Пиросмани

This Soviet film is a biography of the Georgian artist Niko Pirosmanishvili (1863-1918), usually known as Pirosmani. It won awards from the British Film Institute and the Chicago Film Festival.

Pirosmani died of starvation, unable to sell any of his works for sufficient money to support life. Ironically, his primitivist style was later very much in fashion, and huge sums were paid for his surviving paintings. This well-regarded film focuses on Pirosmani’s everyday life in the Georgia of his time, and is photographed in a bold style which echoes the artist’s vision and causes the viewer to enter into it. This is necessary, because little factual material about the artist was available; most of his biography was composed of legends and recorded gossip.

Director Giorgi Shengelaia avoids the usual clichés of films about artists’ lives, successfully experimenting with colour control techniques based on the painter’s style. Avtandil Varazi plays the gentle, uncompromising artist who sold his paintings to bars and restaurants for food and drink, and worked mostly in solitude.

Shengelaia’s film constructs a series of impressionistic tableaux from incidents in Pirosmani’s life. Each tableau takes its style from Piarosmani’s own paintings, with simple lines and pastel colors, figures poised suggestively in space, and further resonance derived from references to the work of the French impressionists.