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Seeing Differently: The Film Language of the Latvian Director Laila Pakalniņa

2018; Canadian Comparative Literature Association; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/crc.2018.0005

1913-9659

Inga Pērkone,

European Cultural and National Identity

Seeing Differently:The Film Language of the Latvian Director Laila Pakalniņa* Inga Pērkone The creative work of the Latvian film director, producer, and scriptwriter Laila Pakalniņa (born 1962), who has made almost forty films of various lengths and genres in thirty years of filmmaking and is Latvia's best known film director, can be organically linked with the phenomenon of Anna Lācis and her wider context, as represented in recent studies of Lācis.1 In her creative activity, Anna Lācis was mainly an outsider resisting and searching for alternatives to mass culture, which is mostly based on an aesthetics of realism. Lācis seemed rebellious and somewhat strange, whether in the theatrical world of the independent Latvia in the 1920s, in interwar Germany where, in 1924, she became Bertolt Brecht's assistant and actress (Райх 127), or in Moscow, which by the end of the 1920s was increasingly subjected to the doctrine of socialist realism. During the years following World War II, when Lācis worked in a Latvian provincial theatre in the town of Valmiera, her plays were also supposed to have been "intense, passionate, boldly versatile and colourful, most probably unusual for the theatre of Latvia" (Zole 39). Anna Lācis led a life that was unconventional for a woman, and her interests, theoretical views, and everything we know about her creative practices place her in the discourse of modernity and the art of modernism, the same discourse in which Laila Pakalniņa has been working since the end of the twentieth century and in which she is still working today. According to Roland Barthes, "Text is experienced only in an activity of production. It follows that the Text cannot stop (for example on a library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works)" (157). For Barthes, art presents a set of open-ended texts in which chronological and geographical boundaries are insignificant. In this article, I identify the main characteristics of Laila Pakalniņa's oeuvre in order to demonstrate that she and Anna Lācis can be perceived as female fellow-traveller [End Page 90] directors, who are similar both in their aesthetic search and, in a certain way, in their destinies, which to a large extent can be defined by their interest in an artistic language that is alternative to the mainstream and quite often outlandish to a mass audience. For a wider audience, Pakalniņa's films seem strange because of their alternative form of expression, which is very close to modernism. In this, we see an important factor in her affinity with Anna Lācis, who tried to introduce modernism into Latvian theatre in the 1920s. Lācis's innovations are most closely linked with the theatre concept of Bertolt Brecht. According to the stage director, theorist, and spouse of Anna Lācis, Bernard Reich, the separate principles of Brecht's epic theatre were already evident in Brecht's first stage production of Edward II at the Munich Kammerspiele, where Lācis was both a director's assistant and an actress: the task of playing fabula rather than emotional experience, character, or pure psychology; demonstrative acting clearly underlining the action that will become significant; showing the behaviour of the dramatis personae by providing useful and instructive observations; and combining the useful with the entertaining (Райх 133).2 The principles of Brecht's epic theatre are among the bonds that link modernists of different times, places, and branches. As András Balint Kovács notes, "Brecht is a genuinely modernist auteur whose political commitment is a witness to the moral seriousness of modernism. His strategy of Verfremdungseffekt is precisely aimed at directing the attention of the audience to a social reality hiding 'behind' or 'in front of' the theatrical scene. Moreover, the Brechtian theatre is highly critical, not only toward social reality, but also toward theatrical conventions" (226). The aesthetics of alienation that Brecht proposed became particularly relevant in the 1960s and have continued in later modernism, including in Pakalniņa's films. The peculiar comic streak characteristic of her films also brings her closer to Brecht, perhaps more...