A collaborative project spanning more than two decades, with many hiccups in between, is finally coming to fruition. “Discovering Georgian Cinema,” a series jointly produced by the Pacific Film Archive and the Museum of Modern Art, is the first comprehensive retrospective of the overlooked national cinema of Georgia. The series, which takes place at MoMA, will feature nearly 50 films and will be split into two sections: the first, titled “A Family Affair,” will be presented from September 23 through October 16 and will focus on the many bloodlines that run through Georgian Cinema history, from the earliest silent period through the present day. (The second, titled “Beyond Blue Mountain,” will begin on November 22 and will focus more closely on three distinctive periods in Georgian cinema.)
In a recent phone conversation, ARTINFO spoke with Jytte Jensen, curator at MoMA’s department of film, about the origins of the series, the difficulties of putting together such an expansive program, and where Georgian cinema is today.
This series has been in the works for a number of years. When did the process of putting it together begin and when did you become involved?
I actually got involved very early on. I went with my then-boss Adrienne Mancia, who was the curator here at MoMA, to Tbilisi in 1991. That followed my first time at the Moscow Film Festival in 1988, where all the talk was about Tbilisi — that is where everything was happening. Adrienne and Edith Kramer at the Pacific Film Archive had been talking about Georgian films for a while, and whenever [Georgian] filmmakers would come they would often visit the PFA and MoMA. Often they would deposit their films at the PFA because they didn’t want to take them back home because they didn’t know what would happen to them. So the PFA has, over the years, assembled a really wonderful collection of Georgian films, starting all the way back with [former PFA curator] Tom Luddy, who’s now at the Telluride Film Festival, and Edith Kramer and now Susan Oxtoby. MoMA showed many films from the Russian Republics in the 1990s, with a special eye to one of the liveliest, which always was the Georgian cinema, and had filmmakers here and bought a few prints, which are in our archives. We always wanted to do a very large exhibition, and the two curators that came before Susan and I tried many times. But it never happened. Mostly because we dealt directly with the Georgians and they were very reluctant to give us prints from Gosfilmofond, the Russian film archive. That was where the major films were deposited during the Soviet period. There were no prints in the archives in Tiblisi. So Susan spent over a year and a half going to all the major European archives to find prints there we could use, which is what really made this series happen now.
You mentioned the difficulties of working with archives. Were there other difficulties in putting together the series?
The filmmakers have always been eager to participate. They want their films to be shown and they’re eager to show their films in the US. There were major exhibitions of Georgian cinema in Germany and France in the 1990s, but we could never get it together here simply because we could not get the right prints and we wanted to do it very comprehensively. We even planned larger exhibitions than this one, 60 to 70 films. This one is just below 50 at MoMA.
What has been the biggest surprise during this long process?
One of the surprises has been how well it holds up. I did see a lot of these films in the 1990s, and the historic films are pretty much what we selected then. But one of the great things about doing it now is that there’s an ongoing discovery about Georgian cinema because it has been so hidden and, in some cases, censored. Not everything that’s very, very good, and should be a major part of film history, has been discovered until recently. For that, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival has made some major discoveries by Russian and Georgian cinema experts. They found films in the archives that we didn’t know existed, including a very important film called “Buba,” from 1930, by an early female director, Noutsa Gogoberidze, who was the mother of the most famous Georgian feminist filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s, Lana Gogoberidze. Noutsa was in a Stalinist camp and her films were always suppressed. Now Lana has found one of her mother’s films, which is amazingly beautiful and really a main discovery in terms of subjective documentary cinema. It’s been discovered in the last four years and we’re hoping to add it to our collection at MoMA.
Was there work that you could not include in the series, due to lost or damaged prints?
Yes, both of those reasons. There’s a lot of work to be done and they’re very aware of this in the various archives and film centers in Tbilisi. There’s s a lot of work to be done on prints, subtitling, and just really access to films so people can preview this treasure trove of films. So, yes: There’s films we heard about but couldn’t find; there’s films that we knew we wanted to include but were not able to find good prints. This is the minority, though. We did find a lot of stuff we wanted to include, and it’s been great to have this collaboration with so many archives. It also opened up to the Georgians that this is how they can collect their film history. Now they know where we got all these prints from and there are really not a lot of excuses other than money, and that is a very valid excuse of course.
I wanted to ask about the structure of the series, which is broken up in two parts.
I’ll tell you, really, I broke up the series for practical reasons. We start on September 23 and go to October 16. Right after that, we open our annual To Save and Project Festival. That goes for a month, and when that series ends we’re doing a joint event, which will open the second part of the Georgian retrospective with Kote Mikaberidze’s “My Grandmother,” from 1929. We wanted to make a break there because it’s very much the same audience the two programs are courting, people who are sensitive to film history and want to make discoveries and see films that don’t open in a movie house. We didn’t want to overlap, and we think both series are valuable. It also was natural because we wanted a populist first section, with this idea of the many family strains that go through Georgian cinema from the very beginning until now, where many of the new filmmakers are third generation filmmakers. We programmed also so we had a chance to show the three areas where Georgian filmmaking is brilliant: the silent period, the period of Soviet filmmaking in the ’60s and ’70s — where Georgian filmmaking was very strong — and the current generation with the New Georgian Cinema. Now, you can’t go to a festival where there’s not a Georgian filmmaker either participating or winning the prizes. Sarajevo just gave its Jury Prize to a Georgian film, “Brides,” by Tinatin Kajrishvili.
Is there a particular film you’re most excited about showing people?
No [laughs]. I’m excited about the films we’re showing with musical accompaniment. We open with Nikoloz Shengelaia’s “Elisso,” and this brilliant American composer, who is an expert on Georgian folk music, has made a beautiful composition. I’m excited about seeing this film come to life with ancient but still contemporary music.
