The Labyrinths of Narration: Chaos and Mayhem at the Latvian Collective Farm in Dawn
Dawn, Laila Pakalniņa (2015)
Dawn revolves around the folk tale of a young pioneer boy, Pavlik Morozov, who became a hero in the USSR. In Laila Pakalnina's film, Janis (Antos Georgs Grauds), a young boy living in a small village, joins with his fellow villagers in the Soviet vision of the collective farm which will bring prosperity for all. His father (Vilis Daudzins) opposes the creation of the farm, and in Soviet times, all those who opposed the great ideas offered by the Communist leaders quickly became the enemy of the whole system. His father wants to burn down the headquarters, so Janis betrays him, and the father takes revenge on his son. In the Soviet Union this story was a subject of many books, songs, plays, a poem, opera and also the basis of Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished film Bezhin Meadow (1937).
In Dawn, the pace of the narrative is relentless, with a constantly moving camera and political slogans hurled in the air. Janis, the "builder of a new life," is treated badly by his father, who very aggressively looks for answers as to why Janis betrayed him. Pakalina uses impressive shadow-images to depict these moments. "Why on earth is he my father," ponders little Janis in the middle of this mayhem and chaos. Against some moments of silence, Pakalina's film emphasizes continuous movement and agitation.
Despite the stylized acting and repressive atmosphere, Pakalina's directing resembles the total orchestration of things, and is so in control of the happenings that the entity starts to look like an ideally suitable play practiced in the Young Pioneers' summer camp. Other notable characters include Liena Smukste as the workers' council chair and Wiktor Zborowski as the village's political officer.
This allegorical, partly semiotic filmic approach expresses the absurdism of the tale in a manner that allows the characters to fill the frame in an exaggerated state of mind. This also allows the filmmaker to interpret the slightest details as euphemisms for much more sordid aspects of "truth," establishing a permanent state of confusion as it pertains to the aims of Soviet politics. Pakalnina favors the classics of the Russian cinema, and the same dynamic is repeated throughout the narrative. There is an extensive feeling of fabulation throughout the film, although its value as truth is much less important than the metaphorical ability to draw attention to controversial aspects of narration.
Dawn, Laila Pakalniņa (2015)
But while the story of Morozov serves as a starting point of the narrative, the film systematically twists and trivializes the depicted events as to perpetuate the dominant principles of this period of Soviet life. Pakalnina is both honoring and criticizing of this particular form of cinema. The most implausible events are visualized through Wojciech Staron's monochrome-camera to emphasize primitivism and ideas that are already present in the narrative both in image and sound. The staged feeling of appearances comes across heavily and is emphasized through the kaleidoscopic editing of disjointed images. Pakalnina's way to visually match shots in some sequences suggests their geological continuity, but the narrative framework appears to be so cryptic that it prevents attempts to establish closed interpretations. Instead, Pakalnina's method is to reform and duplicate narrative references, thereby creating an audiovisual palimpsest, in which motion and emotion are connected through the same camera choreography.
The narrative favors the disconnection from reality, yet the black-and-white material of the film in turn focuses on the attention, expressions and general behavior of the depicted persons. The Eisensteinian montage, formerly used to depict the struggle of the proletariat, now shows the proletariat as mocking that which seeks to uphold him, through more languid and disconnected imagery. Rather than fast, intercut images, Pakalnina instead shifts to long takes, surveying the landscape and the humans within. Everything becomes grand and monstrous—the camera, the land, and most especially, the people.
Pakalnina's pictorialism turns cinematic conventions into moments with a sense of duration inside her planned sequences. This becomes a modality connected with the viewer's attention and perception of the scenes. Consequently, time comes to be understood inside the images—the idea of duration as the registering of time is crucial here. On a narrative level, Pakalnina's images move and flow into each other, while the compositional hierarchy between them does not change very much. There is an internal tension in the structure of the images that holds them together and produces a unified vision controlled by the cineaste. There is also a specific affection in looking at these images.
Pakalnina seems to be studying the precise laws and specific effects of the Soviet mythology in a certain geographical environment, which is, this time, Latvian—whether consciously organized or not—on the emotions and behavior of individuals on the farm. This creates a form of Soviet-Latvian psycho-geography, which can be applied to the findings of an investigation that relies heavily on the performance of the masses, and their influence on human feelings. Pakalnina addresses her spectacle through a combination of an observational mise-en-scène with a performative presence of both camera and the actors.
Dawn, Laila Pakalniņa (2015)