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| FILM DIRECTOR NUMBER 1 Mārtiņš Slišāns I would like to begin my thoughts on the contribution of Laila Pakalniņa to Latvian culture by considering a film which, at first sight, is by no means a work of first-rate significance in her filmography. A film that hasn't been included in the Venice Film Festival competition programme - that Olympic peak of cinema, attained by Laila Pakalniņa's second feature film, "The Python" (2003). Neither has the film I wish to discuss been screened at the star-studded gathering of cinema gourmets and snobs that is the Cannes Film Festival - as happened to her first fiction film, "The Shoe" (1998) and to her documentaries of previous years, "The Mail" (1995) and "The Ferry" (1996). It is special only in terms of its "unspecialness". Just like everything Laila Pakalniņa does. | |
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In the beginning there was...
I'm referring to a quite "ordinary" commissioned film, telling about children with special needs, or, in popular speech - the handicapped. This is the documentary "Mārtiņš", made under the wing of the foundation Velku fonds and telling about the Šķesteri family and their fifteen-year-old son Mārtiņš, diagnosed from the age of eight months as an invalid for life, wheelchair-bound and with no hope of recovery. Why am I starting with this film in particular? Because, in my view, it's precisely such commissioned work, without any embellishments, that expresses the director's view of the world. Here, there's nothing to hide behind: the task is very clear and there's no need to wander about in the labyrinths of artistic exploration. Such conditions serve to reveal IN ESSENCE what a director is or isn't capable of. Watching this film, which follows the everyday life of an invalid and his family, several significant aspects of Pakalniņa's view/perception of the world are revealed. This is the brilliant, flowing simplicity of form, derived from the Postmodern penetration of all the layers of relationships. It's so simple that it brings to mind Michelangelo's statement that he hewed his statues from a block of stone, simply chiselling away all that was unnecessary. Laila Pakalniņa takes a similar approach to life: removing all that's unnecessary and leaving in the picture only the most significant things. In truth, the director does not even remove what is unnecessary, rather, it seems, simply not submitting to its influence, striving to grasp the essence of human life in its purest form. And she does it with a clear, honest, immediate view. A view that every protagonist seen here naturally perceives as his own, permitting a very close approach. That's something very rare: the ability not to fragment life, but instead to see the overall picture, to sense what is essential and, maintaining the continuity of this feeling, to convey it to the audience. The first-mentioned aspects belong purely to the human category, while the last indicates a very high level of professionalism. To pass on the feeling of the pure thing, which has made it through the mill of technology and working conditions, to reach the screen and the audience without losing sharpness - that, in my view, is the sign of a great director. From the State Institute of Cinematography Delicate sentiment. A small dose of playfulness. A few drops of feminine coquetry. A large quantity of human feeling. A great deal of human and professional work. And a glass of pure, distilled world's-end and world's-edge feeling. This is Laila Pakalniņa's recipe. The taste: lightness and simplicity, but with a serious basis. In order to achieve this exquisite taste, she has come a long way. Created in 1991, at that time still subject to approval by the USSR State Committee of Cinematography, was Laila Pakalniņa's diploma work "The Linen" (10 min.), marking the completion of the directing course at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography. Although there's much that is expressive and even masterful, the film can by no means be described as a work of genius, as exceptional or astounding. It's a sketch, revealing artistic techniques that the director was to develop to a much higher level in her future work. This includes special attention to sound, unusual shots from the edge of a driving car and from inside the car, and the somewhat didactic use of a lullaby, which in future works was to develop into a very precise choice of song motifs. Several years and several video films later, she created the short documentaries "The Mail" (20 min.) and "The Ferry" (10 min.). And the rest, as they say, is history. Pakalniņa became the first Latvian director whose works were shown at the world's biggest and most prestigious film festival: in 1996, "The Mail" and "The Ferry" were included in the official programme of the Cannes Film Festival. So, what has changed? This unrelenting work - at least one film a year - has paid off, so that we can regard "The Mail" and "The Ferry" as paintings on film, with a finely and sensitively worked texture. They both tell of everyday work: one traces the activities of Riga postwoman Aurika Mesme; the other follows the movement of a ferry and life around it on the Lower Daugava in the region of Latgale. If one had to provide a definition of the personal directing style of Pakalniņa, then "The Ferry" and "The Mail" might be described as classic pieces. This is the ability to turn ordinary affairs into the poetry of film. It's the monumental roar of life, revealed through seemingly insignificant details. It's the flow of life, at the edge of which the artist seems to have stood with a film camera, simply pressing the "Record" button. It looks so simple anyone could do it. Sound plays a very important role in these verses of film poetry: birdsong, everyday street noises, egg-beating, water-pouring, typewriter-banging, a chair being pushed back, broom bristles swishing against the floor, the opening of window shutters, the barking of a distant dog, the sound of an old vacuum cleaner - one could go on like that to the end of the page. All that surrounds us every day, but which we perceive only as a background, is turned in Laila Pakalniņa's works into rhyming poetry, arranged in black-and-white images. Here we should mention a gem in the style of the director's later years: the documentary short film "Papa Gena" (2001), a 10 minute film improvisation on the theme of Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute". This work was a special kind of commission and was created specially for the Venice Biennale. Watching "Papa Gena", one can simply admire her ability to say so much, so simply and in such a short space of time, revealing her own distinctive view of life and passing it organically through the prism of the set theme - the theme of "The Magic Flute". It's been done very simply: asking chance passers-by to listen on a headphones to a fragment from "The Magic Flute" and to film them listening. The sound of the opera fits so organically into the texture of the black-and-white shots filmed by Gints Bērziņš that the result is, in terms of form and content, a rare gem of high-class cinema. This work is a diptych, the other half of which - the other 10 minutes - was created by director Viesturs Kairišs. This is the "dark side of the moon" of the diptych. The artificiality and unjustified pretentiousness of Kairišs's work is an antithesis to Pakalniņa's light naturalness, and the taking of the unknown stranger - Mozart - to an anonymous grave in the work by Kairišs is an absolute contrast to Pakalniņa's "living" Mozart. But all this naturalness and lightness, like that of a ballerina performing a virtuoso pirouette on the stage (in this case on the screen) without a single drop of sweat on her brow, would never have come about in Pakalniņa's works without long and relentless work. Thus, watching "The Mail", we recall "The Linen" as a first draft for this work. The approach set out in "The Linen" has been fulfilled years later in "The Mail" and "The Ferry". This is a very specific environment, a very specific location and people, but the generalisation achieved by the author is so universal that it seems the film is comprehensible in any part of the world. This is the flow of time, which brings calm into general excitement. It's hard to find a better cultural messenger than this: it doesn't have to cross any linguistic or alien cultural barriers; it's not provincial or narrowly local in significance. It's a piece of the edge of the world, so close and comprehensible that it wins universal acceptance. Since humanity is all-embracing. A provocation of power The beach. Waves gently rolling onto the shore. Sunset. Like a black-and-white photo (director of photography Gints Bērziņš) with sound. This is the opening shot of "The Shoe", Laila Pakalniņa's debut in the genre of full-length feature film. Suddenly, into this natural idyll, chugging up from afar, comes a little bulldozer. It's the late 1950s in the Latvian SSR, on the Liepāja beach, the border of the USSR. The bulldozer is marking out the border. The following morning at dawn, a border patrol discovers a woman's shoe. It's a serious transgression of the empire's borders. The border guard patrol goes to the nearby city of Liepāja to search for the owner of the shoe. As it turns out in the end, it belongs to a girl (who the soldiers, in their diligent search, never even notice), sitting on a bench chatting to the boys. It was she who had crossed the borderline... for a bathe at sunset. This work travelled round Europe's major film festivals: Cannes, Berlin, Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary and many more in addition to these top events. But that's not the important thing. "The Shoe" marks the arrival on the scene of a young and important maker of feature film, and of themes that - now one can confirm it, having seen "The Python" as well - are particularly characteristic of the director's thinking in fiction film. Clearly seen already in "The Shoe" is what the Director of the Venice Film Festival Moritz de Hadeln would later call Laila Pakalniņa's "surreal humour". The selection committee of the Venice Film Festival said that watching "The Python" they had laughed a great deal. The Italians described it as "surreal humour", and in the view of the present author, this is an apt description of Pakalniņa's restrained, behind-the-camera mirth. Very intellectual, but at the same time very much alive, linked very closely to everyday life. The situation is as realistic as possible, but the twist and the context are so unusual that it may best be described in the terms of a poster for a recent Spanish film about the director Luis Bunuel: a man comes up to the sea, bends down and picks up its edge to see what's underneath. Laila Pakalniņa treats everyday situations the same way in "The Shoe", and especially in "The Python". Whether it's a spade stuck vertically into the roof of the latest model Audi, or the slightly more traditional, but irrational hunt for a rabid beaver. These are only some characteristic features, and the humour emerges from the overall context of the situation. It reminds one of the French comic Jacques Tati with his finely crafted mise-en-scènes. And besides that, it displays marked non-conformism in the face of power, a kind of passive resistance. It seems, through the author's personal experience, she is showing the resistance of the Latvian mentality to the Soviet system and to any kind of violence, as well as the absurdity of the mechanism of power. It's also an unusual kind of nostalgia for a time when the world could be viewed as black and white. Also appearing is the figure of an always-courteous representative of authority - the militiaman/policeman - and, episodically, the image of the strict headmistress that was to be further developed in "The Python". It's a crisis, a kind of state of siege, brought about by a transgressor of the status quo of power. There's also a fascination and interest in the school as a method of upbringing, in discipline and its infringement. And one particular kind of shot, like a poster photograph. Subtle irony on the traditional techniques of heightening suspense in film. (As the soldiers march past a house, a morning exercise broadcast is heard on the radio, with a voice commanding: "One, two, three, four. Left, right. Gradually change to a faster walking speed."). And what is very specific: the little gems that make the director's films so personal and special. Such as the soldier, for example, who passes through a slaughterhouse with black and white carcasses as in a fine art photograph, suddenly bending over to smell one of them. Without any special emphasis, simply in walking past them: presumably in order to find out what it smells like. The revolutionary "The Python" is Laila Pakalniņa's second full-length feature, and at the same time the first film in the whole history of Latvian cinema to be shown at one of the most important world cinema gatherings: the competition programme CONTROCORRENTE ("undercurrent") of the Venice Film Festival. Applying in full measure to this film is the saying that good film cannot be described: it must be seen. Even defining a good film in those terms only, "The Python" is an outstanding film. I make so bold as to say that in the context of the history of Latvian film and in the contemporary setting, "The Python" is a revolutionary film, which confirms that this director stands head and shoulders above other Latvian film directors - both in professional terms, and in terms of the depiction of her view of the world. In purely professional terms, it is revealed in the acutely precise mise-en-scène, the attention to detail, the rhythm of each individual scene and of the film as a whole, the acting and the successfully led high-level effort by the whole "supporting" group: cinematographer, art director and all those countless invisible others known as the film crew. In terms of the world context, the personal style of Laila Pakalniņa might be compared with the very elite of contemporary, culturally significant film. Coming to mind is the foremost contemporary Japanese film export, Takeshi Kitano, and contemporary Iranian cinema, with Mohsen Makhmalbaf as its flag-bearer. Both have won awards at the world's most prestigious film festivals, and both bear their country's flag - if not consciously so, then at least through their works. The achievement of our "Latvian girl" (please excuse the familiarity!) is linked to the work of Makhmalbaf and Kitano across the geographical divide by the feeling of contemporary time: seemingly unhurried, but at the same time with a very clear and precise rhythm, not permitting the audience to lose attention, even if there's seemingly nothing happening in the shot. It's the pulse of life itself captured in these works. It's everyday activity stripped of the layer of makeup, stress and nervousness, with the tissues opened up as in heart surgery, recording the regular heartbeat. It's not the cinema of events, but the cinema of experience. Every shot works not only as traditional drama, but also as an experience to be lived through. In literary terminology, it's the difference between a book and a newspaper: it's the saturated, multi-layered and immediate experience of the author in contrast to a simple flow of words as information. It is on account of this quality of the work of Pakalniņa alone that I make so bold as to say that her achievement in Latvian cinema, which has hitherto played according to the traditional rules of drama, is revolutionary. The only comparison with the audacity of "The Python" is the bold attempt by Rolands Kalniņš to create new means of cinematic expression in the film "Maritime Climate", which was "put on the shelf" by the Soviet officials after the first material had been filmed. This 36-minute "piece" filmed in 1974 and restored only in 1992, shows a search for avant-garde expression even in the context of world film of its day. The approach to drama seen in "The Python" is a bold venture and a great risk. Since, looking at it from the perspective of traditional drama, this work might be described in the terms used by Napoleon about jokes: "Jokes are like cotton thread - if they're spun too fine, they'll break." If "The Python" is considered from the perspective of traditional drama, then the surreal elements and the delicacy of feeling render it seemingly inert and fragmented - losing the escalation of tension and the clarity of the author's aim. But this is an inappropriate frame for looking at "The Python", since the film plays according to its own rules: it's film that requires a new classificatory shelf. In my view, it belongs to the class of "experience" film, rather than to the traditional "chain of events" class of film. It seems that all this has demanded a great deal of boldness and readiness to risk on the part of the author. To risk all that well-known, correct, acquired knowledge of film drama and follow a voice saying, "That's your vision! Go out and fulfil it!" It's the risk of a flop, of not being convinced about success and of sewing with cotton threads, which can turn out too weak to hold together a reel of film. In my view, the risk has greatly paid off. Even with regard to details such as the sound track, so important in Pakalniņa's films. In her first feature film "The Shoe", it was still slightly shaky and hadn't entirely found its own fiction film voice, being based instead on her previous experience with documentaries, but in "The Python" it has already travelled a great distance towards the consciousness of an identity appropriate to fiction film. The works of Laila Pakalniņa, and especially "The Python", also succeed in recording the most elusive of all the dimensions of the world around us - Time. Emotions, smells, tastes, etc., we all feel (and showing them adequately using cinematic means is an art in itself, achieved by only a very small number of directors), but a feel for the flow of Time, let alone the ability to record it on film, is such a rare gift that even in world film it is possible for only to a handful of individuals. "The Python" has a sense not only of recorded Time in general, but also of a specific expression of it: this is the flow of contemporary world time, that of the early 21st century. Great ideas are usually "up in the air", floating as an elusive substance, and artists and creators pick them up, often regarding them as their own particular feeling. This is the story of great discoveries that usually occur independently in two or more different places around the world. These include styles of painting or writing, which spread like an explosion in some particular period of time independently of geographical origin. These are the deepest impulses of a specific age: waves of invisible, but ever-present Time, the splashes of which were given physical expression in late 19th century Impressionism, or in Nouvelle vague French cinema of the 1960s. It is this specific early-21st century sense of time that is embodied in the works of the aforementioned Kitano, Makhmalbaf, and Pakalniņa as well. And it's no longer important whether it's Teheran, a suburb of Tokyo or Bolderāja in Riga. All these people have one thing in common: they take as the basis of their work a setting familiar to them, depicting their country and their society, but split it in the prism of their own personal vision. And here it would be entirely inappropriate to allocate places on the pedestal, since cultural competition between countries is competition in the horizontal plane - none are better than the others, only different. The works of these authors have in common not only a similar sense of Time, but also such "secondary" features as a similar narrative rhythm and visual minimalism. And, however paradoxical it may sound - the sense of humour as well. Especially if we look at "The Python" in relation to contemporary Japanese film and in particular the director and actor Sabu. Also shown at last year's Venice Film Festival was the latest film by Takeshi Kitano - ZATOICHI - which, in visual and emotional terms includes a virtually identical shot to the railway-track-rakers in "The Python". In Pakalniņa's film, a couple of such figures rake the gravel of the train tracks with some kind of implement. An absurd situation, entered by the viewer from outside, who looks on and comments: "Weeding the rails, are we? Well, well...". In Kitano's film, the game with tools develops into an ironic choreographic generalisation. The author An author is someone with something new to say about universal themes, someone who opens up for the viewer a new perspective from which to regard the realities of human inner and outer life. This can be done by someone who dares to work outside the accepted framework, thus either creating a masterpiece, or, equally, ending up making a serious blunder. The right to call himself by this name belongs only to someone whose perception of the world is PERSONAL and ACUTE. An author is characterised by the boldness to seek out new avenues, new means of expression, since what he wishes to say (the content) requires a specific, not always traditional form of expression. And in film, where seemingly all the approaches have already been exhausted, it's a real achievement to find a new view of the reality of life. An author does not usually go in for compromises for financial reasons. If he does, then originality is lost in proportion to the compromise. Not every director is an author. But Laila Pakalniņa is. Final remarks Historical consciousness develops through cultural facts. In order to bring them about, money needs to be invested. In film, this investment is considerable, but I make so bold as to suggest that one single author such as Laila Pakalniņa justifies ALL the investment in film. Since this is an investment towards the creation of identity, without which Latvia as a country will dissolve and disintegrate in the waters of the Euro- or global village. By the way, it is precisely life in the conditions of such a cultural mix, the identity of culture and time in her country, which is to be the subject of one of Laila Pakalniņa's upcoming works, a five-minute document on us, here and now in Latvia, which is to form part of a cycle of such documentaries by directors from 25 countries. It has been commissioned by none other than the currently most imaginative European film factory, the Danish company Zentropa. | |
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