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.”

An Unusual Exhibition (1968).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 32mn
Size: 	3.16 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	4 618 Kbps
BPP: 	0.093
Audio
#1:  	Georgian 2.0ch AAC @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/6CBF5724C201DBE/An_Unusual_Exhibition_(1968).mkv

Language(s):Georgian
Subtitles:English (Hardcoded)

The post Eldar Shengelaia – Arachveulebrivi gamopena AKA An Unusual Exhibition (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Мачеха Саманишвили / სამანიშვილის დედინაცვალი

Impoverished old nobleman Bekina insists on marrying a wife, but his son Platon does not want to have sharer in father’s inheritance. Platon finds two times widowed and childless bride for Bekina, but a fate makes fun of him.

Samanishvilis Dedinatsvali [Eldar Shengelaia] 1977.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 23 min
Size: 	1.27 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	686x566 ~> 731x566
Aspect ratio:  	1.292
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.206
Audio
#1:  	Russian 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/6D350B8422FA0F9/Samanishvilis_Dedinatsvali__Eldar_Shengelaia__1977.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:None

The post Eldar Shengelaia – Samanishvilis Dedinatsvali AKA Stepmother Samanishvili (1977) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Blue Mountains (1983) ends with the implosion of the aspiring novelist’s publishing house. Clearly a symbol of Soviet bureaucracy and its capacity for ultimate self-destruction, this moment is a dazzling and wickedly humorous indication of Georgia’s deep seated disillusionment with the USSR.

Soso, an employee of the publishing house, takes multiple copies of his manuscript around the building. Despite having seemingly friendly relations with all the publishers, everyone responds to his request with something that can only be described as friendly, but complacent apathy. In fact, practically everyone in the building is complacent. No one understands the basic necessity to get anything, or even just something done. Irodion, one editor, claims he doesn’t have time. They simply “won’t let him go.’ Irodion says this whilst boiling an egg in his office. Another elderly man, more honestly simply says, “Everyone is in such a hurry,” in response to Soso’s requests that he read his manuscript. In another office, the men continually play a very involved game of chess. A throng of men stand around the board shouting positions for the pieces to move to; they are never in agreement and the game rarely progresses.

With this film, Shengelia wanted to show the strange inaction presided over by Soviet bureaucracy. Everywhere red tape, employees with ill defined work remits, and a secret culture of inequality: it is always possible to pass the buck to somebody else. A subtle comment the film is making is one of progression stifled by ineptitude, desires are not taken seriously and the director of the publishing house is never there. An old man waits constantly to see him, no one will help him, aside to tell him to wait for the director just a little longer. In a moment of wonderful satire, when he finally encounters the director, this same old man is offered a job, one that looks very much like the endless waiting game he was suffering before. There are many moments of exquisite irony akin to this, the most hilarious being that the only person who will read Soso’s manuscript is the man working in construction. Being overeducated for the job he has, he will occupy himself with Soso’s manuscript. Ultimately, this is what leads to the building’s collapse. It is a fertile analogy; it simultaneously speaks to art’s capacity to destroy systems, the power of the working man and also to the Kafkaesque uselessness of a system riddled with issues.

Soso’s manuscript is either called, ‘Blue Mountains’ or ‘Tian Shian’. This is mimicked by Eldar Shengelaia’s naming of his own film, called explicitly either, Blue Mountains, or An Unbelievable Story (1983). A deliberate parallel is drawn between Shengelaia’s own experience as a director working in the Soviet system with the plight of his protagonist. Blue Mountains (1983) was invited to screen in the prestigious Director’s Fortnight strand of the Cannes Film Festival in 1985. The film was able to evade censorship, due to its obscure plot. Moritz Pfeifer for the East European Film Bulletin rightfully points out that films from the era that critiqued the state tended to use a similar device: ‘A common recipe for these films is to look at some social microcosm – a banquet, a university, a cruise – and to use it as a metaphorical pretext to unmask the absurdities of the political macrocosm: corruption, oppression, groupism. One reason for this indirect style was that the more complex the metaphor, the more difficult it was for the censors to block a scenario.’ However, despite this successful evasion, and even winning a USSR State Prize for the film, Shengelaia was prohibited by the Soviet authorities from attending Cannes in 1985.

Shengelaia is known for a particular blend of tragicomedy, one that exemplifies a quintessentially Georgian approach to life. His sharp eye for satire and the strange rhythms of life can be seen throughout his impressive oeuvre. But, it is valuable to consider why Shengelaia picked this moment to critique the Soviet system. The political landscape of Georgia in the 1980s was one of dissatisfaction, the Thaw had revived a deep sense of nationalism in the country, and the stark economic downturns of the 1990s lay in wait, anticipated by many. Shortly after Blue Mountains (1983), Shengelaia began to devote the vast majority of his time to the Georgian Independence Movement, just ahead of its popular take off in 1989. He would not return to filmmaking until the 1990s.

Blue Mountains (1983) ends with the image of the new hightech building, a replacement after the original one fell apart. It is a prophetic vision of a new Georgia yet worryingly, in this vision, the publishing house is still run by the same useless people who ran it before. A satirical perspective that suggests Shengelaia, whilst politically engaged, feared that perhaps only facades change.

Blue Mountains (1983).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 35mn
Size: 	3.06 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	4 320 Kbps
BPP: 	0.087
Audio
#1:  	Georgian 2.0ch AAC @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/6BD4450D58809FE/Blue_Mountains_(1983).mkv

Language(s):Georgian
Subtitles:English, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, German

The post Eldar Shengelaia – Tsisperi mtebi anu daujerebeli ambavi AKA Golubye gory, ili nepravdopodobnaya istoriya AKA Blue Mountains, or Unbelievable Story (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

It was always likely that Eldar Shengelaia would end up in film. His father Nikoloz was one of the early pioneers of Georgian cinema, his mother Nato an acclaimed actor. Younger brother Giorgi was an accomplished director in his own right, noted for his 1969 biopic on the Georgian primitivist artist Pirosmani. Both Shengelaia brothers won admission to the VGIK film school in Moscow, the USSR’s most prestigious, graduating a few years apart, and Eldar’s first directorial efforts were produced while working at Mosfilm in the late fifties – The Legend of the Frozen Heart (1957) and A Snowy Tale (1959).

However, unlike certain of their compatriots – Mikhail Kalatozov, Georgi Daneliya, Marlen Khutsiev – the Shengelaias had no intention of decamping permanently to the Russian-language cinema of the Union’s heartlands. The Shengelaia brothers were committed to filming Georgian life and culture. Giorgi pursued this mission from his very first short, a drama based around ancient Georgian religious rituals. Likewise, Eldar’s first mature film, made after he had moved back from Moscow to Tbilisi’s Georgia-Film studio: 1963’s The White Caravan.

The film follows a group of highland shepherds as they move their herds from the Caucasian peaks down to winter pastures by the Caspian Sea, in present-day Dagestan – an arduous back-and-forth traipse that keeps the men away from their wives and children for nine months of the year. Each shepherd makes his own peace with this lifestyle, apart from Gela, eldest son of the Martia, the group’s formidable leader. Discontent with his lot, Gela falls in love with Maria, a local girl who works the Caspian fisheries. At the same time, his head is turned by the fast fun and brisk pace of a nearby city. Both his eventual engagement to Maria and his relationship with his father and comrades are ultimately undone, with tragic consequences, by the young man’s inability to let go of the idea that he must cut all ties to move to the city, there to truly “live life” for the first time.

Eldar’s decision at this pivotal moment in his career to turn to the humble labourers and remote locales of Georgia/the Caucasus was in keeping with a broader trend in the nation’s cinema. The Shengelaia brothers were part of a pan-Soviet filmmaking cohort that came of age post-war and, crucially, post-Stalinism, reinvigorating Soviet cinema in a series of localised “new waves”. The Georgian incarnation of this phenomenon, powered by the likes of Tengiz Abuladze, Otar Iosseliani, and the Shengelaias, soon became known for its poetic visual imagination and its incorporation of Georgian folklore and traditional art as a means of establishing national cinematic identity within the Soviet canon for the first time.

On this front, Shengelaia certainly delivers: from the polyphonic folk singing heard over the opening credits and then later performed onscreen, to the brief but intimate portrait of village life that opens the film and the breathtaking framing of the Caucasus mountains as the shepherds begin their journey. Shengelaia’s camerawork is nimble and freewheeling throughout, craning, panning, and dollying through his makeshift homesteads and rural landscapes. One could certainly make the case that the film functions as a classic tale of urban degradation versus rural harmony, with Gela’s downfall a cautionary tale about the risks involved in turning one’s back on traditional ways of life.

What Shengelaia does with The White Caravan, though, is more ambiguous and emotionally insightful. From the off, we are made aware that “country” and “city” are not really so distinct after all: the shepherds walk down immaculate, tarmacked mountain roads and listen to Mussorgsky on the radio; the countryside is dotted with oil refineries and factories. The city that Gela visits is pointedly never named, the specificities of urban life elided. What Gela rejects is the inflexibility of a life mapped out for him – the road he walks up and down again year on year – rather than shepherding per se. The climatic storm that brings the narrative to a brutal end reflects this heaving sense of frustration, afflicting all characters equally. The White Caravan might be a Georgian story, Shengelaia’s first, but it is also a universal one.

Nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, 1964.

3.52GB | 1h 33m | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/B21CDCA31795140/The_White_Caravan_(1963).mkv

Language:Georgian
Subtitles:English

The post Tamaz Meliava & Eldar Shengelaia – Tetri karavani AKA The White Caravan (1963) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

There’s a distinct madness to Georgian auteur Eldar Shengalaia’s method when it comes to blending political satire and humour. He deploys madcap comedy with ease to both disguise and expose the nuanced complexities of individual and societal living during the Soviet era. The 1973 surrealistic satire Eccentrics is Shengalaia’s second feature-length comedy, in which he rekindles the thematic pneuma of his earlier diploma films such as Legend of the Frozen Heart and Fairy Tale in Snow (1958-60) by juxtaposing fantasy and reality in a fable-like love story, described variously by critics as “poetic”, “grand and eternal”, “a parable of grotesque realism” and “vaudeville-like.”

Somewhere in rural Georgia, country lad Ertaozi’s (Demno Jgenti) idyllic life comes to a startling halt when his father dies, leaving him orphaned. Auctioning his home and belongings to square up his father’s debts, Ertaozi sets off for the city, where a chance encounter with the winsome Margalita (Ariadna Shengelaia) makes him go weak at the knees. Sensing Ertaozi’s infatuation, Margalita manipulates him to further her own ends, and Ertaozi soon finds himself behind bars, albeit in the lively company of Qristepore (Vasili Chkhaidze), a zealous scientist who dreams of building a flying machine. Impressed with each other’s problem-solving acumen, Qristepore and Ertaozi soon form a mentorprotégé bond and, defying the swivel-eyed cop, Khuta (Boris Tsipuria) and his wily sidekicks, embark on an unexpected flight of fantasy, both literal and allegorical.

“Eccentrics was perceived as a fairy tale, but in fact, it’s an ode to freedom!” exclaims Shengalaia, who, at 90, has retained his crown as the undisputed “King of Tragicomedy”. Disguised as dreamy folklore, Eccentrics utilises classical and pastoral humour to articulate Georgia’s pursuit of national and cultural identity, whilst underscoring the absurdities of the Socialist system through a series of oddball characters who are both perpetrators and victims of its ideological misdemeanours. Although steeped in Georgian traditions, the characters of Eccentrics carry a universal appeal and their idiosyncratic charm in blending pathos with laughter is reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin, one of Shengelaia’s great influences.

“Almost all Georgian cinema is an allegory of that [Soviet] time, because you couldn’t speak directly,” says Shengalaia. Despite its non-controversial plot, Eccentrics’ subtext did not escape the scrutiny of the regime’s gatekeepers, and its on-screen release was deferred for a long time, restricting it to screenings at smaller clubs. Years later, when the film was allowed on the big screen, the subversive significance of Qristepore’s and Ertaozi’s predicament was clearer – Soviet dissidents were often confined to psychiatric institutions. Shengalaia and co-writer Rezo Gabriadze were also denied the permission to take Eccentrics out of the country. “It was unimaginable that you would go beyond the [Soviet] boundaries then. We had the feeling that we were born here, we would be here forever…” Decades later, when western audiences and critics finally had the opportunity to sample his films (including Eccentrics at Cannes and other film festivals), instant comparisons were drawn with the likes of Vittorio de Sica and Luis Buñuel.

A delightful cocktail of love, lust, chicanery, and scientific wizardry, Eccentrics is a triumphant tale of choosing freedom over bondage, dreams over reality, and hope over fear. “Captivity gave us the impulse to create something exciting and interesting. This is a real paradox”, says Shengelaia. Of his titular eccentrics, he adds: “They were flying neither to the west, nor to the east. They simply got tired of the reality and rose above it.” Half a century on from its release in 1973, the leitmotifs of Eccentrics remain deeply resonant and relevant, especially at a time when love and harmony seem to be in short supply an

3.06GB | 1h 18m | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/19F144B1C4B86E1/Eccentrics_(1973).mkv

Language(s):Georgian
Subtitles:English

The post Eldar Shengelaia – Sherekilebi AKA The Eccentrics (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.