Free registration via wouter.hessels@ehb.be (limited capacity)

A seminar/programme by Federico Rossin for Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound,

The great paradox of Georgian New Wave, a paradox that radically distinguishes it from all the coeval new waves of the 1960s and 1970s fascinated by the myth of the back-to-zero, is that it has drawn its greatest inspiration from the traditions of national art (painting, poetry, architecture) in opposition to the traditional values of contemporary Soviet society. The reality that Georgian filmmakers wanted to show was the result of a synthesis of opposites that was just the contrary of the simplifying and didactic tendency of the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. The materiality and austerity of the traditional world are narrated through a modernist purification of film style, which always oscillates between documentary and poetry, abstraction and symbolism. The brutality of the traditional society is no longer shown with an ideological mask covering the Stalinist reactionary conservatism. The artificial conflicts, the pseudo-poetic tones and the pathetic values imposed by Soviet cinema are abandoned in the name of a cinema of poetry and truth. Filmic classicism is dismantled precisely because it is the bearer of a totalitarian oppression and a false message. The modernism of the New Wave tries also to emancipate itself from the tradition of literature adaptations of Georgian cinema: the main goal is to develop a completely autonomous aesthetic system through innovative plastic and narrative solutions. This filmic autonomy thus becomes a decisive means of unmasking the entire value system of the respectable post-Khrushchevian world: the role of women and men, the family and work, the community and the society are deconstructed one by one, and this subtle but radical criticism often condemned the films to censorship and oblivion. And it is in all this that we can find an extreme proximity and similarity to our world today.