Hertz Fran - famous documentary filmmaker

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

He survived the collapse of two states: Latvia and the Soviet Union, and ended his life in the third - Israel. Frank Hertz, with his documentaries, left us his vision of some aspects of everyday life in these countries. The director in his works sought to show the real side of events and people as they are, without lies and falsehood.

Early years

Frank Hertz Vulfovich (also Herzl or Herzel) was born in 1926 to a Jewish family in the Latvian city of Ludza. In the family, besides him, there was also a brother and three sisters. Mom, Maiofis, was a doctor, came from a family of a rabbi, her cousin was a writer-humorist and Yiddish translator. Father, Wulf Frank, owned a small photo studio, was a decorative artist in the Lucine art studio. He organized a folk theater in which performances were performed in Yiddish, and the actors were shoemakers, tailors and teachers. Later, Frank showed one of his father's works, the "Dream" collage, in the documentary "Flashback" in 1934.

Hertzel graduated from a comprehensive school where they taught in Yiddish, thenstudied at the Latvian gymnasium. He grew up among the negatives and photographs that his father took in the pavilion, on the streets and farms of Latvia. The boy loved to collect newspaper clippings about the events of those years: the war in Abyssinia, the war in Spain, the Anschluss of Austria. By the beginning of the war, he had accumulated about 5,000 clippings. Later, Frank Hertz recalled that he also had photographs from the Moscow trials of the 1930s.

War years

In 1940, Latvia became a Soviet republic. By the beginning of World War II, his mother died, and in July 1942, Frank Hertz, along with part of his family, went to the Urals for evacuation. However, he lagged behind the train and reached them only six months later. My brother went to the front in 1942.

Father found a job in the artel of the disabled, and wrote scripts in his spare time. One of the sisters lived with them, her husband died in the first months of the war, two other sisters, who did not have time to evacuate, ended up in the Riga ghetto and were killed in the 44th in the Stutthof concentration camp. Frank graduated from high school in the city of Revda in the Urals. Frank Herzel was drafted into the army at the beginning of 1945.

Serving in the army

He was sent to study at the Kamyshlov Military Infantry School, from which he graduated in 1947, and at the same time completed his studies at the All-Union Law Correspondence Institute in its Sverdlovsk branch. The school was located 150 km from the regional center, Hertz went to the film depot, brought and took films. Thanks to good relations with commanders, he often managed to stay onan extra day to take an exam or test. Therefore, he managed to get a law degree in two years. In the army, Frank took a lot of pictures for the wall newspaper and colleagues. After college, he served in the Trans-Baikal Military District until the age of 52, he was demobilized as a senior lieutenant.

In 1953, he tried to enter VGIK, passed all the exams, but he was not accepted, because his sister was in prison for illegally trying to leave for Israel. Hertz himself does not regret this, believing that it was still too early for him to do documentaries.

Photographing Life

Since 1953, Hertz worked as a journalist and photographer, first in Vladimir in the regional newspaper "Vladimir Kolkhoznik". The editorial office was located in the office of "Zagotzerna", under which the tower of the Bogolyubsky Kremlin was converted. He traveled a lot around the surrounding villages, for him it was a school of life, an inexhaustible source of topics.

Then from 1955 he worked in Riga in the newspapers Rigas Balss and Padomju Jaunatne, where he was responsible for advertising materials. In the evening city newspaper "Rīgas Balss" his reports from eight pictures began to appear, one on each page, a small plot lined up from them. Frank says his first films "S alty Bread" and "Afternoon" were born from such newspaper reports.

On the road to recognition

In 1959, in the biography of Frank Hertz, a period of work began at the Riga Film Studio, first he worked as a photographer, then as a screenwriterand director. The first film shot according to his script was the documentary about love "You and I" (1963), then there was "Report of the Year" (1965). The film "White Bells" (1963), a romantic story about the life of a girl in a big city, brought international fame along with the first film awards.

Having gained professional experience, in 1964 he decided to make his first films, which were made in the format of television broadcasts. In 1967, he made one of his major films - "Without Legends" - about the life of a famous worker, unlike the official press, shown without embellishment. At first it was banned, but since the late 70s, VGIK students have been studying it.

In his documentaries, he repeatedly refers to the theme of crime and punishment. Among such tapes are "Forbidden Zone" (1975), "Before the "dangerous line" (1984), "High Court" (1987) and "Once upon a time there were Seven Simeons" (1989).

Global recognition

In 1988, Frank Hertz came to the Jerusalem International Film Festival with the film "The Supreme Court". This was the first Soviet delegation of cultural figures to visit the country after the break in diplomatic relations. In Israel, he met his sister and daughter. In 1992, the film "Jewish Street" was filmed about the tragic fate of the Latvian Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis. In his early films "Testament" (1963) and "Sentence" (1966), he already touched on the theme of the Holocaust, emphasizing, first of all,attention to the strength of the spirit of people in catastrophic situations.

In 1993 he emigrated to Israel, where in 2002 he founded his own documentary film studio. The first film shot on the Promised Land was a picture, as the director himself defined, about the "mystical power of the Wailing Wall" - "Wailing Wall Man" (1993). The latest work of the Latvian and Israeli documentary filmmaker was a film about the backstage life of the Israeli theater "Gesher" - "Eternal rehearsal". Frank is the author of 30 films and over 100 publications.