Pirosmani[Пиросмани](1969) USSRDirected by Georgii ShengelaiaWritten by Erlom Akhvlediani and Georgii Shengelaia. Cinematography Konstantin Apriatin. Art direction Avtandil Varazi. Music Vakhtang Kukhianidze. With Avtandil Varazi, David Abashidze, Zurab Kupianidze, and Maria Gvaramadze. In Russian with English subtitles |
A poetic film about the life
of Niko Pirosmanishvilli (1863-1918), a Georgian primitivist painter whose
work came to be recognized several years after his death. | Georgii Shengelaia (b. 1933) graduated from the State Institute of Cinematography in 1963. A student of Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Mikhail Romm. Early Shengelaia has a strong predilection for auteur poetic cinema. Pirosmani brought Shengelaia early fame. In 1973, he made a musical, Melodies of Veriiskii Quarter, set in pre-Revolutionary Tbilisi. The film's propensity for theatricality and stylization made it one of the paradigmatic texts for the Soviet cinema of the 1970s. Prerevolutionary Georgia was the primary setting for most of Shengelaia's films. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Shengelaia started working in commercial genre film. In 1997 Shengelaia made the action thriller Klassik. |