“One Eye Dry, the Other Wet.” Marking the Centenary of Herz Frank

One hundred years ago, on 17 January 1926, Herz Frank, one of the great masters of non-fiction cinema, was born. To mark the director’s centenary, Message to Man presents a retrospective featuring both the documentary filmmaker’s landmark works and his lesser-known films, some of which have never been shown on the big screen in Russia.

In the history of Russian cinema, the documentary form has had a difficult journey: following the collapse of the avant-garde project and the campaign against formalism, Dziga Vertov’s legacy was forgotten for many years to come. Cinema, like the other arts, was put at the service of socialist realism and made to reflect the “proper” ideological line.

In the 1960s, with the advent of the Thaw, the language of non-fiction cinema began to change gradually; filmmakers emerged who viewed the methods of capturing reality in a different light. One of the centres of this new way of thinking was the Leningrad school of documentary film, whose manifesto was a shift from the collective portrait to the private one; from the demonstration of an idea to the observation of the individual and their inner world.

Another circle of kindred spirits, which would later be called the “Latvian poetic school of documentary,” emerged in Riga in the same years. One of its voices was Herz Frank, who had already worked as a journalist and a photographer before he came to cinema.

“A documentary filmmaker is someone with one eye dry and the other wet with tears.” Frank’s own words, which give this programme its title, succinctly sum up his professional credo. Across his filmography, Herz Frank remained true to the principle of impartial filming and, at the same time, never abandoned an author’s perspective on the people in front of the camera.

His empathy, however, never turned into complicity. Herz Frank used to say that an author is free to film anything; the question is simply a matter of what he chooses to show. According to Frank, taking sides meant losing truth, both factual and artistic.

This centenary programme follows, through a selection of works, the creative journey of a director who believed that a documentary filmmaker has no right to be indifferent, and must convey to the viewer the testimony of what he himself has witnessed. For the most valuable testimony is that which reveals not only a record of the time, but also its image.

Ruslan Simakov