This article is devoted to the theme of women and war in the films of Jānis Streičs, possibly the most influential Latvian film director. In the course of his career, which spanned nearly 50 years, Streičs made films that were popular in Latvia, as well as throughout the Soviet Union. He is one of the few Latvian film directors who managed to continue a comparatively stable career in the newly reindependent Republic of Latvia. Streičs skilfully used the canonised means of expression of classical cinema and superficially fulfilled the demands of socialist realism to provide appealing and life-asserting narratives for the audiences. Being a full-time film director at Riga Film Studio, and gradually becoming a master of the studio system, Jānis Streičs managed to subordinate the system to his own needs, outgrowing it and becoming an auteur with an idiosyncratic style and consistently developed topics.
In this article, Streičs’ oeuvre in its entirety provides the background for an analysis of two of his innovative war films.
The aim of this article is to demonstrate how World War II, a theme stringently controlled by Soviet ideology, provided the impetus for a search for an innovative film language.
Laugh in Case of Emergency: Framing the Pandemic Through Memes in Italy and Russia Where We Go One, We Go All: QAnon, Networked Individualism, and the Dark Side of Participatory (Fan) Culture Witnessing in Participatory Journalism: Siege of Aleppo and Narratives of Authenticity A Medium Is Born: Participatory Media and the Rise of Clubhouse in Russia and Ukraine During the Covid-19 Pandemic Reuse and Appropriation: Remediating Digital Museum Collections and Digital Tools for a Participatory Culture in Transition When is a Poet an Instapoet? Participatory Cultures of Digital Games: The Double-Edged Sword of Being a Reddit Community Moderator Letter from Ukraine Book Review: Hagi Šein, Digiajastu teleraamat: Digiajastu televisioon Eestis 2000–2020 [Television book of the digital era: Television of digital era in Estonia in 2000–2020] , Tallinn: 2021, ISBN 978-9916-4-0728-8, 688 pp.The Mortgaged Miracle Social Stratification in Contemporary Estonian Cinema Rethinking Participatory Culture: Introduction Imparting Knowledge via Entertaining YouTube Formats. An Explorative Study of Young Media Users in Germany Covid-19 Pandemic Coping Strategies in a Complex Landscape of Crisis Communication: A Participatory Study with Disability Organisations in Sweden