A few days ago I learned of the death of the great Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani, at the age of 89. I was sad to hear of his demise – I’d met him a few times, and liked him – but also a little surprised, given his apparently prodigious intake of alcohol, that he’d lasted that long. Whatever, the next day the BFI, knowing I was an admirer of Iosseliani’s work, and had seen most of his features, invited me to write an obituary, and I did. You can read it here.
I was limited in my wordage, so there are a couple of things I’d like to add here. Iosseliani was a great filmmaker, and won many prizes at the major European film festivals (most of his films premiered in Cannes, Venice or Berlin), but he is nowhere near as well known as he deserved to be. Why? Because most distributors were too cautious to even consider acquiring such unusual films. (In the UK, at least we had the original and excellent Artificial Eye prepared to take the financial risk of releasing several of his movies; if memory serves, the ICA may also have opened one of them.) But while the films are certainly unusual, they are far from ‘difficult’ if one is willing to forego a conventional dramatic story; they are funny, thought-provoking, cherishably odd and imaginative, and often very beautiful to look at. (The cinematographer on many of them was the late William Lubtchansky, who shot most of Rivette’s films and also worked with Godard, Truffaut, Lanzmann and Straub-Huillet.) The sad thing is that they are so difficult to see these days; checking on Amazon, I found that several boxed sets are no longer available, though it does seem possible to acquire the old Artificial Eye DVDs of Gardens in Autumn and Monday Morning, both lovely films.
Unfortunately, no longer available is the French DVD of Gardens in Autumn, which included as an extra Otar Iosseliani, le merle siffleur, a 92-minute making-of doc by fellow Georgian director Julie Bertuccelli. (A former assistant to the likes of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Bertrand Tavernier, Rithy Panh and Iosseliani himself, Bertucelli probably remains best known for her 2003 debut fiction feature, Since Otar Left…) It’s a fascinating documentary, because it shows just how bizarre Iosseliani’s working methods were. A script barely seemed to come into the equation; instead, he would produce strange, complicated geometric diagrams for the movements of the cast and the camera. Listening to his arcane explanations of what he required, the producer Martine Marignac demonstrated the patience of a saint. (If memory serves, she is seen chain-smoking throughout.) But then she too had worked with Rivette, Godard and Straub-Huillet, not to mention Leos Carax and João César Monteiro – the Portuguese filmmaker whose films are so eccentric as to make even Iosseliani look comparatively conventional – so she was probably used to artists with ‘vision’.)
It’s highly regrettable that it’s currently so difficult to see Iosseliani’s work. Let’s hope that changes. He deserves better – and so do we. In an age when most movies feel pretty much anonymous in terms of a genuinely individual worldview, those filmmakers with an immediately recognisable creative signature are surely to be valued more than ever.
notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 