PIROSMANI + SHORT

Giorgi Shengelaia’s beautiful, elegaic film — a series of fragmented but naturalistic impressions of the primitivist painter Niko Pirosmani in 19th century Georgia.

Pirosmani’s works received scant acclaim in his homeland before they were exhibited in Moscow in 1930 and later in Kiev — twelve years after his death. He was self-taught and developed a flexible style, the subjects of which ranged from animals and birds to historical figures as well as the ordinary everyday scenes in the fields and city streets. The colours are soft and subtle; the format, vivid and primitive, in the manner of Persian art or the Italian Seicento.

Shengelaya has captured on film those qualities of Pirosmani’s work which make them distinctively his own; the pastel colour shadings, the compositions placingpeop le in doorways and the slanting pavements or images against a stark expansive background. The soft, colours and the simplicity in the storyline are particularly appropriate. The Art Director, Avto Varazi, also plays the title role. As designer, he accurately conveys the period and the subject in the settings, and as the artist himself he delicately expresses the depression, resentment and simplicity in the artist’s nature.

PIROSMANI first screened in the U.K. at the 17th London Film Festival and was awarded the British Film Institute Award for 1973 for being the most original and imaginative film to be shown at the Festival.

The screening will be accompanied by the Sergei Parajanov short Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani.

Daniel Bird, restoration producer of Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani will introduce the screening with a  talk about Pirosmani and the avant-garde.

“Possibly one of the most eye-catching films ever made.”
John Coleman, New Statesman

“Pirosmani was unrecognised during his litetime… but if one may judge from the pictures and the murals reproduced on the screen, he was the best of the primitives, a recreator of the world he saw.”
Dilys Powell, Sunday Times

“Konstantin Apryatin’s photography marvellously captures the clear distinctive colours of Pirosmani’s palette, with its earthy reds, browns and ochres, highlit with flashes of flesh-pink and vivid green … Pirosmani aims to carry the spectator into the world of the paintings even if this demands a leap into surreality as when Pirosmani returning home to his village, daydreams of his boyhood and encounters with visionary rustic folk like the black-clad shepherd with black sheep and the white one with white.”
David Robinson, Times

“Primitive magic… stunning to look at throughout — a masterpiece of cinematography and art direction… Its feeling for the artist and his work is powerful and quite unique. It is not just that if you stopped the movie at any one of a hundred points you would see perfectly re-created, the mood of the paintings themselves. That alone would have been an achievement. What the film also does is speak volumes in a still, quiet voice about the loneliness and melancholia that beset Pirosmani’s life and the nature of his astonishing art itself in relation to the world he observed. But if Pirosmani deals with the agony of creation and, in physical and sometimes almost mystical terms, with art itself, it also gives an extraordinary view of of late nineteenth century Georgia; its faces, traditions and music. Everything is highly fragmented in style, linking only obliquely. But the whole summons up a world within a world with wholly remarkable perception. It is a film that conjures up magic…”
Derek Malcolm, Guardian