Ranging across the vast Eurasian landmass, director Uldis Brauns and his crew captured extraordinary vignettes of everyday life, both big and small
With Adam Curtis’s ordeal-montage Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone still streaming on BBC iPlayer, and all of us goggling at his extraordinary mosaic of TV news clips about the day-to-day agony of post-Soviet Russia in psychological freefall, now is maybe the time to experience that work’s polar opposite.
This 1967 film, made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October revolution, is an archival classic from the Latvian director Uldis Brauns and screenwriter Herz Frank: an amazingly audacious attempt at documenting the ordinary lives to be seen all across the vast Eurasian landmass of the Soviet Union, whose population was then 235 million. (The equivalent total figure for the ex-Soviet states now is about 297 million.) This film is ideological of course, celebrating everyone’s harmonious coexistence under communism,...
With Adam Curtis’s ordeal-montage Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone still streaming on BBC iPlayer, and all of us goggling at his extraordinary mosaic of TV news clips about the day-to-day agony of post-Soviet Russia in psychological freefall, now is maybe the time to experience that work’s polar opposite.
This 1967 film, made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October revolution, is an archival classic from the Latvian director Uldis Brauns and screenwriter Herz Frank: an amazingly audacious attempt at documenting the ordinary lives to be seen all across the vast Eurasian landmass of the Soviet Union, whose population was then 235 million. (The equivalent total figure for the ex-Soviet states now is about 297 million.) This film is ideological of course, celebrating everyone’s harmonious coexistence under communism,...
- 12/12/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
This year the Riga International Film Festival ‘Arsenals’ has chosen to honour Latvian documentarist Herz Frank on the occasion of his 85th birthday. Sporting his signature knitted beret and Leica camera, Frank attended the opening of an exhibition on his life and work at Riga’s small but modern Film Museum, where he signed copies of his book, Turn Back on the Threshold (Uz sliekšņa atskaties, Kino Raksti Library).
Frank is a representative of the ‘Riga Style’, a poetic and observational approach to documentary. One of his most celebrated shorts is 10 Minutes Older (Vecāks par 10 minūtēm, 1978) which presents close-ups of children watching a puppet show. Although the film’s spectators never see the puppets, there is a far more interesting show in the childrens’ faces as they are affected by different emotions. Many years later, this film inspired two omnibus features, Ten Minutes Older: The Cello and Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet...
Frank is a representative of the ‘Riga Style’, a poetic and observational approach to documentary. One of his most celebrated shorts is 10 Minutes Older (Vecāks par 10 minūtēm, 1978) which presents close-ups of children watching a puppet show. Although the film’s spectators never see the puppets, there is a far more interesting show in the childrens’ faces as they are affected by different emotions. Many years later, this film inspired two omnibus features, Ten Minutes Older: The Cello and Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet...
- 9/13/2011
- by Alison Frank
- The Moving Arts Journal
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