Barbara Wurm: I’m very happy to welcome Dāvis Sīmanis, a filmmaker, film theorist, film historian and film educator from Latvia. I’m so proud that your film MARIJAS KLUSUMS (Maria’s Silence) will be premiering at the Forum. When and why did you decide to make a film about Latvian actress Marija Leiko?
Dāvis Sīmanis: It started quite a long time ago. When making my previous film GADS PIRMS KARA, I was very involved in investigating the lives of the victims of the Stalinist regime and I came into contact with the biography of Marija Leiko. Her life fascinated me in a very broad sense because it seemed to me like a prism through which the most important historical moments of the early 20th century could be viewed, starting with the 1905 revolution in Russia, the First World War and extending to the revolutions in Russia and in Germany. During the inter-war period she lived in Germany and played an important role in the expressionist movement in cinema and political theatre in the 1920s there. She worked with Max Reinhardt, Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. And then there came this one particular moment when she decided to go the Soviet Union to take care of her orphan grandchild – a fatal decision. It’s a very fascinating story.
Christiane Büchner: And what made you decide to produce a big, epic historical film around her?
DS: History interests me when it gives us unknown territory to imagine and to investigate: something that is not only revealed by the narrative of the film, but also exists behind the scenes; something that provokes reflection on the part of the audience. This could entail reflecting on the particular historical period depicted in the film, but it could also encompass how that period coincides with our own time, how it becomes a metaphor of something that is happening right next to us. When we started the film, Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine hadn't yet started, that was not in my mind when we started filming. Unfortunately, now when I look back, I feel that we are once again in the midst of some... We always want to think of history as something that could push towards progress, that makes us more humane in a way, makes us more developed as human beings. And then at one point we just realise that everything is cyclical, it comes back to these transgressive moments in history and that nothing has really changed in a broader sense.
BW: How did you work in terms of research and filmmaking ideas – also regarding the formal decisions that you took?
DS: Let's say I have my own method, which also is a struggle for me, because there is a historian that lives inside me. Film and history are not things that necessarily go together very well. You always become achronological and more focused on a one-person drama and building tension for a film, so you basically always go against historical narrative. In this case, we carried out a strict research process on the era of the film, reading piles of monographies written about what was happening in Moscow at that time, about all the repressions, even with very graphic depictions of the ways how people were interrogated and how the victims were treated and so on. But, of course, there were grey areas, things we couldn't learn much about.
But all in all, I would say that with this film we were as truthful as we could be to the historical narrative that circulates in academia. And then we filled in these grey areas, these gaps in between, with our own speculations about history, let's say. So in this sense, I would say that the historical narrative here or the life story of Marija Leiko in this period is already so rich and contains so much drama and tension that you don’t have to imagine a lot because it's all already there. You don't have to be too restrictive with respect to history, you can still be free to live with or be truthful to it, but forge a very intense story behind it at the same time.
It was important to me that we are not in this focused drama about one character all the time, but that we are continually thrown a bit out of it, with little nudges to the audience that there is something else there.
CB: What is striking in your film are the different acting styles that flow into each other. How did you work with the actors and these differing styles?
DS: Olga Šepicka, the leading actor, is a bit over-dramatic at some moments, and I wanted her to play herself in some past way as an upper-class women when she was with all the high-ranked Soviet officials. At the same time, she also had experience with Meyerhold techniques, so there was already this connection in that sense. We wanted a mix of different techniques to be involved, at least in the main character’s acting, to give the impression that she herself is changing. At some points, she's very intimate, fragile, not acting at all. Then when she's in social circles, she's acting herself in some particular way. And then when she's on stage, she's acting with a very strong knowledge of acting techniques.
We also tried to learn about how Asja Lācis worked with actors on stage. It was a very progressive form of theatre that she was trying to implement. But of course, she was already living in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. It was the era of socialist realism as the main artistic direction. She was a total exception, and so we wanted to know more about her. We could relate to her when she later worked in Latvia in the 1950s and 60s because she was one of the survivors. She spent 10 or 20 years in camps, but was not executed. By learning from these historical forms of stylised acting, we could then give actors certain indications to how they should play themselves on stage. There’s one scene that is not in the film, unfortunately, where all the actors are practising the Mayerhold movements with Asja Lācis. And it's almost like this collective physical dance. We were filming this scene for, I don't know, let's say, three or four hours. And after that, most of the actors said to me, “Now we understand. Now we understand why gesture is so important, why movement is so important.” So they understood how totally different it is from psychological theatre.
BW: Would you say that this blend of styles and of aesthetics, which is maybe the Brechtian way, was also formative for your own approach? I’m thinking here in particular of the scenes that show the social or political surroundings, the context, by introducing small objects or plotlines like the disappearing bread or the disappearing people.
DS: You are totally right that these scenes, these interludes or pauses in the narrative which are not directly linked to the main plotline of the film, create this alienation effect, this Verfremdungseffekt. It was important to me that we are not in this focused drama about one character all the time, but that we are continually thrown a bit out of it, with little nudges to the audience that there is something else there. It's not only what I am seeing, there's also something behind it. As one of my old acquaintances, American composer John Luther Adams, once put it: “And then you just stand and look at it and nothing really happens and nothing really happens. And then you start to understand.”
CB: What unfolds in those scenes are other realities of the era, even if we are in this Soviet upper class setting that is also framed by culture. Maybe you can contextualise the role of culture in relation to the word “silence” in the title.
DS: The silence in the title refers to many things in the film. First, Leiko's stardom was mostly connected to the silent era in cinema. There are some allusions to that in the film, very small ones, very fragile, but they are there. But there are two other main silences in the film. First there is the silence of the people who are the cultural bloodstream of the regime, those people who were silent about the atrocities that were happening. But the third silence for me relates to the whole period because the victims cannot speak for themselves anymore. So in a way, the silence comes from the irrationality of this historical period, of some total extinction that prevents anyone from having a voice afterwards.
I think society in Latvia has at least reached a point when we can talk about more controversial aspects of our history.
BW: If you research this historical period, then you come across the concept of the Latvian operation in Soviet history, one specific target during all the additional purges of other nationalities, which also included Ukraine.
DS: I think most historians agree that of all the national operations of 1937, 1938, the case of the Latvian Theatre (Skatuve), which is also one of the protagonists in the film, was the most emblematic case, because you could see these innocent actors who were working in factories, wanting to create art on the stage and just to be together, as a community, being killed without any explanation. It's just because they had been Latvians at some point in their life or continued to cherish their culture. Because of this they were eliminated.
BW: In my mind, MARIJAS KLUSUMS fits between COLD WAR by Paweł Pawlikowski and DAU by Ilya Khrzhanovsky, at least the version of the film that was screened in Berlin, where we live through similar interrogation scenes as the one in your film with Marija.
DS: There is a Polish film by Ryszard Bugajski called PRZESŁUCHANIE, which was a big inspiration for me because it shows how a totally innocent person is broken through this never-ending interrogation. For me, it was important that the part of the film where Marija is interrogated and how she is treated in the prison takes up a big part of it by comparison. Because when we get only a brief glimpse at torture we don’t feel why this is really significant. We know, of course. But the scene is a quite precise depiction of what could have happened to Marija, because there are still records of this. And that's why we wanted it to be uncomfortably long for the audience.
BW: And do you think it is a provocation to pick up this topic today? Is it something daring? Or has it already been done in the history of cinema?
DS: We have seen this in Soviet films, where the great heroes of this post-revolution period are praised, like those who built the Soviet Union, such as Jēkabs Peterss. But if we talk about the operation against nationalities and in this case against Latvians, nothing has been done in Latvia to represent this historical period and phenomenon because it doesn't fit really our own Eastern European victimised position, which consists of different layers: first the German oppressors from the 12th century onwards, then we saw ourselves as victims of Tsarist Russia, and then afterwards the Soviet Union. And then there are still populists who think that we are victims of the EU. In this sense, the film is a narrative which goes against this victimisation because it shows that although there are thousands of innocent victims in the history of Latvia in the Soviet Union, there are also the perpetrators, people who were executioners, high up in the hierarchy of power, and they were responsible for killing people. They were also Latvians. In a way, this is like a snake eating its own tail. At the same time, I think society in Latvia has at least reached a point when we can talk about more controversial aspects of our history.
CB: One last question. You said in the beginning that you follow certain tectonic historical movements. And in this film, maybe you were ahead of what is happening now just because you followed these movements, because it was already there even if not yet visible. What do you want us to learn from your film?
DS: This is a difficult question, because I knew what I wanted people to learn from this film when we started to make it. But then it turned out that people are not ready to learn anything, like when we see what’s happening in the world and especially in Russia and in the war against Ukraine. When faced with these points of catastrophe, they have to learn some kind of epistemological strength to overcome these totally anachronistic systems of power, interaction and militarisation and learn something that Karl Jaspers would call “distotal communication”, where people can just coexist with one another and live in this state of, I would not call it harmony, but respect, mutual respect. And the kind of reflection that could lead to these learning processes is something I want to provoke with the film.
BW: Thank you very much for this conversation and the insight you gave into the ideas and the making of MARIJAS KLUSUMS.
