, followed by 1976 in Druskininkai, and in 1979 in Nidda. Latvia hosted the seminar in 1978 in Cēsis, in 1981 in Talsi and in 1990 in Riga (Matīsa, Redovičs 2007: 19]. Only film practitioners participated in these events. Latvian documentarians now remember these seminars as unimportant, without impact on their work. However, there has been no proper research in the Baltic states on this topic.

A completely different picture is unveiled when witnesses are asked about the film seminars at Bolshevo.

Seminars at Bolshevo

The filmmakers’ house at Bolshevo (Korolev), just thirty kilometres from Moscow, was built in 1936 at the order of Boris Shumiatskii. It was the place where the Soviet cinema workers went to live for extended periods of time: either to work or to spend their vacation (Goldovskaya 2006: 28).

As Mihails Savisko (1936 - 2024), the most prominent Latvian film critic of the 1970s and 1980s, remembers, the first seminar in Bolshevo for young Soviet film critics without professional education took place in 1960. Participants in the Bolshevo seminars, at least in Latvia, were chosen by the Union of Filmmakers. The seminar lasted for a month, and the participants were all film critics from around the Soviet Union. They analysed foreign films that were not screened for ordinary Soviet moviegoers on a regular basis. The seminar was led by the most prominent Russian critics – Maia Turovskaia and Iurii Khaniutin. Viktor Shkhlovskii (1893-1984) was sometimes on vacation there. Although he was not invited to talk to the young film critics, they were able to meet him during his evening walks and ask him any questions they wanted (Matīsa, Redovičs 2007: 18). The consequences of going to Bolshevo for Savisko were twofold: on the personal level, he met Georgian film critic Kora Certeli there, they married, and Savisko moved to Georgia for three years. On the professional level, the consequences of Savisko’s Bolshevo experiences had an influence on the historiography of Latvian film that continues to this day.

European Documentary Film Symposia

The meetings of documentary filmmakers of the Baltic states and the meetings of film critics and practitioners at Bolshevo served as an inspiration for the most important documentary film event in the Baltics – European Documentary Film symposiums, which took place in Latvia from 1977 until 2007. The godfathers of the symposium were the documentary filmmaker Ivars Seleckis, who was the director of the documentary film department at the Union of Cinematographers of the Latvian SSR, and film critics Ābrams Kleckins and Mihails Savisko.

Based on his experiences at Bolshevo, Savisko was absolutely convinced that a precondition for film theory to thrive is prolonged personal contact among practitioners in a friendly and free atmosphere to watch and discuss films free from annoying daily tasks. This was the ideal for the European Documentary Film symposiums as well. Starting in the 1960s, Savisko regularly wrote longer commentaries about developments in Latvian documentary cinema, and he was the main theoretician behind the Riga School of Poetic Documentary. Watching the Latvian documentary film output of the 1960s, he felt an inner urge to reassess these developments in the context of film theory (Pērkone 2013: 20).

The third godfather of these symposiums was documentary film critic Ābrams Kleckins (1933-2021), who worked at the Riga Film Studio and continued to develop the theoretical basis for ‘Riga Style’ documentaries in the 1970s.

Initially planned as a unique event, the structure of the symposium was more or less the same over the years: the invited festival participants included colleagues from the Baltics and other Soviet republics located in Europe (the decision not to invite filmmakers from the Asian Soviet republics was justified as a wish to keep the company small, even though excellent documentaries at the time were being made, for example, in Kyrgyzstan, too (Matīsa, Redovičs 2007: 26)). The guest list included colleagues from “friendly socialist countries” – Bulgaria, Poland, GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as well as at least one film practitioner and one film theoretician from each country, with no more than thirty participants.

In their book on the history of the European Documentary Film Symposium, Kristīne Matīsa and Agris Redovičs depict in great detail how Savisko’s personal connections, developed since the first seminar in Bolshevo in 1960, opened different doors in Moscow because without the acceptance and financial support from the ‘centre’ it would not have been possible to organise such an international event. Additionally, it was Savisko’s fascinating personality that attracted acclaimed figures of Soviet film criticism to come to Riga⁵ for the symposium (Matīsa, Redovičs 2007: 22).

The importance of the symposium for Latvian film history was clear from the inaugural meeting in 1977. Seleckis, Savisko, and Kleckins curated a film programme for which they selected ten of the most important Latvian documentaries made since 1960. Since then, the films that they chose have not only become internationally recognised Latvian film classics but are now regarded as the films that define the Riga School of Poetic Documentary. In the programme, there were five films by Herz Frank (1926-2013), as well as films by the other famous Latvian documentarians – Uldis Brauns (1932-2017) with his 235 000 000 (1967), Aivars Freimanis (1936-2018), Ivars Seleckis (b. 1934), and there was even a chronicle directed by Juris Podnieks (1950-1992), who later became one of the defining filmmakers of perestroika cinema.

The theoretical conference, which was part of the symposium, opened with a talk by Kleckins, “Riga School and problems in the development of documentary cinema” (Kleckins 2012: 181-189), where he explained the genealogy of the Riga School of Poetic Documentary and, defined its characteristics.

The ‘godfather’ of the Riga Style was Dziga Vertov, whose films and theoretical writings enjoyed renewed attention in the Soviet Union and abroad during the second half of the 1960s. Pērkone traces the understanding of cinematic poetics back to the Russian formalists, Viktor Shklovskii in particular. In poetic cinema, formal elements dominate over the semantic ones, narrative approaches are exchanged for formal approaches, serving as the basis for the whole composition (Pērkone 2013: 19). Kleckins highlighted two characteristics of the Riga Style: first, it rehabilitated the image - which could be self-sufficient without text or dialogue. Second, such films rehabilitated the importance of real life on screen (Pērkone 2013: 21).

The high theoretical level of the conference was supported by the papers of Maia Turovskaia and Viktor Demin. Due to the high artistic level of the films, as well as of the theoretical papers, it was decided to organise the symposium as a regular biannual event. Over the following years, films by masters of Estonian documentary cinema Mark Soosaar (b. 1947), Andreas Sööt (b. 1934) and Lithuanian master Henrikas Sablevicius (1939-2004), as well as those by the Russian Aleksandr Sokurov, were included in the programme. Sadly, most of these films remained little known outside Warsaw Pact countries.

No research has been carried out yet about how Soviet Latvian films were distributed abroad. In any case, Sovexportfilm was responsible for distribution of Soviet films in foreign countries. The short documentary Mūžs/ The Trace of Soul (1972) by Herz Frank was shown at The Short Film Festival Oberhausen in the 1970s. In the case of the Riga Poetic School of Documentary, only in 1990, there have regularly been programmes in Western countries where these films were screened. They experienced a kind of revival once again in 2018 when the full-length documentary Bridges of Time, which was dedicated to the masters of Baltic poetic documentary, circulated in the world film festival scene.

The Further Importance of Friendships

The change in the economic conditions and state structures meant that during the post-Soviet period, professional friendships (networks) would be useful in obtaining practical information on how to facilitate cultural events of such a scale in the newly independent country.

The year 1989 marked the starting point for this learning period when the symposium was attended by Raul Zaritsky, who served as a vice-president of the Flaherty seminar. The idea emerged to organise the next Flaherty seminar in 1990 in Riga. The film programme was planned by Erik Barnouw, Amos Vogel, Richard Hershkowitz, Raul Zaritsky, Ivars Seleckis and Ābrams Kleckins. Forty-one participants came from the USA, 24 from Latvia, 23 from Russia; there were also 3 Germans, 3 Estonians, 2 Lithuanians, 2 Ukrainians, and 1 participant from Tajikistan. This event proved to the Latvian side that they were capable of organising a major international event on a very high level, and they understood completely that in order to sustain the symposium in the future, they had to find new contacts and financial support from Western European countries (Matīsa, Redovičs 2007: 77, 82, 84). They succeeded. It would go beyond the limits of this paper to speculate about why EDFS dissolved, but one of the reasons that the symposium ceased to exist was the emergence of the Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries. Founded in Denmark in 1997 as a promotional forum for documentary film projects from the Baltic states, Poland and western Russia, it moved to Riga in 2005. ⁶ The Forum regarded the regular meetings of documentary filmmakers from the Baltic states that took place in the 1970s and 1980s as their predecessor.

Epistemic Community and the Canon

The purpose of this article has been to delineate the personal connections between several Latvian filmmakers and film critics and their colleagues from the other Soviet republics and the so-called socialist Global South. Even though this brief overview only scratches the surface, I hope that it encourages more” horizontal” research to discover the ties and contacts between filmmakers in the Soviet republics and abroad and how these private connections affected both their professional careers and the film history of the region in general.

The concept of the Riga Poetic School of Documentary, which today often seems organic, was developed by Latvian film critics by observing the recent film production at Riga Film Studio at the time. It is a conceptual product of the particular epistemic community which gathered at the European Documentary Film symposiums held on the periphery of the Soviet empire. According to Annus Epp, the resistance to the colonial matrix of power in the Soviet-era Baltic states was unavoidably connected to the national question. In Epp’s words: “... the values of modernist national culture were different from Soviet modernity: instead of Soviet “ethos of progressive socialist intervention”, nationalist modernism stressed alternative values of a modern era – individuality and creativity.” (Epp 2016: 5). In a way, the Riga Poetic School of Documentary can be regarded as a phenomenon partly reflecting these values. Even though Uldis Brauns’s first short films Sākums / Beginning (1961), Celtne / Construction (1962), and Strādnieks / Worker (1963) implement some progressive socialist rhetoric, as Pērkone has shown, the Riga Poetic School of Documentary aesthetic bore close similarities to European modernism. It was a wish to document a universal human condition, its reflexivity and its subjectivity (Pērkone 2013: 20,27). Thus, in a way, the Riga Poetic School of Documentary can now be interpreted as a decolonising project, born out of the careful balancing act between the limitations and the possibilities of a colonial state and made world famous thanks to the social connections of Latvian film critics.

Conclusion

In their opinion pieces in Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Ewa Mazierska and László Strausz opened a discussion about the diminishing critical relevance of the feature films made in Eastern Europe. The reasons the relevance of Eastern European films diminished in the latest Sight & Sound poll of “The Greatest 100 Films of All Time”⁷ are clearly explained by Strausz, who emphasises that the S&S poll is built on the outdated East-West dichotomy (Strausz 2023). In recent years there have been several attempts to construct alternative film canons in order to highlight cinematic masterpieces that have been overlooked. Here the list of 30 post-Soviet films can be mentioned, initiated by the European Film Academy and GoEast Film Festival.⁸ The Beyond the Sight & Sound Canon List, published in April 2024, is another example. However, it is doubtful that these lists will have any impact. As my examples show, understanding the dynamics of how certain film lists develop influence and how films are canonised depends on more than the social ties of film theoreticians, critics and functionaries. Using the wording of Mark Granovetter, the social embeddedness of the process is decisive as well. Speaking about economic models, Granovetter argues that “the extent to which economic action is linked to or depends on action or institutions that are non-economic in content, goals, or processes” (Granovetter, 2005: 35). As my article demonstrates, EDFS was such an institution for promoting Riga Poetic School of Documentary during the period of the Soviet occupation and beyond. The fact that cinema from “Third World” countries was promoted in Latvia by a film critic who had developed a successful career within the state organisations that served as the ideological gatekeepers in the Soviet state film industry may have contributed to the neglect of films from this region among Latvian audiences.

By highlighting the historical dimensions of a particular epistemic community, I have sought to explain the historical situatedness of a particular film canon established by the epistemic community. Films do necessarily drop off the canon because their quality has diminished over time. This may instead be due to the fact that the epistemic community for which these films formed the canonical standard is no longer active. At the same time, looking particularly at the masterpieces of Riga Poetic School of Documentary, they should not be forgotten. These films are regularly included in various global documentary film retrospectives. Sandra Harding argues that all knowledge projects are socially situated (Harding, 1992: 441). Film canon of Riga Poetic School of Documentary is such a case, because it comes from a peripheral film culture that might not be visible from the dominant power position of the West.

Elīna Reitere
University of Latvia

Bio

Elīna Reitere is a researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art at the University of Latvia, the 2^nd editor-in-chief of the Latvian film magazine kinoraksti.lv and a deputy researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia. She has studied audio-visual culture, film, media and performance studies in Riga and Mainz (Germany). She wrote her dissertation (published in 2018) on narration in slow cinema Her article in the book Latvian Cinema: Recent History, 1990-2020 (2021) deals with the careers of different generations of Latvian filmmakers after 1990, and she is currently writing a book on the social history of Latvian film. In 2019, she was nominated for the Normunds Naumanis Prize for Art Criticism in Latvia for her film reviews.

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Strausz, László. 2023. “Return of the Repressed. A Response to Ewa Mazierska’s ‘The Sight and Sound Poll and Eastern European Cinema’”. Studies in Eastern European Cinema 14 (2): 206-209.

Filmography

Brauns, Uldis. 1961. Sākums/Beginning. Riga Film Studio.

Brauns, Uldis. 1962. Celtne/Construction. Riga Film Studio.

Brauns, Uldis. 1963. Strādnieks/Worker. Riga Film Studio.

Herz, Frank. 1972. Mūžs/ The Trace of Soul. Riga Film Studio. Available worldwide here: https://www.filmas.lv/latvijas-filmu-klasika/#muzs

Seleckis, Ivars. 1968. Tikšanās Gvinejā/ Meeting in Guinea. Riga Film Studio.

Suggested Citation

Reitere, Elīna. 2024. “Social Ties of Latvian Film Professionals in the Soviet Era and the Historical Situatedness of the Canon”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 19. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2024.00019.346.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This licence does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms