Georgian Short Documentaries at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2019

Arabesques on a Pirosmani Theme

This programme, composed of four short Georgian documentaries, was cherry-picked by me from a larger number of newly restored films made available to Il Cinema Ritrovato by Central Archive of Audio-Visual Documents of the National Archives of Georgia. Thanks to their hard work and generosity, you'll be able to see some of the most dazzling,  hauntingly poetic films of this year's festival in Bologna. The title of this programme, "Beyond Soviet Propaganda", is suggested by curator of Georgian Archive; a very apt title if you watch the films. — Ehsan Khoshbakht

Tudzhi

Tudzhi [Cast Iron] (1964) by Otar Iosseliani

In this early Iosseliani, the last of the Georgian masters, shows a fascinating combination of influences – from his own background in music, to Soviet documentaries about heavy industry. He records a day in the life of the workers at a steel mill, where the juxtaposition of vulnerable flesh and raging, smelting iron creates striking images. It opens with city symphony style shots of industrial chimneys. From there, in a movement from light to darkness – repeated elsewhere in the film – it’s off to the mill. The post-production sound, although realistic, adds an eerie dimension. There are humorous touches, however: during a lunch break a gigantic fan is used by the workers to dry their sweat-soaked clothes and the air blowing around the shirts turns gives them new sculptural forms. And later, when the workers are seen barbecuing by simply holding the skewers close to the ground, where the temperature is high enough to grill their daily meal.

Khabazebi

Khabazebi [Bread Makers] (1970) by Bidzina Rachvelishvili

This short film recaptures the beauty of a process which has persisted since the Stone Age. Sharing one of the recurrent stylistic motifs of the Georgian documentaries shown here, an uncanny atmosphere is created by the use of post-production sound and chiaroscuro lighting. In effect, the removal of the bread from the oven is witnessed with the same sense of wonder as would greet the appearance of a flying saucer. When sticking the dough to the tandoor, the baker moves half of his body into this dungeon – an image at once frightening and mesmerising. Nowhere else has bread been seen like this before, save perhaps for Night of the Living Bread (Kevin S. O'Brien, 1990). But this is hardly a parody: here the most essential human foodstuff meets an expressionist sensibility. In fact, along with Manoel de Oliveira’s O Pão (also showing this year), Bread Makers presents some of the most beautiful images of our daily bread on screen.

Mekvle

Mekvle (1981) by Goderdzi Chokheli

There is a thoroughly visual poetry to be found in Georgian films. Opting for a wordless approach seems necessary, especially since in totalitarian regimes words are stripped of meaning quickly. Chokheli shows a village on the edge of the snow-covered Caucasus Mountains, probably similar to the one in which he was born. Over the images the sound of shotgun fire is heard. More sounds follow: people chatting, dogs barking – but no figure is in sight yet. There follow close-ups of houses, more voices heard, but still no sign of human beings. By the time the camera frames the mountain view from the window of a ruin it is clear that no humans will ever appear – this is an abandoned village and we are listening to the sounds of the past. The parade of sound continues: a wedding, a funeral. The haunting poem eventually takes us to a bedroom where, over a shot of an empty wooden bed, we hear a man and woman whispering and making love – the shadows have grown, and the day is almost over.

Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani

Arabeski na temu Pirosmani [Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani] (1985) by Sergei Parajanov

In the most stylistically distinctive Georgian documentary in the series, Parajanov pays tribute to Georgia’s saintly artist Niko Pirosmani (1862-1918), whose paintings of kings, commoners and animals are seemingly childlike yet remarkably modern. Parajanov arranges the paintings in a loose structure around subjects and people, capturing the melancholic and metaphysical nature of Pirosmani’s work whose eschewing of the rules of perspective can be traced in Parajanov’s own tableau-style cinema. Using the teahouse storytelling of that region (to which other masters such as Abbas Kiarostami returned), Parajanov uses non-diegetic sound to give life to still images. A cut takes us to a photographer’s studio in the early 20th century where models with chalk-white faces pose for the camera. Parajanov alludes to cinema as the mechanical reproduction of the artworks shown; a mechanical piano is cranking in the background. In the last scene, with the dolly tracks visible within the frame, the camera is drawn forward, through a doorway, beyond the one-dimensional set, and into modern-day Georgia. The sound of a duduk, probably the saddest instrument in the world, accompanies an ending of inexplicable beauty.

Ehsan Khoshbakht