In the Beginning Was the Song: The Sound of Labor in Ioseliani’s Cinematic Cosmology

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media I: Eco-Poetic-Cinema from Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Yugoslavia

Abstract

Between his early masterpieces Falling Leaves (1966) and There Once Was a Singing Blackbird (1970), Otar Ioseliani made a short film for the Georgian Studio of Scientific, Popular, and Documentary Films. Titled Old Georgian Song (1969), it alternates impressionistically between the rapturously lyrical—scenes of haymaking in the alpine reaches of Svaneti dissolving into a rushing river carrying a song to the lush lowlands—and the starkly quotidian—the members of an ethnographic choir looking directly into the camera as they sing in their work clothes, framed by the drab walls of a regional House of Culture. Across Ioseliani’s body of work, songs and sounds accompany work of all kinds—agricultural, industrial, even cinematographic, as when a Georgian field song ironically underscores a chaotic film shoot in Singing Blackbird. As I argue in this paper, song operates in Ioseliani’s cosmology as a kind of interface, a mediating structure between the human and natural worlds. In this way, it is both an agent of anthropogenic ecological transformation and a trace of something beyond the human, something that eludes the totalizing logic of productive work.

Author

• Brian Fairley, U of Pittsburgh