1 Addressing the limits of Actor-Network Theory

In my search for theoretical concepts that would best assist in explaining the phenomenon of unmade film projects, I first turned to the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which examines “human and non-human actors as mutually shaping, transforming and translating each other” (Spöhrer, Ochsner 2016: XIV). ANT sharpened my gaze for recognizing external constraints. But in the end, my resistance to applying ANT roots in its conceptualization of human agency as just one parameter among others that shapes and is transformed by the network. This position poses a problem for media studies (see Spöhrer 2016: 3-6; Couldry 2008: 101-104), especially production studies, where the decisions of the core creative team weigh more than other factors of the net.

Secondly, Jan Teuerlings has drawn attention to the blind spot of the ANT – Bruno Latour’s lack of acknowledgment for social structures. These, in contrast to actors, are operating across multiple locations and different moments in time; it is an intellectual abstraction “that does not exist ‘out there’ but nevertheless helps us to see patterns”. (Teuerlings 2017: 70). Latour, on his part, draws a line between structure and dispositif, which is local; it is a configuration in which the action takes place (Teuerlings 2017: 70).

The fundamental concept of the project-based film industry economy is precarity, which is defined on the objective side by deregulated social structures and neoliberal employment policies (Kirsten 2021: 20), but on the subjective side by a persistent sense of vulnerability and anxiety (Kirsten 2021: 20). The film industry in Europe and in such small country with small market as Latvia is crucially dependent on state financial support and the institutional situation of film in a given country and period. The precise configuration of the state support system and its effects, when using Latour’s ANT, can be regarded as a historical dispositif. It will be the aim of the next sub-chapter to disclose the specific conditions of Latvian film industry of the 90s. At the Cinematic Precarity Research Group we came to a conclusion that precarity is always historically and geographically specific. I claim that form of the Latvian film industry of the 90s was such a mode of precarity whose features will be described below.

Concept, that is applicable to the career research form ANT is that of “anaphoric trajectories”, which has been proposed by Danish film scholar Sara Malou Strandvad. The concept of “anaphoric trajectories” has been defined by Bruno Latour in his later writings on ANT:

An anaphor is a word that is used to avoid repetition, where the referent of an anaphor is determined by its antecedent. Accordingly, anaphoric trajectories propose that the process of instauration constantly morphs while still depending on previous actions. […] The metaphor of trajectory is meant to emphasize the fragility of construction: that a work process may fail at every point, that instaurations do not have stability, and that every relation and translation is uncertain. (Strandvad 2017: 145.)

That means that the possibility of failure of an endeavor is more probable. The description of the development of Legend about Kaupo further below will reveal why it was a paradigmatic case for the situation the Latvian film industry was in at the beginning of the 90s, but the final decision to abandon the project was met by the director, Pēteris Krilovs.

2 Historical backdrop: leaving the state-socialist production mode behind

In April 1990 – a month before Latvia declared its restauration of independence from the Soviet Union –, the Riga Film Studio (the most important Latvian film studio during the period of the Soviet occupation) fired all film professionals working in the creative sector (directors, directors of photography, art department). Private film studios were established. This date was a turning point from the state-socialist mode of film production to the new mode of neoliberal film production. The most influential publication on the state-socialist mode of film production has been offered by Petr Szczepanik. He bases his description on the production realities in the Czechoslovak cinema and in East Germany (Szczepanik 2013). As with those case studies, in the Soviet Union as well, the general strategy of the film industry was developed by the state; it regulated the production process and all the premises on which the film studios operated. But the biggest difference between the State-socialist Mode of Production in East-Central European countries and the Soviet republics lies in the vertical model of triple ideological and management control. Every step of film production in Soviet republics was the object of triple scrutiny: first in the film studio, then at the Film Committee of the Republic, and afterwards at the Ministry of Culture of the USSR (and its subordinate institutions in Moscow) (for more see Reitere 2006). But all the plans for the film sector in the whole Soviet Union were made at the Ministry of Culture of the USSR and then spread down the hierarchy of power. Latvian film scholar Inga Pērkone, who calls the Latvian cinema from the mid-60s till 1989 its classical period, highlights two features that differentiate the Soviet system from the Hollywood model. First of all, in the Soviet Union, the director was regarded as the most important person within the production process, because the continuity script, which was the basic document for film production in Hollywood, was replaced by the director’s script. Secondly, the driving force beyond the Soviet film industry was not making a profit, but spreading the Soviet ideology (Pērkone 2011a: 47-49).

If the mode described in Czechoslovakia was partly “a self-supporting system, with production financed primarily by revenue generated from the domestic distribution of imported Western products” (Szczepanik 2013: 115), then film production in Soviet Latvia was financed twofold. While the documentaries and news reels were financed by the Soviet republics, the funding for the feature film production came from Moscow. This feature of the Soviet film-producing system was the reason why, in the 1990s, Latvia experienced the condition of nonexistence of films. When in 1990 the budget for the newly declared Republic of Latvia was calculated, the budget of the Soviet Latvia served as a starting point, and the fact that the feature films were financed by Moscow was simply forgotten (Reitere 2020). Until 1992, at the Riga Film Studio, those films were completed, which were commissioned for Central Television in Moscow. Afterwards, the real period of despair for Latvian film started (Reitere 2021: 347).

The first call of the National Film Council of Latvia for film and video projects took place in 1992. The amount of money available was 71,803 lats (Latvian currency). Next year, the funding support experienced a rise to 180,561 lats. But still, the demands by the projects were three times as much as the money available. This amount was meant not only for film projects, but for all projects in the film branch, for example, the Riga Film Museum applied for support to find a new location. Several of the very famous and experienced film directors of the middle and older generation applied with their full-length feature film projects.

In the end, in 1993, the Commission of the National Film Council decided to give 40,6% of the state support money to documentary film projects and news reels, 25,7% to animation films, and only 22,2% to feature films. Producer Ansis Bērziņš, who chaired the commission that year, explained in an interview the strategy behind this partitioning:

First of all, the budget we have at our disposal is that of a survival regime. In this situation, we regard it as our duty to sustain a minimum subsistence level for all types of films – feature films, documentaries, and animation. Under different circumstances, it would have been better to divide the whole sum among just a few projects and not to give a tiny amount to many of them. But we know perfectly well that behind such a decision would lie unemployment of many very talented creative people; we would ruin the creative potential of our people. Now, we all simply have to survive until better times come (Rietuma 1993).

But next to this, a very important aspect for the decision-making in 1993 was the factor of emergency, which means films have to be made right now. In such a situation, the commission decided to prioritize the documentary films and news reels, not feature films (Rietuma 1993).

Additionally, the commission decided that in order to avoid the generational gap in Latvian film, the priority for funding was given to projects of young filmmakers. Between 1993 and 1995, just one full-length feature film was made – The Nest (Ligzda) by famous Latvian film master director Aivars Freimanis.

But what the rest of the film directors and their envisioned crews for their envisioned film projects were doing all the time? They kept writing new film projects and sending them to the calls of the National Film Centre, still knowing that there would be no increase in state support for film. Ieva Romānova, who used to work as manager of the Latvian Union of Filmmakers, described this situation as follows:

When the Latvian film industry was in a really desperate situation, we regularly wrote different protest letters to the Ministry of Culture. They always answered: You will never ever get an increase in funding. But keep writing, because we can quote your letters in our documents (Puķe 2024).

This illustrates one type of work-for-labour (Standing 2023: 126) Latvian film workers had to learn to carry out after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when the state-socialist mode of production was replaced with project work and funding for film projects had to be acquired from different sources. The funding scheme for project development at the National Film Centre of Latvia was introduced only in the 21st century, and the other funding source for film, the State Culture Capital Foundation, was established in 1998. Until then, all the stages until shooting were mostly unpaid work-for-labour.² In this situation, one of the full-length feature film projects that received funding from the first call of the newly established state support system in 1992 was a project for a historical feature, Legend about Kaupo (Leģenda par Kaupo) by the acclaimed Latvian film and theatre director Pēteris Krilovs (b. 1947). It was one of the most ambitious projects of that time, which was developed to a considerable late stage of pre-production.

Research on shadow cinema addresses the most basic question of academic inquiry – what kind of primary sources are at hand to form the basis for further interpretation (Fenwick et al. 2020:6). My paper on Legend about Kaupo is based on two research interviews with Pēteris Krilovs and on materials on the project from his private archive. A short description of the film’s fabula; project’s calculation, different explications that the project’s authors wrote for different purposes; an accompanying letter of Krilovs for a now unidentifiable script-competition, where Legend about Kaupo was submitted; a short version of the director’s script, photos from location scouting, and sketches for set design. As that was a prestige project, it had quite a big press coverage, which is consulted as well. In case of the unmade projects, these are the paratexts that make them visible, even though Gérard Genette acknowledges only one case when the paratext can exist without a text – that of the coincidence (Moll 2019: 16-17). The nonexistence of a text/film can have manifold reasons that will be displayed in the next sections.

3 Case example: film project Legend about Kaupo

The film script Legend about Kaupo by Latvian playwright Ārijs Geikins was submitted to the Riga Film Studio in 1988. It was included in the studio’s plans for the future, but, as back then the project had no director attached to it, it was not implemented until the breakup of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the 1990s, the script landed in the hands of the film director Pēteris Krilovs and the production studio Zalktis (Rušeniece 1993). The crew of the project during the preparation phase consisted of Pēteris Krilovs as a director, Brigita Rozenbrika as the film’s producer and production designer, and director of photography Andris Pavlovskis. The script was written, the calculation done, and the project was submitted to the funding calls of the National Film Council of Latvia in 1992 and 1993.

The intention was to make a historical feature about Kaupo, a king of the Livonians or Livs.³ At the beginning of the 13th century. Kaupo is a very controversial historical hero because he was Christianised around 1200 and changed sides from the pagans to German crusaders. In 1203, he even visited Rome and met Pope Innocent III, who presented him with 100 gold pieces. In Latvian public history, Kaupo is mostly seen as a traitor who fought against his people and their desire for independence. Others insist that Kaupo was a politician who was realistic about the possibilities, that it was necessary to make common cause with the Germans and bring modern Western European values and culture to pagan Livonia. The author of the script underlines that he regards Kaupo as a politician who assesses the situation realistically and becomes a traitor against his will (Geikins 1992: 2-3).

Analysing the project that the National Cinema Council had selected for shooting in 1993, film critic Dita Rietuma wrote very enthusiastically that she regards Legend about Kaupo as a programmatic work of art cinema. Even though Kaupo is a Livonian, the film has the potential to become a Latvian confession. The topic of Kaupo is still very actual, his decisions and the consequences of them (Rietuma 1992).

The crew consulted with historians on the matter and carried out historical research on how Livonian castles at the beginning of the 13^th century looked to build a replica of it. They spent the summer of 1992 travelling around Latvia looking for a former hill-fort (pilskalns) that would be suited as a location where the castle could be built. Krilov’s archive contains several dozen photos of castle-forts from these expeditions. Based on the historical research, Rozenbrika designed very detailed sketches for the film sets, displaying the craftsmanship tradition of the Riga Film Studio. The costume sketches were drafted. But Krilovs forbade himself to think about casting because he understood that by the time they would have the money together, the actors he might have chosen could be too old or otherwise unsuited for the project (Reitere 2024).

According to the calculations, the project needed a total of 496,936 lats. It received 4000 lats. The replica of the wooden castle was consciously left out of the film’s budget because it was regarded as a parallel project. Additional struggles for the project were the inflation in Latvia in 1992 and the change of the state currency from Latvian rouble to lats in 1993.

It soon became clear that the producers of the film would have to come up with new ideas to get the film made under these circumstances. Thus, in 1993, they established Kaupo’s Castle Foundation, whose main task was to raise money and sponsors for the construction of a wooden replica of a 13th-century Livonian castle. It should be noted that the idea was to build a castle that could be used as a tourist attraction and not as a decoration for filming! The project developers had had several very promising talks with possible sponsorship from Latvian timber companies and two Latvian banks (N.N. 1994).

The main artistic reason for the retreat of the project’s creative team was the impossibility in these circumstances to shoot the travel of Kaupo to Rome, which was meant to be the centrepiece of the film. That would have cost a considerable amount of the film’s budget. It was planned to film Kaupo in his 13th-century clothes, travelling from Riga to Rome through contemporary Europe (or Europe of the mid-1990s). The idea was to stage it as the cinematic equivalent of the symbolic “return to Europe” that Latvia was going through after regaining its independence from the Soviet Union.

When it became clear that neither Kaupo’s journey nor the building of the castle could be realised with the financial support available (around 1996), Krilovs moved on to other projects.

4 Theoretical approaches to unmade film projects

Incomplete – an umbrella term for unfinished, unmade, or only imagined projects, coming from women’s film and media theory – serves as a framework that best characterizes the situation in the Latvian film sector in the 90s. Following the affective stance of the theoretical framework mentioned, the incomplete has to be regarded as “signs of possibility [that] […] offer ideal sites for examining the lived experiences, practical conditions, and institutional realities of film production and consumption” (Beeston and Solomon 2023: 10-11).

If for feminist film theory the concept of the incomplete allows to incorporate into the film history marginalized film projects and practitioners (Beeston and Solomon 2023: 11), then for Latvian film sector of the 90s, I claim, the incomplete (or, using the wording of Jane M. Gaines the condition of nonexistence ) was a status quo until at least 1997, when with the funding decision for Jānis Streičs melodrama Mills of Destiny (Likteņdzirnas, 1997) the awakening of the Latvian film industry started (Rietuma 2021:42).

The research in film cultures of small and peripheral countries, which for a considerable time span have been subjugated to the imperial power (of the Soviet Union), can learn a lot from feminist film and media scholarship, because it turns its attention to artefacts that are left fragmentary or lost altogether. Thus, if the creative output of women has “conventionally been coded as secondary and nonessential within masculinist understandings of film authorship and narratives of film production” (Beeston and Solomon 2023: 17), than a similar line of thought can be perused concerning Latvian film historiography as well and applied to other periods of Latvian film history than the period of Soviet occupation as well. Because Latvia, as a small and peripheral film culture, has always been in hierarchical relations, either within political or cultural hegemony.

Further this article, following the line of thought of Beeston and Solomon, argues that the melancholic tone about the ideas unfilmed that is the leading emotion in research interviews with Latvian film professionals on the situation in the 1990s, can be supplemented with a concept of Latvian undone films of the 1990s as “a zone of potential” and by incorporating more and more of these unrealized film projects into Latvian film historiography the very slim film output of the period can be enlarged and the efforts of film professionals, even if the project was never made, put into the spotlight and enrich our understanding of creative labour. The scope of this article doesn’t allow me to expand my thesis here, but I tentatively suggest that the zone of potential in Latvian film sectors of the 1990s was far wider than the films actually made.

In art discourse, failures belong to the mythology of artmaking. For example, Martin Mittelmeier stresses the productive aspect of the literary artworks that are not written, because the results of such negative production aesthetics is often integrated into later works of art of the same artist and build the foundational basis for his or her later masterpieces (Hanauska, Kraus 2019: 2). In any case, the tendency to see everything stressing the productive outcomes of the failed artworks – experience gained, foundational bases for masterpieces and so on, fall into the neoliberal discourse of value. That means – even negative experiences have to be presented and interpreted as something that generates some kind of value. Even more, it belongs to the mythos of the neoliberal self-promotion to speak about our own failures, defeats, or flops, because only those who have gone through hard times and are still not beaten have deserved the success.

Mainly, the interpretations use two possibilities to explain failure. Either the artist had to obey the circumstances and had no agency in such a situation at all, or it was his or her own individual fault that the artwork didn’t come into being. But I’m interested in more systemic approaches to failures. Because the film industry displays not only uncontrollable artistic features, but it is also a system governed by a lot of industrial practices, inner constraints, and principles.

Eva Novrup Redvall encourages “to think about failure in all stages of making film and television.” It encompasses all parts of the industry – starting with the professional training of young filmmakers at film schools to the level of policy making (Redvall 2023: 69). Different stages of the film production and different professional roles can have different/divergent understandings of what constitutes a failure. She encourages film scholars to sharpen their attention to “what is not being produced and whose voices are not being heard” (Redvall 2023: 69). But this might constitute a challenge in an industry that, in its industrial rituals, is trained on focusing on success and best practice stories.

Sara Malou Strandvad, on her part, has developed a socio-materialist perspective on film production, emphasising the evolving nature of the product itself, or ‘the film in the making’, and its ability to create effects (Strandvad, 2013: 36). The idea of the film-in-the-making as an active object during production clearly influenced the outcome of Legend about Kaupo, as will be described in the next section.

5 Legend about Kaupo, the life course of a project

The Life Course approach analysis lives by embedding them within their historical trajectories and social pathways. It states five principles that have to be taken into account when researching human lives: the Principle of Life-Span Development, the Principle of Agency, the Principle of Time and Place, and the Principle of Timing. I claim that not only the life span of the individual, but that of a film industry can be recast through the eyes of the life course paradigm. Thus, the Principle of Life-Span Development applies to the development of the film industry as well – different stages of it should be regarded as a reaction or continuation of what was before, instead of labelling them as clear-cut major breaks. The poverty of Latvian film of the 1990s was, among others, a planning mistake of the budget for cinema in the newly re-established Republic of Latvia, based on the disregard of the two-tier funding system of cinema in the Soviet Republics, for example.

The Principle of Time and Place states that “individuals and birth cohorts are influenced by historical context and place” (Elder Jr. et al. 2003: 12). The dissolution of the Soviet Union and re-establishment of independence of the Republic of Latvia was a tremendous event for everyone. For people working in the film industry, the shift from the state-socialist mode of film production that guaranteed secure jobs and income to the precarious filmmaking rituals of neoliberal Europe had tremendous consequences for their lives. Chances to cope with it were dependent on which generation the film worker was born in and at which point in their lives he or she were at the time of the reshape of the Riga Film Studio in 1990. Veteran film directors retired, experienced severe poverty, and many of them passed away shortly after. The youngest generation was the swiftest one to adapt to the living and working conditions in the new production system. But it was the generation of the middle-aged Latvian film workers who experienced the biggest diversity of life paths to cope with the new job reality (further see Reitere 2021). Krilovs, who belongs to this generation, is one of the positive examples who managed to bridge his career as a film director at the Riga Film studio during the 70s and 80s with a new career as a stage director and professor for theatre and film at the Latvian Academy of Culture later in life. Thus, the Principle of Timing (Elder Jr. et al.2003: 12) is very clearly at stake when analysing the careers of film professionals whose professional life coincided with the downfall of the Soviet Union.

The idea that it could be possible to make a cost-intensive and elaborate historical drama in Latvia of the 90s can be understood as a continuation of the professional experience of the project’s authors from the period of the Soviet occupation. Since the 1970s, the Riga Film Studio has regularly had the courage to produce specifically Latvian films, characterized by recourse to Latvian history, ethnography, topics on Latvian identity, and its roots. These films had pretty slim chances at the box office, but they had the chance to become representational works of the nation (Pērkone 2011b: 249, 254). In a way, Legend about Kaupo continued that line of the nation-building task, but in a completely different political situation. According to the director’s statement, Krilovs envisioned Legend about Kaupo in line with other works of literature or art that are ambitious acts, because with them, small nations that are almost unknown, erect a monument for their own existence (Krilovs, date unknown). The rhetoric surrounding Legend about Kaupo itself is a sign of the affective stance Latvian artists and cultural workers felt at the beginning of the 1990s and their preconceptions on what the duty of art should be after the restoration of the state.

The calculation of Legend about Kaupo, carried out around 1992, clearly shows the way of thinking of the Riga Film studio about how the shooting process will proceed and how much it will cost. For a film of 115 minutes, eleven months of production were planned, including three months for preparation of the shooting, three months for the shooting period (65 shooting days), and three months for the post-production (Krilovs 1992). In comparison, the approach to the funding possibilities of the project displays the will of the producers to adjust themselves to living under capitalism and think about the film as some kind of sustainable business project. The establishment of the Kaupo’s Castle Foundation and the idea to build the wooden castle not as a set decoration but as a replica of the 13^th century, so that it can be used as a tourist attraction later, shows the openness of the producers to the new funding situation. Krilovs, in the description of the aesthetic concept for Legend of Kaupo, underlines its economic advantages:

Although Kaupo’s fate is historically determined, we do not want to portray it as a historical film. We plan to depict many scenes (battles, journeys, rituals) in a stylized manner. We will use the distortions of scale and perspective found in old maps and engravings, distorted distances, and incorrect proportions. Psychological and emotional scenes will be replaced by theatrically constructed landscape paintings. This will also allow for the economical use of scenery and objects in nature (Krilovs, date unknown).

Asked now if Krilovs regrets that Kaupo - this ideologically and artistically very important project - had to be left unmade, he expressed no remorse. Because this project was very important for him and for Latvia at that time, at the beginning of the 1990s, in the situation they were in at that time. It would have made no sense to try to make this particular project about Kaupo a few years later, when the whole situation in Latvia had changed. Following the line of thought of Strandvad this is clearly a case where the film itself, its content, preconditioned projects negative outcome. – Film, that would symbolically have dealt with Latvia returning back to Europe after decades under the Soviet rule was topical only at the beginning of the 1990s.

Krilovs is not willing to accept the interpretation of failed art projects that the knowledge he gained from working on Kaupo somehow helped him with other projects neither. Krilovs always had plenty of other interesting job offers, so he just moved on. In his later career, he had one particularly important duty: practically constantly, he was one of the experts in different commissions for film and cultural projects. Thus, Krilovs decided for himself that he had to give the chance for young filmmakers to make their feature films; this is not an occupation for him anymore (his last feature film, Legend about Jānis Tīdemanis/ Leģenda par Jāni Tīdemani is from 1998). He makes documentaries instead. Secondly, he was more interested in working with high-quality dramaturgy, which was not possible in making films, but was a possibility offered by theatre (Reitere 2024). Thirdly, over the decades, Krilovs has become one of the most accomplished teachers for aspiring theatre and film practitioners. He was one of the founders of the National Film School (est. in 2017).

With a time distance, Krilovs acknowledges that the grandeur with which the project was conceived can only be explained by the cluelessness of the team about how hopeless the actual situation of Latvian cinema was in the 1990s. “The poverty was unimaginable” (Reitere 2024). Thus, the abandonment of the project was clearly an act of agency, where the decision making was based on the opportunities at hand in a particular social and historical situation (the Principal of Agency, Elder Jr. et al. 2003: 13). The act of not knowing is a sign of an agency of an individual, that she is embedded in a particular situation with only partial knowledge of the events.

6 Conclusion

Balázs Varga points to the strikingly different ways in which the Central-Eastern European cinemas were transformed in the aftermath of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Each of the countries – the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, and Hungary – had their own model of transformation along the lines of the internationalization of the industry, its organizational structures, audience taste development, and artistic choices of the film directors (Varga 2020: 380). Research on the unmade Latvian prestige project, Legend about Kaupo, supplements the palette with yet another pathway. Apart from its unique features, it serves as an example for a considerably smaller film industry that, in contrast to Varga’s examples, had to get rid of the dependence structures characteristic of the Soviet film industry and establish its own system in the 1990s. This wish is part of the “zeal for ‘normality’” that Stukuls Eglītis makes out as the driving force behind the social change in Latvia in the aftermath of the restoring of the own state (2002: 8). Normality meant two possible goals – either to go back to the imagined past as Latvia was before the Soviet occupation in 1940 or become a rightful member of the modern West (Stukuls Eglītis 2002: 8). The artistic vision of Legend about Kaupo points in both directions – to “return” to Europe, but in its’ contemporary form. But the external circumstances and professional skills needed to become fully integrated into the modern paradigm of European film production had still to be acquired. At the same time, some of them that used to be standard for the film industry during the Soviet period had to be reshaped or discarded altogether. These processes were characteristic of the phase of precarity the Latvian film industry was in from 1990 to 1997, at least.

Production history of Legend about Kaupo holds true what other researchers saw confirmed in other contexts: personal experiences of Latvians are inseparable from the history of the nation (Dzenovska 2021: 157). The present publication showed how, in the case of film workers, their professional careers are deeply affected by the political situation and historical decisions of the state and coincide with the life course of both the industry and that of the filmmaker. But at the heart of the body politics of the Latvian state is its’ inability to “care for the physical bodies of Latvians in conditions of capitalist freedom” (Dzenovska 2021: 156). The Latvian version of the shadow cinema of the 1990s, when film projects were prepared but could not get implemented due to the far-inadequate state funding for the film industry, is one facet of this policy.