THE “CREATIVE TREATMENT OF ACTUALITY”: POETICS AND VERISIMILITUDE IN LAILA PAKALNIŅA’S FILMS

Abstract

Laila Pakalniņa is a contemporary Latvian filmmaker who works across both documentary and fiction film. Her films are often regarded as avant-garde, experi- menting with genre conventions, challenging her audiences to reconsider their understanding of narrative and the cinematic form. Her work also pushes the boundaries between what constitutes fiction film and what constitutes documen- tary. This arguably occurs because of her engagement with the tropes of poetic documentary cinema, of which there is a strong tradition in Latvia due to the famous Riga School of Poetic documentary established in the 1960s. This paper examines her documentary film Čau, Rasma (“Hi, Rasma”, 2014) as a continu- ation of the poetic documentary tropes developed by John Grierson, and argues that verisimilitude can be found in her documentaries through an application of Grierson’s philosophical work. The paper aims to contribute to a broader discus- sion of poetic documentary practices in the current era, and how this documentary approach has developed from its modernist beginnings.