Tati is a gentleman that I have a great deal of respect for. I believe that he did his work observing a world that, at the time, was going mad. He is not however a model for me; it was another time and a different look on the world. René Clair and Marcel Carné did not anticipate the beginning of the disaster, the beginning of this typhoon of madness that invades us today; Tati, he sensed it a little, while remaining sweet, tender and fairly “familial”. He showed the exaggeration of petit-bourgeois bad taste in Mon oncle; in Trafic, he saw the arrival of a new time but still in the tradition of Chaplin’s Modern Times, that is, in insisting on the comic side of things, by observing human behaviour as a child’s game.
Chaplin’s and Tati’s method is the old method of the clown. It is a matter of a single character standing against the world, in the footsteps of Don Quixote and Voltaire’s Candide. The character, in its relation to the world, is like corn husk paper that a chemist plunges into an acid solution. It is through the character that the acidity of the world is revealed. My method borrows more from the paintings of Breugel. It is the sum of a puzzle, the intersection of different characters blinded by the impossibility of continuing to live in tranquillity, according to their desires and what they understand about life. The drama of the world is that of the intersection of desires: the increase of the desire to have and the disappearance of the desire to give.
Marcel Jean and Micheline Dussault, “Entretien avec Otar Iosseliani : L’homme tranquille”, 24 images, Number 66, April–May 1993.
[In the absence of films to share, we must limit ourselves to trailers].
Home Sweet Homeless: The Harmonious Dissonance of Otar Iosseliani
“When a film is successful, I think, it’s always a bad sign,” Iosseliani ponders. “As far as I’m concerned to make ‘great cinema’ is absolutely impossible, the very idea repels me. These are my criteria, there is nothing I can do about it.” For perhaps nothing can be done about many things except comprehending the charming insanity of human life on earth in all its meaningless beauty. The meditative irony of Iosseliani’s cinema stands out for its unexpected angle that somehow manages to show a familiar thing in a completely different light. The surreal animal presences that populate many of his movies seem to suggest the awe and shock with which animals must look at us, a perspective that Iosseliani’s look whimsically conveys. As modern life accelerates beyond any limit, depriving life of the time it requires, Iosseliani’s cinema is a timely reminder of how vital idleness is. He is, after all, a director who films the ineluctable fate of objects and wo/men in all its absurd, painful and ridiculous magnificence while trying to salvage the time we don’t seem to have, let alone master. An inconspicuous, charming anti-conformist whose simple and profound cinema feels more like friendships than films, evoking the fading art and pleasure of conviviality.
Celluloid Liberation Front, posted in Cinema Scope Online
[See The Guardian obituary to Otar Iosseliani here.]
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