how the world of his films works

On February 2, the great French-Georgian director Otar Ioseliani, who died in December 2023, would have turned 90 years old. According to his early films, the Thaw intelligentsia fell in love with Georgia, his films of the 1980s and 1990s depicted an absurd, slightly ridiculous France, his films of the new century showed human history and civilization without any condescension. Ksenia Rozhdestvenskaya talks about how the world of his films works.

Ioseliani hated anniversaries, was skeptical about celebrations, and the very concept of time, like space, did not seem convincing to him. It’s not for nothing that in his films times are confused, layered on top of each other, corroding the world; It’s not for nothing that he always opposes the “national and ethnic broth” in cinema. It’s not for nothing that the character in “Monday Morning” (2002) warns: we are not in time and not in space.

But we still exist in space, and time still passes. The heroes of Ioseliani’s film “And There Became Light” (1989), Senegalese from a tribe not yet devoured by civilization, went to see this film three times, each time hoping that they would learn something new about themselves. But every time it was the same thing on the screen, and they, according to Ioseliani, came to terms with the fact that this was them.

This is how all his films work: what he showed is now – at least for his viewer – Georgia, France, Africa, the bourgeoisie, April, Monday morning, humanity. We.

Georgia

Ioseliani was born in 1934, an aristocrat trying to become a “real Soviet director.” One of the undisputed leaders of the Soviet new wave, he became neither Soviet nor anti-Soviet: he is as-Soviet, not across the officialdom, but past.

He graduated from a music school with a degree in violin and conducting, and music lived in his films as the main character. He dropped out of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University and went to the directing department of VGIK. It was easy to read sedition into his films of those years: here are flowers dying under the caterpillars of a bulldozer (this film, “Sapovnela”, was banned), here is a close-up of a barrel of crappy wine number 49 – and this is right after the fiftieth anniversary of Soviet power (Listopad, 1966 ), here is the too easy and too attractive life of the “parasite” Gia (“There Lived a Song Thrush”, 1970), here is the cunning sarcasm of “Pastoral” (1976), where high culture is not able to understand living people – all these films one way or another displeased the authorities. Editors from Goskino told him: “We’ll ban it anyway. But you work.”

The Soviet intellectual’s idea of ​​Georgia was undoubtedly influenced by Ioseliani’s films. He found the very essence of Georgia: he took equal doses of documentary and parable, myth and sweat, irony and curiosity. His Georgia is a melancholic country in which fighting people look like dancing, love dies, strangled by things, music lives its own life, and the decay of traditions is inevitable and disgusting.

He found the very essence of life: to live easily, to have time to drive in a hook on which someone will hang a cap, to have time to rush to the orchestra in time to hit the drum. His heroes often look into cameras, telescopes, through the peephole of a movie camera; they are never geniuses, but they always try to be free.

He did not invent non-existent Georgian traditions, as for the Senegalese in the film “And the Light Became” (the Senegalese, by the way, approved of these traditions: according to him, they found these customs decent). But his Georgia seems like a mythological space, shimmering like the ghost from his French “The Hunt for the Butterflies” (played by Ioseliani himself). However, his Paris is also transparent, also a myth.

France

Ioseliani went to France in 1982 – and there, in his words, “he filmed the same thing that he could film in Georgia.” I was returning. Have worked.

In his French films, just like in Georgian ones, almost nothing happens, music plays, people in the same photographs look at the camera in the same way. The same bulldozers, flowers, chairs, mistakes, irritation, musical instruments… The wine is different. It’s true.

Ioseliani once said: “Perhaps we populated the cities with what we know about life and people, and they exist only in our souls… The Paris I’m filming about has long since disappeared.”

In fact, that Paris never existed. In fact, only that Paris remains. Humanity, like the inhabitants of a Senegalese village, watches again and again “Les Favorites of the Moon” (1984), “Chantrap” (2010) or “Winter Song” (2015) – and sees the same Paris on the screen, again and again. And in the end he gets used to the fact that Paris is like this. Populated by aristocrats, marauders, gypsies, old men and women, policemen and thieves. The Paris of broken pianos, broken sets, murdered aristocrats and aristocratic homeless people. Paris tourists. Paris of barbarian invasions.

You can, of course, perceive all of Ioseliani’s films as one film or as a comedy series about the decline not just of Europe, but of civilization in general, although sometimes it seems that the point is not about the decline and not about Europe. The beheaded aristocrat of the French Revolution (“Winter Song”) is in some sense equal to the maturing Nico with a black eye (“Falling Leaves”); the orchestra in April (1961) uses the same instruments as the orchestra in Hunting for the Butterflies (1992). An episode from the documentary “Cast Iron” (1964) – workers dry their sweat-soaked shirts in front of a powerful fan, which almost rips their shirts out of their hands, inflates them with sails – decides to sneak into “Monday Morning”. A worker there will also try to dry his shirt by the fan, but he will immediately be cut short by a passing boss: no, it’s not allowed. Ioseliani’s Georgian films are reflected in his French works, Georgia appears through France.

“My films are puppet theater. I select dolls and turn them into people… I’m making a film about clashes between forces, not between people,” the director said at one of the meetings with the audience. That’s why he doesn’t have close-ups, that’s why his plots are not plots in the usual sense of the word, that’s why his characters are always distracted by something, that’s why time in his films behaves like Monday morning. Ioseliani wrote scripts “to deceive producers,” hated film adaptations, that is, following someone else’s plot, and denied the autobiographical nature of his films. And then he confirmed it. And then he denied it again. Actually, there is no point in quoting him. Once he gave about twenty interviews in a row – and in all of them he said different, opposite things.

In “Monday Morning” there are echoes of Ioseliani’s family history – his grandfather disappeared after the revolution, and appeared only many years later, and his grandmother told him: “Hello, fellow countryman, come in!” “Chantrapa” was perceived by everyone as an autobiography – in this film, the young director Niko tries to become a “real Soviet director,” but officials see sedition in his film, and he has to leave for France with a suitcase, a cello and a cage of carrier pigeons. But even there fame does not come to him: the audience does not understand him.

And yes, in all these films, forces are important, not people or biographical details. Ioseliani believed that cinema is closest to music. And to the circus. For him, what was important in cinema was not the person, but gestures, glances, directions of movement, and the clash of forces. Georgia and the power of its attraction, the Soviet Union and the power of its control, France and the power of its aristocratic boredom. Civilization and the strength of its desire for self-destruction.

Utopia

In essence, Ioseliani was a singer of utopia. It’s not for nothing that in some interview he spoke bitterly about his work: don’t think that there is an ideal place to produce such films, there hasn’t been such a place for a long time.

It seems that there is not a single Ioseliani film that does not begin with footage of people working. Even Hunting for Butterflies, a film about the cozy disintegration of civilization, a film in which they argue about a sandwich, a film that itself disintegrates into pollen and dust, begins with the arrival of a train and the local orchestra diligently blowing the trumpets. Works. Even in the bourgeois paradise of Truth in Wine (1999), everything begins with the work of servants – they offer guests glasses while they listen to music. According to Ioseliani, a person is a working mechanism. The only thing he must do is remain himself. All of his main characters did exactly this: they didn’t mix with the crowd, they refused to fit into other people’s rules.

Time, life, death, history – these are also alien rules of the game. Many don’t fit in.

In “Monday Morning” the dragon for the fresco is going to be copied from a crocodile, because it is “of the same species.” The people in Ioseliani’s films all seem to be copied from some example of the “same species,” and the places in Ioseliani’s films are all copied from some unattainable place. There is no going back anywhere, he says. Every minute everyone becomes a different person, and every minute passes.

Cinema is the perfect expression of this philosophy. A little dispassionate choreography by Tati, a little Buñuelian bile, Bresson, Rivette, the Lumiere brothers – the world of Ioseliani with its Paris, Tbilisi, Tuscany, Venice tells much more about the utopian world of world cinema than about real cities, people, historical events.

In “Chantrape” a girl appears playing the accordion in Paris. At the end of the film, she sits with an accordion in the middle of a Georgian field. This girl is the assemblage point, the point of equality of different worlds. Ioseliani stitches Georgia, the USSR, and France into one cinematic space – one where you can quietly play the accordion. And watch the decline of history.

Story

In the documentary film “Georgia Alone” (1994), Ioseliani talks about two centuries of Georgian history, about wars, deception and self-deception, about Georgia under the Bolsheviks and post-Soviet devastation. From this film comes “Robbers. Chapter VII” (1996), starting with tanks in Tbilisi.

He knew the story and could not forgive it. His father, an officer in the tsarist army, was repressed (later rehabilitated). He believed that the Georgian aristocrats did not fulfill their historical mission and did not save the country. He believed that “robbers” of all times and nationalities destroy everything that is most fragile – culture and art, and this is almost impossible to restore.

“I don’t expect anything good from the future,” he said. “The world has gone crazy.”

Ioseliani always maintained that all comedies are sad. He believed that “comedy arises when we see a hero who has wandered into this world from some other region.” Well, then his whole life was a comedy – both the Georgian-Soviet part of it, and the French, and the post-Soviet part.

Georgian courtyard. French estate. Tbilisi street leading up. Parisian eatery. Soviet cinema hall. Ioseliani’s viewer does not perceive history as apocalyptic darkness, as a wild set of torture instruments, as a frenzied freight train. Rather, it is a familiar town in which the “robbers” are funny and pathetic, the creators are lazy and sad, the thieves are blessed, the homeless are homeless. Perhaps the main thing that Ioseliani did for his viewer was to show him the optionality of suffering. Better pour yourself some wine. It’s better to listen to music. It’s better to sit in a chair and watch the world fall apart.

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