‘Take away our chance to work and it’s the equivalent of dying’: remembering Giorgi Shengelaia, Georgia’s genius cinema autuer

“When the weather changes, it reflects on me — when it’s sunny I am better,” he had told me with regret. But when asked about his life, Shengelaia was animated and generous with his memories. In the years since, I’ve thought about his words often. They came back to me more than ever last week, when I was told that Shengelaia had died at the age of 82.

Giorgi Shengelaia directed 14 films, and occasionally acted (appearing, for instance, in Rezo Chkheidze’s 1956 classic Our Yard with his then-wife, actress Sofiko Chiaureli.) His best-known movie, and his crowning tour de force, is undoubtedly Pirosmani (1969), a poetic and idiosyncratic rendering of the life of Georgia’s great turn-of-the-century primitivist painter, Niko Pirosmani. Born into a peasant family and later orphaned, Pirosmani taught himself how to paint and worked odd jobs while devoting himself to his art. He became famous only after his death, instead dying poor from alcoholism and malnutrition. Shengelaia presents Pirosmani as the quintessential tortured artist of yore, with a monk-like calling to create; a misfit doomed to suffer at the hands of a banal and pragmatic society that cannot understand him. Pirosmani’s painting Giraffe (1905) is seen hanging on the wall of a restaurant throughout the film. An otherworldly creature out of synch with Tbilisi’s climate, its parallel with the outsider artist is clear — perhaps with Shengelaia, too, in his last days, secluded from the onslaught of hyper-modernity at home.

As well as images of his parents, photographs of Soviet cinema greats Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov, who Shengelaia was close with in his early days, also appeared on the walls of his home. The sadness that many of his contemporaries had died young seemed to wear on him. Working under the Soviet regime was tough on all of them, he recalled. “It’s interesting that all these famous Soviet directors had heart problems and so on,” he said. “[The government] didn’t need to put them in jail, they just needed to take away the possibility of work. For an artist, it’s the equivalent of dying. When you are a writer or painter you don’t need anything, you can just take paper and finish your work, but a director needs industry and equipment. Under Stalin they often couldn’t manage,” he said.

But he lamented more our accelerated world of surface-level entertainment and simulations, with the masses stuck to their iPhone screens. “I can’t understand how Socrates or Plato would react to computers,” he mused. The modern world simply missed “the ambience from which great pieces of art will appear”, he claimed. “Everything that is art now is cheap, commercial stuff; it’s a business. And it’s totally the same in cinema. Try and give me a couple of [modern day] directors like Pasolini, Bergman, Fellini, Iosseliani, or Tarkovsky. I understand why sometimes there are no geniuses, but when they disappear like this all at once, I understand that civilisation has gone in the wrong direction.” If nothing else, It was impossible not to be swayed by Shengelaia’s romantic, old-school appeal to authenticity.

I haven’t yet followed through on Shengelaia’s urging. But perhaps one day, I’ll get up the courage, and be able to leave a note on his grave: “In eternal gratitude for Pirosmani, I’ve hurled my laptop out the window. Carmen.”