DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS’ ANTI-COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. THE FILM “KULDĪGA FRESCOES” (AIVARS FREIMANIS, 1966)

Abstract

In his book The Communist Post Scriptum, philosopher Boris Groys defines communism as a revolutionary project, the aim of which was to subordinate the economy to politics and to transform society from a financial medium into a lin- guistic medium. In order to achieve communism, it was first necessary to verbalise society. At the beginning of the 1960s, efforts by Riga poetic documentary film- makers to work in the cinéma vérité style failed because the Soviet people, having experienced a linguistic turn, clearly knew what to say and how to speak when approached by film cameras. It was one of the reasons why part of Soviet film- makers started avoiding the spoken word in cinema in the hope of approaching truth solely through image. In the middle of the 1960s, there were two monumental documentaries created at Riga Film Studios that were entirely based on the dramatic expressivity of image: 235,000,000 (1967) by Uldis Brauns and “Kuldīga Frescoes” (Kuldīgas freskas, 1966) by Aivars Freimanis. However, I believe that the films went in opposite directions. The epic documentary 235,000,000, which was dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the USSR, actually offered an equivalent visual expression to the leading Soviet linguistic discourse, whereas “Kuldīga Frescoes” liberated visual aesthetics from the shackles of political language, “taking it to another horizon where it becomes free, a new creature in nation humanity” (Rainis). The topic of my paper will be “Kuldīga Frescoes”.