HUMAN DIGNITY AND LIFE’S BEAUTYHuman Dignity and Life’s Beauty A conversation with Ivars Seleckis about the Riga School of Poetic Documentary, personal career choices and the magic of cinematography. by Nadežda Fedorova
This conversation was recorded in Riga in August 2024, in the lead-up to Ivars Seleckis´ 90th birthday. At the time, the legendary Latvian documentary filmmaker was immersed in the final stages of his new film “Continuation. Growing Up”, while preparing for exhibitions and retrospectives honoring his life’s work.Seleckis is widely regarded as a founding figure of the Riga School of Poetic Documentary Film, a movement that emerged in the 1960s and brought a lyrical, humanistic style to Soviet-era documentary filmmaking. Characterized by strong visual imagery, associative editing, and a deep sensitivity to everyday life, the Riga School shaped not only Latvian cinema but also influenced poetic documentary practices across the Soviet Union and beyond.Ivars’ already busy schedule that summer was supplemented by numerous interviews. We agreed that he would call me when he had time. When I arrived at the café on Elizabetes Street, Ivars was already sitting there, by the open window, drinking tea.He had a neatly trimmed grey moustache and beard. His bright blue, calm and attentive eyes shone from beneath his bushy eyebrows. His grey hair, tucked into a small bundle, was slightly dishevelled under a black beret pulled to the side. A dark blue velvet jacket complemented the impeccably ironed white shirt. I wondered whether I’d be able to gain the trust of someone who had created so many sensitive, insightful portraits of people. How would he respond to my questions?All my excitement faded the moment a kind smile lit up Ivars’ face. After a brief exchange of greetings, we moved on to the interview.
Ivars Seleckis
Ivars, your name is associated with the phenomenon of the Riga School of Poetic Cinema. You were, so to speak, at its origins. Could you tell us how it all began?How did it all begin? Well, by the end of the 1950s, a bunch of people with different professional and life experiences had gathered at the Riga Studio in the Newsreel department: Herz Frank, Aivars Freimanis, Uldis Brauns and others. All of them were young, bold and full of ideas. The screenwriter Viktors Lorenc returned from VGIK
with an idea to make a ‘personal’ film about Riga. The film was called ‘My Riga’ (Mana Rīga, 1960) and was shot from a subjective perspective imbued with love for the hometown. It was directed by Alois Brenč, with Valdemars Gailis as cameraman and me as assistant cameraman. This was the first step. And after this film, Herz Frank wrote a script for the short fiction film ‘White Bells’ (Baltie zvani, 1961), and Kraulitis shot it in a documentary manner. Then there were the documentaries The Beginning (Sākums, 1961) and The Shore (Krasts, 1963). And that’s when the critics noticed us. And how were we different? We didn’t know how to make films, we made them as we saw them, without looking at the canons, that probably made us stand up from the rest. Then this wave spread to Lithuania, then to Kyrgyzstan, and swept across the entire Union.
Scene from “My Riga” (Mana Rīga, 1960) shot by Ivars Seleckis
Tell me, Ivars, when did you become interested in cinema?After the war, in 1944, my parents and I came to Riga and settled in this house, here on the corner of Brivības and Elizabetes Streets. And sometimes I would run here (Ivar points through the window at the neighbouring building, Splendid Palast Cinema
[ii]), through these doors, to watch films. I watched all kinds of films, they were mostly trophy films on the screen at that time, Tarzan and the like. But I wasn’t really interested in those films.
The thing I loved most was reading. I read day and night. And when I read, I saw and heard. And it’s still like that: I can’t read a play and go to the theatre. If I read it, it already plays directly in my mind’s eye.
And when I finished secondary school, my mother gave me a Zorki camera. And I started taking photographs. Actually, I wanted to go to study history, but my parents dissuaded me because they realised that under the dictatorship that had begun, history was unlikely to be taught objectively.
And that’s when you chose to become a cinematographer?No, not immediately. First I went to the Agricultural Institute to study food technology. For the sake of the company, I wasn’t interested in it at all. But it turned out to be a new, dynamic faculty, with interesting, highly educated teachers from all over Latvia. And I started taking pictures there with my camera, and I got better and better at it. With the advent of light cameras I started to shoot chronicles: 8, 16 and 35 mm. And when I went to Moscow for an internship, I met VGIK students at one of the parties. Well, word by word we got to talking. And they told me that VGIK also had a distant learning programme. And I thought: damn it, what the hell do I need this food technology for, it’s not what I want to do.
So you dropped out of the Agricultural Institute?Under pressure from the dean, I had to finish it after all. And only after that, I went to the Riga Film Studio to work in the Newsreels Department as a runner, and enrolled in the distant learning programme at the photography department at VGIK. My graduation thesis was ‘Year in Review’ (Gada reportāža, 1965).
Ivars, you said that you were originally interested in history. What attracted you to photography and to documentary film? Self-expression. And also the feeling that I could be useful. You know, there’s such a thing as visual history. And I realised that with photography and film you can create it. And that’s what our Newsreel Department was all about. Our task was to preserve the history of the country. And it was very important, because it was being constantly destroyed. Even then we knew that visual documents were also subject to censorship: for example, there were newsreels from the time of the first Latvian Republic and Ulmanis Regime
[iii] in the archives, and not all of them were available for viewing. But nevertheless, they existed, and this gave us hope that nothing was in vain. And we approached our task responsibly.
And how did the very definition of the Riga School of Poetic Documentary Film come about?Somewhere in the 70s, my fellow documentary filmmakers and I felt stagnation, even crisis. So the idea came to organize a conference (in 1977) to look at the work we had done so far and to analyse it. The journalist and film theorist Abraham Kleckin, who had been following our work for a long time, read an introductory report that had all these definitions: poetic documentary cinema, the Riga school, and so it went. And with the help of this conference, we were able to look at our work from the outside and we realized that we were doing something special, something of our own.
Could you tell me a little more about the conference?The first conference brought together many film theorists from the USSR and abroad, and many interesting ideas were formulated. So we decided to create a European Documentary Film Symposium, which would take place every two years. We would select the films we were going to talk about and invite theorists who would lecture and analyse them. This went on for 30 years. After each symposium, a book was published. But new times came and the funding was taken away. Now we can feel what a damage it was.
Tell me, Ivars, this special thing that characterises your work with your colleagues and what Abraham Kleckin defined as poeticism. Where does it come from?The clarity of the image increases the clarity of thought. In poetry this is particularly evident. We have about two million dainas
[iv] in Latvia. The peculiarity of dainas is their brevity, imagery and allegorisation. They are also being often used as a way to convey something to a person in a slant, not offending way. So this operating with images and the circumlocution are probably easy for us. For cinema it means though, to work directly with images. The image must speak without words. Because words are vulnerable. It was particularly true during the Soviet times, regarding ideology and censorship.
Shooting the last scene of ‘Year in Review’ (Gada reportāža, 1965)
And how did the work go exactly, from idea to the finished film?Concepts, ideas, can arise from anything. But in Soviet times, the films were commissioned. That’s how it was with ‘Year in Review’ (Gada reportāža, 1965): A new director came to the Riga Film Studio and said: Guys, the date is approaching, 25 years of Soviet Latvia. Do something decent. Aivars Freimanis will be the director. So we got together: Aivars was the director, I was the cameraman. For the concept were responsible Herz Frank, who read Pravda
[v] and was ideologically savvy, and the poet Imants Ziedonis, who thought in images. First we always wrote a script, and the director approved it. And then we would put the script aside and start really working on the film.
You put the script aside?Yes. The script was needed by the studio director to start the project. But we preferred to work with a theme and a rough plan of action in our heads. This plan of action was deepened and modified in the process. In fact, a script is not necessary in documentary filmmaking, I am convinced. It can even have a very harmful effect. People with little experience unconsciously try to shoot what is pre-written, and what you get at the end is a badly played fiction film.
It was a continuously developing creative process where all of you were involved, from beginning to the end, right?Absolutely. The scriptwriters, the director and the cameraman were in continuous development of the theme. Since we didn’t use director’s monitors at that time, we had to be clear about what we were all aiming for, communication was very important.
For example, one of the themes of the ‘Year in Review’ should be ‘achievements in agriculture’. But how can you show it? The idea came to us during the location scouting, when we missed the last bus and were walking 14 kilometres in the dark from the collective farm to our base. We walked and thought. What distinguishes the Latvian agriculture? Cattle breeding. And an old custom came to our minds: On the first day, when cows are put out to pasture after a long winter, people pour water on each other. To wash away the winter fatigue, to share the joy over the coming spring. And so the scene was found.
There were of course reproaches from the studio management to the scene, that there were no figures, no indicators, what had been achieved and what the Republic could be proud of. But this lively and emotional imagery spoke much better than abstract figures: It showed happy people. And healthy cows!
Could you tell me a little bit more about how a cameraman works in documentary film? How do you find the images, the shots?There’s a kind of magic to it. For example, you go out into the field. And it seems boring, nothing is happening. But you pick up a camera, and you can shoot continuously.
You mean that the film comes to life through the eye of the cameraman? Something like that. And just such moments, when, at first glance, ‘nothing happens’, give us the opportunity to look closely at details that can reveal the theme of the film on a deeper level.
How much footage did you usually shoot? Did you have a film limit?Of course there was a film limit: Two and a half minutes of footage for one minute of finished film. Or 75 metres to 30 metres. So for a 90-minute film, we shot about 4 hours of footage. The tapes were two-minute, 60 metres each. The average shot length was 10 seconds.
But when making a documentary film, you can’t always predict when something important or interesting will happen. Were you glad that with the introduction of digital technology there was no longer a need for such an economical approach? No, on the contrary. Knowing that the footage is limited, you are fully mobilised. And then you turn the camera on a second before something happens. To do that, you have to be extremely focused and open at the same time. In this modus operandi, you catch the slightest changes around you and something tells you in time that something is about to happen.
Such a hunt for shots, I can imagine, must be thrilling.Yes. But it’s also a lot of pressure, you get very tired after such work. But nowadays, on the other hand, directors perish selecting material.
Tell me, Ivar, the films made by you and your colleagues during the Soviet years are sometimes referred to as the ‘Riga New Wave’. They were indeed different from the films of the Stalinist era. Weren’t you afraid to go against the established canons? Did you encounter obstacles from the authorities?The generation before us had experienced repression, they lived in fear. But we, we didn’t care. We filmed what we saw. Obstacles happened, sure. But after we wrote a letter to Moscow and got our way, we became bolder.
Please tell me about this incident! After the film ‘The Shore’ (Krasts, 1963), which everyone liked, we were told in the editorial office: ‘The way you learnt to shoot fishermen, now shoot a collective farm.’ And we went to the collective farm and shot the film ‘Bread for the Road’ (Ceļamaize, 1963): Autumn, slush, young Komsomol members came to help the peasants, but not everything goes well at once. The film was accepted and is already being shown. At the same time there was a congress of the Latvian Communist Party, and the first secretary of the Latvian Communist Party Arvīds Pelše expressed his dissatisfaction with our film: Why do our documentary filmmakers not film about accomplishments, but dig around in some backyards? Well, as soon as the editorial staff heard that Pelše was not satisfied, they immediately forgot that the film was accepted. ‘Bread for the Road’ was withdrawn from screenings, we fell into disfavour. So we got together and wrote a letter to the CPSU Central Committee in Moscow. A commission was sent from there, it arrived and decided not to raise the scandal. Apparently, Moscow didn’t need another witch-hunt. On the same day an article appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda, where they wrote that the guys were young, they paid attention to the difficulties, and that this was also right. But the film was nevertheless not distributed.
That’s it. After that incident, there were also objections from the management, now and then, but we argued like this: ‘Dear comrade. What you think you see in this film is your subjective perception, your associations. We don’t think so.’ And they had to agree. But you must understand, we were never really dissidents. We wanted to document the lives of the people around us.
Which Western films did you watch when you were studying and just starting out, back in the Soviet era? I watched the most films while studying at VGIK. It was 1959. I was very impressed by Flaherty at that time. Especially his first film, Nanook.
Flaherty was known to plan some scenes in advance. And asked his characters to act them. And how do you work?I work without a written script, I prefer to shoot by myself and never ask people to repeat something. The first shot is always the most real, the most natural one. When you don’t have a script, you are attentive to every detail, every twist and turn of what is happening, always looking for something that characterises what you are shooting. You have to react instantly. That’s why I like to film myself. Now, though, I’ve started to work with a cameraman, because digital technology is changing rapidly.
And how do you choose your heroes?If I’m not directly interested in a character after learning about him or her somehow, but am working on a theme, like in the film Land (2022), I take time to cast. I look at a lot of people until my intuition tells me: this person, or this person. Pure intuition. But it has never let me down yet. Of course, there is observation and analysis: how the persons speak, how they move, how they laugh. But the decision comes instinctively. I can’t explain it logically.
Ivars, how did you come up with the idea to make the film “Crossroad Street” (Šķērsiela, 1988)?At that time, society was undergoing a transformation. The screenwriter Tālivaldis Magrēvičs and I thought about how ordinary people were experiencing them. People at the bottom of the social ladder. We didn’t know that. We thought: How do we start? The first decision was to shoot in Riga. And we started looking for streets in the suburbs. It was not easy, and then Tālivaldis suddenly remembered the street where he lived as a child. When the studio director came to see what we were going to film, he said: Well, there’s nothing here. You’ll never make it. But he left us alone, and we started working: we established contact with the residents, rented a room. And we started walking the route every day. At first the people were sheepish. But then they got so used to us that they started to see us as a kind of entertainer. We connected these people by being there continuously, they established contact with us and through us with each other. Well, it’s one thing to shoot the material. What’s the next thing? And then Maya Selecka, our editor, my wife and soul mate, came up with the idea of connecting the material according to the principle of ‘the flow of life’ with all its ups and downs.
Protagonist Aldis (first from the left) with the film crew of “Crossroad Street” (Šķērsiela, 1988). From left to right: Leonīds Bērziņš, Tālivaldis Magrēvičs, Ivars Seleckis, Jānis Vestmanis.
And then the director appreciated your efforts?Not right away. Almost no one came to the internal screening of the film. Neither the editors nor other colleagues. No one believed in the film. Only one editor came, out of duty. And Ilmars Blumbergs, a very talented artist. He drew all our posters. He saw the film and said: ‘You guys don’t know what you’ve done.’ Then the bosses looked at the film from a different angle. The film was taken to St. Petersburg to the ‘Message to Man’ festival, where it was warmly received. And then the film went to Soviet and international festivals and won many prizes. Including the Grand Prix at the festival in Amsterdam (Joris Ivens Award, IDFA) and in Yamagata in Japan – the Flaherty Grand Prize and the Prize of the European Film Academy. And only then we learned, that there are such streets in every city, in every country. The Japanese were surprised: what are you complaining about? You have so much land! They live on such small pieces of land there, and to them we seemed rich.
Well, then times changed, and we decided to make a sequel. And we called it ‘New Times on Crossroad Street’ (Jaunie laiki Šķērsielā, 1999)
And then we also made ‘Capitalism on Crossroad Street’ (Kapitālisms Šķērsielā, 2013).
Ivars, could you tell us a bit more about your ‘code of ethics’?Well, documentary filmmakers have a special responsibility to the people they film. People don’t know what they will look and sound like on screen and they trust us. That’s why it’s always been important to us that the people in the frame look natural. The film portraiture is a special art, considering also the fact that in cinema, a person is shown on a huge screen, to a large audience. A person is shy. Especially people who are socially vulnerable and have never been in the spotlight before.
And besides, a film can have an ‘after-effect’ for its characters, it can sometimes even change their fate. We have always been aware of our responsibility in this sense. That’s why we’ve always shown the film to our heroes before the premiere, to each one individually on the big screen. Because if, for example, a man like Aldis ([i]one of the protagonists from ‘Crossroad Street’, N.F.), who talks there openly about everything, is in the audience at the premiere, and the audience of hundreds would start to laugh, he could have a heart attack. That’s unacceptable.
Has it ever happened that one of your characters was unhappy with his or her portrait and wanted to change anything?In fact, it’s never happened.
What do you love most about your profession?The process. The process through which you get to know people and their stories. It’s a very complex and subtle process. People don’t reveal themselves right away. It takes time to build trust. Gradually we get to know people and they get to know us.
So it’s also a mutual process? Yes, absolutely. A process of mutual enrichment. We begin to understand each other and ourselves better. It’s very exciting, like reading and writing a book at the same time. But unlike a writer or a reader, we are in direct contact with our characters.
When you speak, it is usually not so much on your own behalf as on behalf of the collective. Please tell us a little about your collective. At the Riga Film Studio there was a Newsreel Department, and the working rooms and offices were located along one corridor. And thanks to this we were in constant contact. It was a real collective. We could get advice and support at any moment. Now the filmmakers work in a different way, disjointed. There are a lot of separate studios. And they lack, I think, the collegiality. When you can just get advice or tips quickly and easily. There’s often this misleading impression that if you think something, or know something, that the others think and know the same. But they don’t. Even Chaplin always made a test screening and looked at people’s reactions, listened to what they said, and then made some changes and made the final version of the film. That’s how it also was with us. We put our work out for discussion and listened to the opinion of our colleagues. Sometimes you need a little. One turn of the camera, one word. And it’s easier to recognise it with a fresh eye. We were like a family. There are not many of us left now.
Film crew of “Salty Life” (Sāļā dzīve, 1996). From left to right: Agris Drēviņš, Romāns Puriņš, Aivars Dambekalns, Ivars Seleckis, Leonīds Bērziņš
Tell me, how do you feel about new technologies?50 years ago, it took at least three months to record a good conversation with a peasant. He’ll tell you the first time, yes. But it will be what you want him to say. And what he thinks, he doesn’t show you right away. Now, with new technology, we have a very different level of openness, but it’s quite possible that it’s deceptive. And artificial intelligence, it opens the door to manipulation on a grand scale. It’s dangerous and should not be allowed in documentary cinema.
Is there anything else in your life that you haven’t seen yet but would like to? Here’s the thing… I had a desire to see the Garden of Eden. So I went to the place that is said to be the prototype for the descriptions of the Garden of Eden. It’s in Iraq, where the Tigris and Euphrates converge to form the Arabian Sea. I expected to see a lush garden. But instead I saw a place 30 metres in diameter, surrounded by a 2.5 metre brick fence, and inside there is scant grass, some stumps with shoots, two guards with machine guns, and an apple tree with apples. The ones Adam supposedly picked for Eve. Well, what do we do? We gave the soldiers badges with Riga’s coat of arms and picked a few apples, they were still green in March, and went home. The apples got really shriveled since then, I still have them.
We come back again to your interest in history.Yes, history and stories. Stories that people have told and still tell each other, and whose traces are lost in time. Take, for example, the Bible, which is full of borrowings from the Gilgamesh stories, even though it doesn’t cite them.
On the 22nd of September you will turn 90 years old. A big celebration with a reception, exhibition and shows is being prepared by the Film Centre. That must be very nice. It is. But it’s also hard because the preparation takes a lot of my time too. I’ve spent my whole life working, and now I feel indebted to my family. I prefer to give my time to them now.
How do you imagine a perfect birthday?To sit down with colleagues and a big tasty fish under a tree by the water, to have a drink, a snack, and to think about life, about the situations lived, but not in a hurry. Company is very important. What can be better than a good company.
Which advice would you give to young people?Never to interrupt their studies and to be persistent. And, probably, to trust fate.
We parted on the corner of Elizabetes and Brīvības Street, just outside the house where Ivars once lived with his family in the late 1940s. He turned and walked up Brīvības Street, while I walked down Elizabetes toward the Central Station. The golden hour had just set in, casting a warm light over the city — that particular summer glow that carries both the contentment of a day’s work and the quiet anticipation of the evening ahead. As I moved through this shimmering light among people easing into the evening, I carried a feeling of stillness, struck by the privilege of having been welcomed so close to another person’s story. I felt the weight and beauty of a long-lived life, a life shaped by clarity, devotion, and presence. The image of Ivars still stays with me: a lean man, marked by the fine trace of age, walking away with a calm, upright bearing — deliberate yet unhurried — a precious life among other precious lives, fully part of the world and still profoundly attentive to it.Rīga, August 9, 2024
[i] The Gerasimov All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, the first and oldest film school in the world (est. 1919 in Moscow)
[ii] The first cinema theater in Riga, est. 1923
[iii] 1920-1934, 1934-1940
[iv] Daina – a genre of Latvian and Lithuanian folk songs. A daina consists of one or two unrhymed stanzas and describes nature’s and human’s life´s cycles. According to the ethnological record there are over 1,5 Million Latvian dainas. The genre remains popular and produces uncountable variants due to its improvisational nature and brevity.
[v] Pravda is a Russian broadsheet newspaper and was the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was one of the most influential newspapers in the country with a circulation of 11 million.
[1] The Gerasimov All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, the first and oldest film school in the world (est. 1919 in Moscow)
[1] The first cinema theater in Riga, est. 1923
[1] 1920-1934, 1934-1940
[1] Daina – a genre of Latvian and Lithuanian folk songs. A daina consists of one or two unrhymed stanzas and describes nature’s and human’s life´s cycles. According to the ethnological record there are over 1,5 Million Latvian dainas. The genre remains popular and produces uncountable variants due to its improvisational nature and brevity.
[1] Pravda is a Russian broadsheet newspaper and was the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was one of the most influential newspapers in the country with a circulation of 11 million.
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HUMAN DIGNITY AND LIFE’S BEAUTY first appeared on
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