padeniye berlina / the fall of berlin (w&d. mikhail chiaureli, w. pyotr pavlenko)

My father is nearing the end of his life. So many things I have seen or read this year have, by chance, lead me back to the start of his life. Post-war Germany, specifically Berlin. We are losing the last of the generations that experienced a time when Europe was reduced to rubble. When armies marched across its broad plains. Perhaps it is because the holders of these memories are leaving us that the fear of war on European soil seems to be receding on the part of the North Americans, and growing on the part of those who inhabit the territories that suffered so much in the twentieth century.

The Fall of Berlin is a Soviet propaganda piece about the events leading to the Russian advance on Berlin, culminating in the Hammer and Sickle flying over the destroyed Reichstag. As a film it goes for a kind of docu-drama, following the fates of two lovers from the Ukraine, who will meet in Berlin after being separated for so long. Stalin features heavily, as the wise leader who oversees triumph. There's no subtlety to the movie and it was clearly made to stir Soviet pride in the difficult years after the war. The budget would appear to have been substantial: the battles scenes are extensive, and an imitation of the Reichstag was apparently constructed for the closing scenes.

It's not the greatest film ever made, but it does hark back to a past which feels all but unthinkable when one walks the multicultural streets of Berlin today. Was that all some kind of terrible fever dream? As events fall back into folk memory, as the real memories of great grandparents, grandparents and parents are lost, only art can hope to retain an idea of what happened, once upon a time, on the thriving streets of Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Charlottenburg. 

(nb My great grandparents home, where my father spent the first years of his life, was out in Spandau, on the leafy border with the East.)

andriesh (d.sergei parajanov, yakov bazelyan, w. yemelian bukov, grigoriy koltunov, sergey shvartszoyd)

Parajanov’s first film is a Chagallian eco-fable. A boy loses his flock after the intervention of a malevolent storm god. The film occupies a space between nature and art, between naturalism and the oneiric. As the boy walks out of his village in the Caucasus, it feels as though we are witnessing images from a lovingly filmed documentary. Then, the film switches register. Nature speaks. The boy talks, memorably, to a weeping willow. He helps out a giant, who reciprocates. Myth and fable weave their way into the story. Andriesh is epic poetry reincarnated as cinema. 

Iko shashvi mgalobeli / there was once a singing blackbird (w&d otar iosseliani,, w. sh. kakichashvili, dimitri eristavi)

Iosseliani’s second feature is a narrative-light account of a day in the life of a percussionist in Tbilisi. Gia is a freewheeling, happy-go-lucky percussionist in the orchestra. Something of a lothario, with an eye for the ladies and a galaxy of friends and acquaintances, his day is crammed to the gills with rehearsals, meetings, family and generally living his best life. He sometimes complains that he never has time for anything, but this is clearly down to the fact that he’s too busy running around being a lad about town. Played with a charming verve by Gela Kandelaki, Gia is a stepbrother to Agnes Varda’s Cleo or Keitel in Scorsese’s Who's That Knocking at My Door. What seems doubly remarkable about Iosseliani’s film is that despite the fact it is filmed behind ‘the iron curtain’ in the demonised USSR, Gia feels like a typical product of the late sixties, a figure endowed with so much personal freedom that it consumes him absolutely. There’s a lovely narrative strand where two visitors from Russia arrive at his home; he tells them to hang out until he gets back later, but in the social blizzard of his day he forgets all about them. Marine, played by the luminous Marina Kartsivadze, makes a cameo appearance and the film revolves around Gia’s capacity to time his entrance to play the kettle drums to the second, infuriating the conductor by only arriving in the nick of time. The film manages to remain compelling despite it being entirely episodic, with almost no attention paid to narrative: this is an immersive day in the life of a Tiblisi social butterfly and its 90 minutes are as thoroughly instructive and entertaining as the life of its protagonist, the singing blackbird of the title.

giorgobistve / falling leaves (w&d otar iosseliani, w. amiran chichinadze)

I don’t think I have ever heard Otar Iosseliani, who died last month, being referenced in the British film world. Cinemateca is honouring him with a retrospective. This early film of his, shot in his native Georgia, is an engaging coming of age tale. It focuses on Nico, a young man who gets a job in a winery as a quality control inspector. The naive Nico, engagingly played by Ramaz Giorgobiani, soon learns that his job is meaningless: the quality of the wine is of secondary importance to the need to hit quotas. When he goes against the majority to declare that the wine in Barrel 49 is not good enough, (It’s like vinegar, another worker says), he is mocked. Nico is smitten by Marine, a neighbour, another who doesn’t take him seriously. When a local bully punches him in the eye for having the temerity to visit her, Nico suddenly turns. At work he takes it on himself to put Barrel 49 out of action and snubs Marine’s attempts to apologise. 

Giorgobiani’s likeable performance holds the film together. But it’s clear that the director’s aim is to capture a portrait of his society. The film opens with on extended rural sequence, showing the vines being picked and turned into wine. Iosseliani then takes us into the homes, cafes and bars of the city. The camera darts around, capturing details, and the aesthetic feels akin to the French Nouvelle Vague or early Bertolucci. As such, the film builds up a compelling portrait of life in Soviet Georgia, which doesn’t seem so very different to life in any other part of Europe. Indeed, what is striking are the similarities, in terms of architecture, anxiety and ambition. Also notable is the representation of the female characters, Marine and her friend Lali, whose self-possession and confidence are in striking contrast to the naive Nico. 

the unsent letter (d. mikhail kalatozov, w. grigoriy koltunov, valeri osipov, viktor rozov)

As regular readers to this column (?!?) might realise, the writer is somewhat beguiled by the achievements of Soviet cinema. One aspect of cinema is that it has little option but to function within the parameters of the socio-political structure it inhabits. Because cinema makers on the whole need money. What emerges in Kalatozov’s work is perhaps a prioritisation of technique and aesthetic over content. Content is dangerous, it can get the filmmaker into trouble. Technique, on the other hand, in particular in cinema, a new art with fervent Bolshevik roots, permits an innovative freedom. With his crossfades and his heightened art direction, Kalatozov exercises this freedom with remarkable panache. The narrative of The Unsent Letter is straightforward. Four geologists are sent to the Siberian taiga to discover diamonds, which will be a key development in the industrialisation of the Soviet republic. After much fruitless searching and a certain amount of Chekhovian angst (one of the geologists, Andrey is engaged to another, Tanya, but a third, Sergey, develops a smouldering passion for Tanya), they do indeed discover the diamonds, charting the location. Mission accomplished, they prepare their two boats to head back downriver. However, the night of their departure, a terrifying forest fire strikes. The boats are lost, Sergey dies, and the remaining trio have to make their way out by foot. Planes fly overhead but can’t see them for the smoke. The radio packs up. Andey is wounded and cannot walk. A seemingly innocuous tale becomes darker and darker. It turns into a survival story (pace The Revenant). Who will live, who will perish? Given the prosaic nature of the narrative, it’s perhaps hard to see how the film can sustain itself over the course of the closing hour. If this was Hollywood, the cliches would be coming thick and fast. But Kalatozov pulls it off. This is deeply immersive cinema. The lingering smoke, the Siberian marshes, the onset of Winter snow, are all realised with a cinematic flair which captivates the viewer. The camera makes us the other party in this journey, albeit from the safety of our cinema seats. We urge the three characters to survive and mourn those who don’t. 

Clearly there’s a hard-fought propaganda element to all this. The struggle of the Soviet peoples etcetera. The dream-montage which shows the development of the region has, to 21st century eyes, a dystopian air, pure nature subsumed by industry. Nevertheless, the pure skill of the filmmaking succeeds in ensuring that the human story, that of the heroic instinct to survival, supersedes any political preconceptions the viewer brings to the screen. The Unsent Letter is as gripping a film as one could imagine, which ranks alongside films like The Wages of Fear, Duel or Alien to reveal cinema’s capacity to immerse the viewer in a terrifying reality. 

the legend of suram fortress (d. parajanov, dodo abashidze, w. vaja gigashvili, daniel chonqadze)

This is a wonderfully chaotic film, a beautiful collection of images, stories, characters, thoughts, dreams. Like stumbling across the notebook of an unknown genius in a language that you can’t read, but whose very form is enough to tell you all you need to know. In a way perhaps cinema at its purest is a return to the pictogram, sign and meaning unified to reveal all in the image of a frame. If this were really so, Parajanov is one of those few poets who offers hints of what a wonderful world it could be.

Legend of Suram Fortress is ‘about’ a fortress which has been destroyed and cannot be rebuilt. Until, the soothsayer, whose circuitous story we have already learnt, reveals what’s required and a valiant young warrior agrees to entomb himself in the castle walls. However, most of this emerges in the film’s final ten minutes. In the preceding seventy, we travel the length and breath of Georgia, meeting too many characters to keep count of. Pomegranates are abused, bagpipes are blown and camels wend their way towards the coast. In one dazzling scene, medieval warriors pace the waterfront with supertankers lurking in the sea behind them.

There must be a whole host of ways of interpreting The Legend, with subtexts relating to national myths; the filmmaker’s own relationship to the USSR; and who knows what else. These aspects for now pass me by. What remains is the declaration of a filmmaker who’s willing to challenge his audience into re-evaluating what the experience of watching cinema can be. Not the act of following the thread of a narrative, but leaping from star to star. As such he almost seems to be challenging the whole notion of the Western narrative tradition, which had been waiting for cinema to be invented and Parajanov to arrive and show that stories don’t need beginnings, middles and ends. They need visions.  

the colour of pomegranates (d. sergei parajanov)

The film buff suggested we go. He and I both thought we'd seen it twenty years ago. I thought it was 4 hours long and he said it was 72 minutes. He was almost right, it would have been, if it wasn't for the fact the print kept going into meltdown, the lights coming up and down, the washed colours dissolving into the orange glow of a blank screen.

The scratchiness of the print and its state of imminent collapse contributed to the sense of watching a relic, discovered perhaps in one of the ruined churches the film shows. The film has the feel of a tone poem. It is a succession of mise-en-scenes, artfully put together, with no dialogue and little narrative. Every image is a thing of beauty, from the carpets flapping in the wind to the sheep bleating in a church. Like looking at a Renaissance fresco that's faded through the centuries, it's hard to tell what the original colours would have looked like, but in this print they had a subdued grandeur, hinting at the richness of the colours that underpin the images shown on the screen, without quite giving them away.

Parajanov's film is meditative. It felt to this viewer like a cross between a sixties acid movie and a nineties fashion spread in a glossy magazine for people with so much money they needed to prove it through the quality of their austerity. The only people in the audience who looked like this was their reason for watching it left after the second projector meltdown. Maybe 7 minutes was enough for them to get a feel. No matter how beautiful, Pomegranates is not an easy thing to watch, stripped away as it is of assumed dramatic ingredients. Towards the end the poet's voice says - I'm so tired, I'm even tired of writing poems - and the audience knows where he's coming from. We too couldn't go on for much longer staring at this alien beauty, not without pharmaceutical assistance.

The film buff noted that there was a surprising amount of religious imagery for a film made in the Soviet Union. I felt as though there may well have been a thousand messages contained within the images that I had missed, which perhaps all save a few now-elderly Armenians would miss. However, to go and see this film expecting to make sense of it would appear to be missing the point, for it's a film that deals with the limits of intellectual understanding, provoking a sensory response instead. It's as close to an experience of other-worldly asceticism as you can get without spending a year sitting on a pillar in the middle of the desert.