Guest
Of all the figureheads of post-war Georgian cinema — Tengiz Abuladze, Otar Iosseliani, his own brother Giorgi — Eldar Shengelaia’s is the name most readily and explicitly associated with the struggle for national independence. Abuladze et al are important points of reference for Georgian cultural identity; Shengelaia on the other hand was an active political campaigner. Indeed, after the success of his 1983 satire Blue Mountains, he withdrew from filmmaking for a decade to dedicate himself to a political career as remarkable as his artistic one: he was twice elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Georgian SSR; sat on the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR; was a member of the so-called “Sobchak commission” that investigated a Soviet military crackdown on pro-independence protesters in Tbilisi; helped to found the People’s Front of Georgia; and was a signatory to the nation’s eventual Act of Independence in 1991. The relationship between Shengelaia’s political career and his filmmaking practice is a complex and oft-disputed one. The temptation is read the issue of Georgian nationalism back into his films, retroactively placing them in a continuum with the battle he waged in the late 1980s. Indeed, Georgia’s ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili announced at Shengelaia’s eightieth birthday jubilee in 2013 that “we will all fly away, the whole country, in defiance of those who are trying to put us down”: a reference to a famous scene in Shengelaia’s 1975 film The Eccentrics, in which two peasant inventors escape the clutches of the Soviet police in a homemade airplane. This approach to the director’s works is both productive and counterintuitive: it risks eliding Shengelaia’s considerable artistic talents and flattening the ambiguities that make his tragicomic satires so rewarding. A case in point is his breakthrough feature, 1968’s An Unusual Exhibition, from a script by Rezo Gabriadze, and with typically incisive music from Giya Kancheli, mainstay of mid-century Georgian film. Aguli Eristavi is an aspiring sculptor with grand artistic plans for the large lump of marble that he hoards in his courtyard. While drafted in the Red Army, he is arrested by, and then falls in love with a Russian officer, Glasha. As their post-war domestic life settles into a familiar rhythm, Aguli’s designs on his precious marble are constantly frustrated by an endless succession of neighbours asking him to sculpt gravestones and memorial busts. As his marble mound sits untouched, as though silently judging him for his failures, Aguli must contend with the slow death of his personal ambitions in the face of public pressure and private responsibility — both to his children and to his apprentice, Zaur. Those looking for hints of anti-Soviet — or anti-Russian — sentiments in Shengelaia’s cutting but empathetic tale might settle on the Aguli-Glasha romance. Our hapless Georgian recruit is detained by his military superior from the north, first literally and then metaphorically through the family life that compels him to accept his unfulfilling commissions. That so much of the film is in Russian as a result of the romance plot is notable in itself. But to insist on this reading flattens out Glasha’s own character in a way that Gabriadze and Shengelaia themselves refrain from doing. In truth, Unusual Exhibition’s treatment of the figure of the artist is not easily reduced to political grandstanding of any stripe. Shengelaia’s attention to the splits and elisions between Aguli’s inner creative spark and his outer public function might feasibly be read as a commentary on the nature of Soviet state-mandated artistic style; but, as Konstanty Kuzma writes, in truth the film “tells two stories at once. One is that of an artist learning to serve the collective, another that of a collective subduing its individuals. One talks about the merits of Social Realist art, the other illustrates how a nation’s cultural identity falls prey to ideological dogmas. Similarly, the Georgian-Russian love story can both be read as a quest for a common language, and as an encounter that unveils unbridgeable divides… By constructing a story that can be read either way — as being pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet — Shengelaia illustrates that the divide between these two interpretations is in large part normatively motivated. Viewers decide how to interpret the story, not Shengelaia on his own.”
