"Even for viewers with no interest in the history and politics of the film, My Grandmother is a wonderful example of eccentrism and a catalog of the avant-garde’s film techniques during Soviet cinema’s golden age.” Denise J. Youngblood, The Moving Image*
This is the second time I’ve watched this film and tried
to write about it because the first time I couldn’t quite believe it. Make no
mistake, My Grandmother is nothing to do with the business of sucking
eggs and everything to do with the Kafkaesque reality of bourgeois spoilers
trying to cripple The Revolution through dragging the new freedoms into the
ground by excessive bureaucracy. They don’t know or want to know any
differently and even the gilded statues of the post-revolution rise up to
chastise those who drop litter: is this the point of Art to make the ordinary
citizen feel small and, in this case, less than perfectly formed.
This was director Kote Mikaberidze’s first film and I
wish I knew more about his brief and that of his co-writers, Siko Dolidze, and
Giorgi Mdivani. The film was made during the time of Stalin's Cultural
Revolution (1928-1932) and creeping bureaucracy was seen as anti-revolutionary
and the enemy of progress but the route the film takes to make this point is
pure experimentalism conducted in a spirit of wilful entertainment. It is so
sharply sardonic, one could almost suspect the filmmakers of trying to smuggle
anarchic meaning past the censors – the ultimate bureaucrats after all,
organising thoughts and filing away the divergent messaging. And, so it proved
with this film which was shelved for decades after the censors had their final
say only to be restored and screened in 1976 by the Georgian film studio partly
as, "even today, it will be able to combat certain shameful practices
still present in our society."
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| The Accounts Department hard at sleep |
My Grandmother is easier to look at as an explosion of
experimental energy, channelled through every available camera trick and
editing technique, than as a coherent film.
Julia Zelman, East European Film Bulletin, Volume 51, March 2015
We begin at the offices of the "TORK" trust, a
round table of laziness and distracted bureaucrats in the accounts department
who pass their time playing with toy cars, staring into space or making paper
planes. These planes are made by a sad man who uses them to declare his love for
a woman in the typing pool who rebuffs his advances and smiles cruelly as he
shoots himself. One man down, the Doorman (Evgeniy Ovanov) is called to drag
the body away as the others fight over his place and promotion, Soon a very
smart young man with a briefcase (Mikhail Abesadze) takes his place and gathers
up the hundreds of overdue letters that have been left to lie around.
The office is visited by a workers’ representative (Akaki
Khorava) who looks on in disgust as they snooze and ignore their work, he
towers over the round table and is furious at the waste of revolutionary
opportunity. He demands fifty roubles to aid production and for once the team
responds but the new business manager, the Bureaucrat (Aleksandre Takaishvili)
is sacked for many obvious reasons.
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| Aleksandre Takaishvili under pressure |
The Bureaucrat returns home and we see his state of
consciousness represented by a surreal sequence as his daughter’s toys look on
in animated shock as he seemingly hangs himself. Mikaberidze uses a fair amount
stop-motion in the film and will later show an animation of a cruel cartoon from
the local paper about the Bureaucrat. His troubles are only just beginning though
as his wife (Bella Chernova) returns home and finding him alive but very much
to blame, kicks him around their apartment before throwing him out of the
window – another cartoonish device. He rises from the pavement like Road-runner
and she pursues him in a fury.
1. Find Grandmother 2. Be insistent 3. Be impudent And
you will find a new job.
The Bureaucrat bumps into the young man with a briefcase
and, as his wife looks on, gets the advice he hopes for; if he’s bold and finds
the right sponsor, i.e. Grandmother, he can work his way back onto the team.
But, like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the mountain, our Bureaucrat is heading
into a maze of frustration as he tries to follow the three strands of advice
only to be rebuffed time after time…
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| Bella Chernova is not impressed |
He goes to see the Superintendent only to be hauled down
the stairs by a statue that takes offence at dropped cigarette butt, just
inches from a bin. The spray-painted almost nude, is uncredited but is very
impressive in a none speaking role and this is an issue that still plagues us
today. Here, it’s possibly a reference to the small-mindedness of civic art or maybe
just the need to keep the streets tidy. Our hero finally makes it past the
endless queue and another door man and brow-beats the Superintendent into
writing him a letter to secure his job back. He drives the older man to
distraction but he will discover the road to cushy re-employment is paved with
bad intent and that you simply can’t put a price on reality…
As an example of what would have been said if it could
have been said at the time though, My Grandma is hard to beat but as Denise
Youngblood has also said*, it was ultimately lacking in sympathetic characters
and the exhibition of so much technique meant it was too “formalist” for the
powers that were to accept. It’s more anarchic than avant-garde and by the time
it’s finished just yells its message at the audience after tying us in knots for
the whole run-time: DEATH TO RED TAPE, TO SLOPPINESS AND TO BUREAUCRATS!
Mikaberidze aimed a liberating film from the influence of
theatre and literature and his use of mixed media underpins this even if the
technique does indeed over-ride the message sometimes; it’s still a wild
adventurous ride. His set designer Irakli Gamrekeli also contributes some
wonderful spaces to the film, from the round table to the door-keepers chair
positioned up a flight of steps next to a set of numbered lights responding to
the corresponding seat of the slow-working bureaucrats within.
Stephen Horne brings musical order to this chaos with his
trademark wit and invention; there’s no red tape or sloppiness just a deep
musical understanding of film and it’s emotional-political context. The
accompaniment is exactly what the film requires to come alive on screen and connect
with modern audiences in a world in which the only rational response to events
is to seek meaning in the manner of the comedy twice-repeated history is
becoming.
You can view My Grandmother with Stephen’s accompaniment
on the Klassiki site here and, if you’re not already a subscriber, you will
find so much bang for your buck or, indeed, reward for your Rouble with a huge
range of films old and new from the East!
*Denise Youngblood, “My Grandmother (Chemi Bebia) (1929)” In: The Moving Image, Vol. 10 Issue 1. The University of Minnesota Press, 2010
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