Four White Shirts

Četri balti krekl

Genre

Drama, Romance, Music

Director

Rolands Kalniņš

Run time

1h 16min

Cast

Uldis Pūcītis, Dina Kuple

Cezars Kalninš, portrayed by „the Latvian Harrison Ford” Uldis Pucitis, installs telephones by day and composes pop songs by night. The puritan Soviet censorship deems Cezars’ lyrics „unsuitable and frivolous”, hence „unfit for the Soviet youth”. In fact, it can be argued that this assessment matches the opinion of the Soviet cinema authorities in regard to the film as a whole, since „Four White Shirts” was immediately banned and released in cinemas only in 1986. The creative boldness and stubbornness, evident in both Cezars’ bitingly ironic verses and the film’s unconventional narrative structure and fresh, new-waves-inspired mode of expression, turned out to be equally problematic for the hero and for the film itself, as well as for its director whose representation of the actual mechanisms of Soviet censorship ended up too realistic for his own good.

Presented as a 2K DCP, digitised in 4K and restored in 3K from the original 35mm internegative duplicate and an intermediate positive copy, preserved at the Film Archive of Latvian National Archives, under the supervision of the director, with support by National Film Centre of Latvia and Cultural Capital Foundation of Latvia, in 2017. The 35mm original negative is kept at Gosfilmofond.

Genre

Drama, Romance, Music

Director

Rolands Kalniņš

Run time

1h 16min

Cast

Uldis Pūcītis, Dina Kuple

Cezars Kalninš, portrayed by „the Latvian Harrison Ford” Uldis Pucitis, installs telephones by day and composes pop songs by night. The puritan Soviet censorship deems Cezars’ lyrics „unsuitable and frivolous”, hence „unfit for the Soviet youth”. In fact, it can be argued that this assessment matches the opinion of the Soviet cinema authorities in regard to the film as a whole, since „Four White Shirts” was immediately banned and released in cinemas only in 1986. The creative boldness and stubbornness, evident in both Cezars’ bitingly ironic verses and the film’s unconventional narrative structure and fresh, new-waves-inspired mode of expression, turned out to be equally problematic for the hero and for the film itself, as well as for its director whose representation of the actual mechanisms of Soviet censorship ended up too realistic for his own good.

Presented as a 2K DCP, digitised in 4K and restored in 3K from the original 35mm internegative duplicate and an intermediate positive copy, preserved at the Film Archive of Latvian National Archives, under the supervision of the director, with support by National Film Centre of Latvia and Cultural Capital Foundation of Latvia, in 2017. The 35mm original negative is kept at Gosfilmofond.

Info

Rating

(none)

Production year

1987

Global distributor

--

Local distributor

Pimedate Ööde Filmifestival MTÜ

In cinema

11/24/2018