The planned Honorary Session is currently with others The Great Kristaps movies will be viewed on the portal Filmas.lv from 12 to 15 November. Three films will be screened at Kalvis Zalcmanis retrospective in cooperation with the State Archive of Film and Photophono Documents: Jamma (1986, directed by Laima Žurgina), Chief conductors (1985, directed by Ansis Epners) and Lifetime (1972, directed by Hertz Franks).
He forgave us
“When you burn for something and are overwhelmed with what you are doing. Kalvis is also a very light person, and all this is an intoxicating cocktail,” says Kalvis Zalcmanis, a graduate of the first cinematography course of the Latvian Academy of Culture – a cinematographer and also a young student of the Latvian Academy of Culture. cinematography teacher Andrejs Verhoustinskis. He remembers that in the 1990s there was practically no material and technical basis, but Kalvis Zalcmanis and Dāvis Sīmanis the senior had taught visual thinking more. “It’s the biggest benefit,” recalls Andrei Verhoustinsky. The first course of cinematographers is still visited by his teacher every summer. The only exception was this summer during the pandemic. The former student remembers that in the 90s all students often disappeared through various works, but Kalvis Zalcmanis has always forgiven.
On the way with Epner
“A movie can be made without actors, sound, even without a director, but never without a cameraman!” – this is a favorite saying in the cinema environment, with which the cinematographers themselves are happy to remind them that cinema, even at the time of its birth, was mainly the cinematographer’s work, ” www. kinoraksti.lv begins by director Laima Žurgina. “Many of our outstanding directors wanted to work with Kalvi. Uldis Brauns and Juris Podnieks, the cinematographers themselves, invited Kalvi Zalcmanis to work on their big films,” Žurgina reminds.
She calls Kalvi Zalcmanis one of the most stable pillars of the legendary Riga Documentary Film School. The director says that Calvi Zalcman had close ties with director Annis Epner. Both are native to Mazsalaca. Both were particularly interested in Tibetan history, culture, religion and philosophy. At the same time, both started pedagogical work at the Latvian Academy of Culture. Together they both traveled the world, forming I am a Latvian. “How can small and ignorant people conjure up a picture of space, named Kalvis Zalcmanis? It is almost impossible.”
Evidence of time
“Kalvis has made about 50 films and 400 film chronicles in his life, and they have mostly been stories about people. An individual, a personality – this was the brand of the Riga School of Poetic Documentary Film from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. These years was disturbing, a little dangerous and intoxicating, a fragile breath of freedom trembled and trembled in the air, at first the people began to ask more and more confidently who we were, where they came from, the official history gradually beginning to resemble what the grandmother knew at home. , the many works of Kalvis are both testimonies of time and they have helped to enchant today as we know it, “congratulating my colleagues on the article The Great Kristaps website, writes Andris Rozenbergs.
“Is it possible to find a common denominator, a unifying truth encoded in billions of seconds of twenty-quarters of a second and hundreds of thousands of meters in the pictures taken by cameraman Kalvis Zalcmanis? to show a harsh gesture of a non – born person is stopped by a tear (Hercules Frank Lifetime, 1972). The anxious faces of boarding school children looking at “their” apple tree in the apple orchard in the spring, to whom a letter was recently written (Laima Žurginas Ugly duckling – a human child, 1985). Ieva Lase, who was immersed in her thoughts on a warm autumn evening, whose ideas about culture and freedom did not fit into the ideas of German or Soviet occupation (Andra Rozenberga The penalty for a dream 1994).”
About the movie I am a Latvian (1990) Kalvis Zalcmanis himself has said in interviews that it must be viewed with the heart. Andris Rosenbergs is convinced that all his films should be watched.
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