Here is a thoughtful piece on the Georgian director Otar Iosseliani, originally written for the Cinemascope web site.A couple of years ago Edgardo Cozarinsky, an Argentine filmmaker who has lived in Paris for the last 40 years, said that nothing important was happening in France culturally but, at the same time, artists were still welcome to live and work there. Otar Iosseliani was born in 1934 in Tbilisi, and moved from Georgia to Paris in the early ‘80s, after censorship halted his career as a Soviet filmmaker in Georgia, where he made three features plus shorts and documentaries. In France he started anew, and so far he has made seven features, as well as a number of docs and shorts. Iosseliani is one of the adopted French filmmakers, a category that includes the likes of Raúl Ruiz and Eugène Green, and can be understood to encompass Manoel de Oliveira, Michael Haneke, and Ousmane Sembène. (It’s likewise tempting to describe the Swiss Jean-Luc Godard as a foreign filmmaker who sometimes works in France.)
Iosseliani once said, “Culture, in the sense of a well-constructed system of human relations, has collapsed [in Georgia]. Maybe it was one of the last countries. But everything collapsed, practically, with the departure of the previous generation.” He was talking about the devastation of war and communism, but the statement could well apply to the subjects of many of his films—such as And Then There Was Light (1989), a film about the destruction of an African village by the arrival of so-called progress. Iosseliani’s films are parables, and parables have many possible meanings. Also, in the director’s words, “the secret of your vision dies with you.” But his new feature, Jardins en automne, seems mainly to comment on the dissolution of the French film community, at least in the form he knew it when he became one of its members in 1984, the year of his first French-made film, Les Favoris de la Lune.
Sharing the designation which Ruiz frequently ascribes to himself, Iosseliani can be called “the best known of the unknown directors.” Ruiz is seven years younger than Iosseliani, but emigrated to Paris seven years earlier, fleeing from the Chilean dictatorship. Both are considered minor masters in the French nomenklatur, and they share a sense of subtlety, irony, a love of long shots and a hatred for explanation, psychology, and conventional storytelling. In a way, they are complementary: while Ruiz is definitively urban, nature is very important in Iosseliani’s work. And while both share an interest for the fine arts and the pleasures of alcohol, Ruiz opts for literature and philosophy while Iosseliani is deeply immersed in music. A pianist and composer in his own right, music plays an essential part not only in Iosseliani’s soundtracks, but also in his plots. Iosseliani’s films are musical in their form and structure, and music is the link between his usually disjointed scenes. But mostly, Iosseliani is a tonal filmmaker. His films can be thought of as the movements of a unique, consistent musical oeuvre.
This tone has to do with Iosseliani’s unique pace, which is rhapsodic and joyful, but with a paradoxical grace that follows from detachment and a lack of sentimentality. Iosseliani’s primary Western influence is Tati, with whom he shares a peculiar serendipity in the contact between people, objects, and animals. He prefers non-professional actors, and because of this, coupled with his lack of attention to dialogue, his fiction films aren’t far away stylistically from his documentaries. Some motifs are common to all of Iosseliani’s films: love for drinking, talking and singing amongst friends; hatred of work in any routine sense; the despising of bureaucrats; love for women as long as they are friends and lovers and never wives or mistresses; the presence of plants and animals among the human.
On this last count, Iosseliani can be acclaimed for bringing some of the best birds to the silver screen, with a high point being the gigantic, unbelievable, and hilarious stork from Adieu, plancher des vaches! (1999). But in Iosseliani’s films, birds are more than just birds—they illustrate an aesthetic principle. In Brigands, chapitre VII (1996), a medieval tyrant is poisoned by his mistress. The man falls down in agony, and she says, “Die you lousy swine!” But the man doesn’t die, and a parrot that hears the words and repeats them is used as a key witness in the mistress’ trial. So, without realizing it, the animal plays an important part in history. In Iosseliani’s films, you can see birds and quadrupeds like the boars that, alive or in photographs, punctuate Jardins en automne (together with a caged bird that’s called “the bird of truth”). These untamed animals are a presence that we humans cannot understand, and we look at their mysterious nature with the same perplexity as they might look at us. Maybe that’s the secret of Iosseliani’s view of human affairs: his camera shows people from the point of view of an animal, and, like men see animals, it finds humans weird, colourful, and potentially dangerous.
Over that basic layer of strangeness and involuntary cruelty, civilization tries to build a network between isolated individuals. But “civilization” doesn’t mean technology nor political order, but a series of rites and traditions that appeal to a much more primitive and, at the same time, sophisticated bond among equals—one that can be named kindness. Kindness is what leads to affection, to communication, to the pleasure of sharing. It has elementary manifestations in the ways to greet people, to ask for a match, to continuously offer cigarettes and drinks to others (Jarmusch!). Kindness is what contradicts brutality, the arrogance of dictators, the sadism of bureaucrats, the greed of capitalists, the pettiness of spouses, and all the other evils in Iosseliani’s films.
The balance of forces is uneven, however. As shown in Brigands, Iosseliani’s most political film, brute force prevails, and the autocrats, the party members, and the arms dealers impose their ignoble rule over tenderness and joy, dispossess the innocent, the rebels, and even the bad guys from their jobs, their homes, and their lives. Not much can be done against the determination of wrongdoers. In There Once Was a Singing Blackbird (1970), a masterpiece from the Georgian period, the main character is a musician who needs to be in perpetual motion and whose optimism and joy of life contradicts his boss’ desire to make him ordinary and disciplined. In the end, a car hits the young man, revealing that the director, in spite of the film’s light, bubbling atmosphere, doesn’t share his character’s naiveté.
As a result, Iosseliani’s films are far from being optimistic. On the contrary, they convey a deep sadness that has been especially apparent in his last few films. Although the filmmaker is very reluctant to show the actual death of his characters, there is a bleak cloud hanging over them, a sense of vague melancholy, of a loss with no precise object. In Jardins en automne, events go smoothly and nothing terrible happens; we seem to be watching a gentle comedy about an ex-politician who finds himself fully free to play the guitar, party with friends, and make love to women. The film’s protagonist, Vincent (a spectacular performance by Séverin Blanchet), is a minister in the French government, whose official duties seem to consist of keeping up with protocol. He’s bored with his job and his mistress. One day he’s fired and finds himself alone, with no job, no home, no girl, and no money. It’s the ideal Iosseliani situation, like in Adieu, plancher des vaches! or Lundi matin (2002). So, he behaves like he’s supposed to: he meets his old pals and girlfriends, and goes around drinking.
But there is a new element this time. Vincent has a rich mother, played by none other than Michel Piccoli, from whom he demands protection, shelter, and money. This is, to say the least, very unusual casting, and it’s almost impossible to avoid giving a meaning attached to this choice. This peculiar lady lives in a huge mansion with a big park, almost a palace, where she gives parties and conducts official ceremonies. In one of these ceremonies, she calls out the names of some soldiers, like Lt. Pierre Grandrieux and Sgt. Philippe Léon, who happen to be dead in the battlefields—Philippe Grandrieux and Pierre Léon are two French filmmakers, younger than Iosseliani, and in the hardcore cinephile camp. On the other hand, one of Vincent’s pals is legendary Cahiers du Cinéma critic Jean Douchet, and another is Iosseliani himself, who plays Arnaud, a character interested in painting, music, and gardening (and a transparent liquid that probably is vodka).
During the party the house is attacked, and Vincent and his friends are beaten. It’s very tempting to see Piccoli as a symbol for the French cinema (the actor, also a director himself, has worked with every major French director, and was even cast by Godard as the grey eminence of 1995’s Deux fois cinquante ans de cinéma français) and to see the attack on the house as a metaphor for the state of film in France, where people like Iosseliani seem not to matter any more. Vincent’s loss of privileges, yet with some remnants of his former official protection, speaks to the fragile situation and threatened careers of Iosseliani and his cineaste colleagues. A crowd sings Marxists hymns and throws tomatoes at Vincent, like they used to do in Stalinist Georgia. He is dispossessed of his official ministerial residence, as well as from his private apartment by squatters. The bistro where the group hangs around is shut down. The walls of the café, full of drawings made by Arnaud, are painted over. The new owner of the house tells the painter to “eliminate all that crap.” It’s an obvious reference to the oblivion to which Iosseliani’s images will be thrown in the future. This is not just a goodbye—it’s a dark one.
To contradict that view, at the end of the film we see another party in a garden, where all Vincent’s lovers, friends, and relatives are talking, drinking, and having fun. They all seem very relaxed, very happy. Then the camera turns up, showing the blue of the sky and the green of the trees. It’s a beautiful shot, full of lyricism and tenderness, one that perfectly integrates with the bright spirit of the last meeting. Then the screen turns black for a moment, and the credits begin to roll. At that point, the viewer might very well remember that the first shot of the film, a prologue that precedes the title, is a long shot in the shop of a coffin-maker, where Douchet, among other people, is trying to buy a casket that will fit him. With this in mind, the last shot becomes one of overwhelming sadness, and the party a definitive farewell.
About 12 years ago, another adopted French filmmaker, Krzysztof Kieslowski, completed his famous Three Colours trilogy, which was supposed to comment on the keywords of the French revolution. Iosseliani once said “the problems of a foreign country can never become truly, intimately yours… For you they will never have the same concreteness as they do for a real human community of people that are born and raised within that community.” However, this foreigner who saw his country destroyed to the verge of the unrecognizable and has, since then, been a well-treated guest—but with very limited recognition—in his new home, has not only showed today’s crisis in French cinema in a way that his native colleagues don’t dare, but deals in a clever way (and in a much less pompous one than Kieslowski) with the principles of liberté, egalité, and fraternité. Something is happening in Paris, after all. The problem is that the French don’t see it.
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