Otar Ioseliani died

Shortly before his 90th birthday, Otar Ioseliani died. One of the last directors of the golden era of Georgian and Soviet cinema, he left his unique mark in French, entering the pantheon of major European film authors.

Ioseliani came to cinema during a good time of the thaw, which did not save him from conflicts with censorship. The director’s feature-length debut, Falling Leaves (1966), shows how the sacred Georgian drink, wine, is profaned at a factory. Local authorities perceived the picture as a challenge to Georgia’s reputation as “the all-Union winemaker.” But after the Paris premiere of this film, awarded the Georges Sadoul Prize, the French press suggested that “apparently, something very interesting is happening on the shores of the Black Sea.” This was a sign of the flourishing of new Georgian cinema, and Ioseliani became its recognized leader.

However, not only Georgian. Then a new generational wave of directors surged throughout Soviet cinema. Cinematography reached artistic heights in the works of Ioseliani’s peers – Andrei Tarkovsky, Gleb Panfilov, Elem Klimov, Kira Muratova, Ilya Averbakh and the slightly younger Andrei Konchalovsky, Larisa Shepitko, Alexei German. The achievements of the wonderful authors of the Georgia-Film studio especially stood out among others. It was led by Rezo Chkheidze, he always took on the blows and obstacles caused by the party authorities, supported young talented directors and achieved a unique microclimate in the studio, where such usual companions of creative life as envy and intrigue were reduced to a minimum.

To a great extent, his merit is that cinema in Georgia at that time became a matter of national prestige, and in the world acquired a reputation as “an island of antiquity and the Renaissance” – this is how the attitude and style of the authors of the Georgian film school were described. The first among equals was Ioseliani.

The style of his early quasi-documentary parables became the standard for the entire Soviet “new wave,” and “Once Upon a Song Thrush” (1970) became an example of a cult film, raised to the top and adored by the Russian intelligentsia. The hero in him is charming, the flow of life does not dry up, “foams like Borjomi in a glass” (these are the words of an enthusiastic critic from the sixties), he has a taste of bitterness, and the wisdom of a genius, and impeccably “French taste.”

After Falling Leaves, Pastoral (1976) encountered censorship obstacles: after the factory, the life of the village became the object of the director’s ironic, skeptical and at the same time lyrical gaze. Ioseliani continued to remain a “bad” patriot, always distancing himself from the “Georgian myth” raised to poetic busking. But the more he distanced himself, the more he became an embodiment of it.

In “Pastorale” he perfected his melody, but it was difficult to move further in censored conditions, although softened by the patronage of the Georgian authorities.

And then the director was the first to make his way behind the Iron Curtain, immediately and unmistakably finding “his” country – France, where this artistic Georgian was appreciated for his elegance, melancholy humor, through which genuine passion breaks through, and good French.

In Paris, Central Africa, Tuscany or Provence – no matter where, Ioseliani shoots the same film, the theme of which originated on the sidelines of his Georgian films and appeared in close-up only in “Favorites of the Moon” (1984) and “The Hunt for Butterflies” “(1992). This is the collapse of aristocratic, and after them, bourgeois traditions and the invasion of the nouveau riche; This combination resonates in the director’s films with a specific mixture of sadness and bile. Traditions are being destroyed – be it Georgian or African, and the French, Russians and Japanese can act as nouveau riche.

Ioseliani belongs to a small number of filmmakers who have made neither political nor artistic compromises.

The expansion of barbarism and plebeianism, the transformation of elite culture into mass culture – the director observed these processes for decades, first with sadness, then with magnificent contempt. First, using material from Sovietized Georgia, then from the “free world.”

Being a moderate conservative, Ioseliani appreciated the passing nature and culture – be it the African way of life, undeveloped by civilization, or the patriarchal mores of the village, where aristocracy is palpable in the faces of both the local nobility and ordinary peasants. Ioseliani himself is from a relict breed of artists, genetically alien to the mass media industry and belonging to the ever-shrinking sphere of art cinema. But this didn’t seem to bother him at all – even when he had to scrape together money for the next project for years. Ioseliani confirmed his independent character at the festival in Venice, where, as soon as he arrived, he questioned the intellectual right of the jury to judge his next picture presented in the competition. When the film eventually received one of the main prizes, its creator did not melt with gratitude, saying that he was used to the awards, and his opinion regarding the jury had not changed.

No matter how much Ioseliani seemed to fit into the French film tradition – from Vigo to Rivette – he never ceased to be Georgian. His documentary film “Georgia Alone” (1994) is a return of debt to his country at a difficult moment in its history. The film does not at all resemble a “document”, although it consists entirely of interviews, chronicles and fragments of old films. In it, as it was said in Libération, “the soul of the people was imprinted – deeply individual, attached to its land, houses, churches, valleys; eternally warring against the dragons, which Saint George, who gave the name to this country, never tires of slaying.” The role of dragons is played in turn by the Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Persians, Turks, and separately – the Bolsheviks. Everything that happened in Georgia before them is concentrated in the first part of the film – in “Prelude”, in the second (“Temptation”) the Soviet period is told, in the third (“Test”) Ioseliani sheds light on the drama of the post-Soviet days. He does not hide the sins of his own nation, and places responsibility for what happened on the nobility – both Russian and Georgian, to which he counts himself. As the director said at one of his creative evenings, the aristocrats did not fulfill their historical mission and did not save the country.

He was true to himself – in his preferences, tastes, likes and in what disgusted him. Always independent, slightly arrogant, gentle, proud Otar.

Andrey Plakhov