FVS Colloquium Event: Talk by Jerry White

The Film and Visual Studies Colloquium and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures presents

Jerry White: “Autonomists, Mensheviks, and Social Democrats, oh my! The Cinema of Georgia’s First Independence Period”

This talk will introduce, in very broad strokes, Georgian filmmaking of the first independence period (1918-1921), primarily a matter of six surviving newsreels collectively known as the Menshevik Chronicle. These were produced by German Gogiditze and total approx. 60 minutes. The newsreels focus particularly on the visit of representatives of the Second International to Georgia, and include footage of European socialists such as Karl Kautsky and Ramsey MacDonald, as well as feature a long section in the predominantly Muslim Adjara (even then, a semi-autonomous region). This talk will draw out these films’ enunciation of a strongly European vision of Georgia, one that strives to cut a middle path between federation and republicanism.

Following the Soviet invasion of 1921, the government of Noe Zhordania fled into exile in Paris, and the history of Georgia's "Menshevik period" of independence became a quasi-taboo subject. These newsreels’ images, though, exercised a strange power over the life of Soviet Georgia. This talk will show how they marked periods of the country's national cinema as a whole, explaining their use in Mikhail Kalatozov's little-known film Their Kingdom (1928), in Nana Jorjadze's Robinsonada or My English Grandfather (1987), and, most intriguingly, in Nino Natroshvili's Georgian Democratic Republic (1990), which utilised footage of actual combat against Soviet troops, footage which now appears lost. These films’ vision of a Georgia that is culturally diverse, republican and European was, during the Soviet period, both dangerous and idealistic. In the present day, with the country still fragmented by the unresolved conflict in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the EU seeming a bulwark against Russian hegemony, that vision is as relevant as it has ever been.

Jerry White is Canada Research Chair in European Studies at Dalhousie University. His work ranges across literature and filmmaking (including documentary and avant-garde practices), with a particular focus on “small” or marginal cultures. In addition to his work on Georgian cinema, current projects include a book-length study of Irish literature in both English and Irish, a collection of the writings of the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage for the magazine Rolling Stock, a series of articles on Catalan filmmakers that may or may not morph into a book. He is the author of Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), Revisioning Europe: The Films of John Berger and Alain Tanner (University of Calgary Press, 2011), The Radio Eye: Cinema in the North Atlantic, 1958–1988 (WLU Press, 2009), and Of This Place and Elsewhere: The Films and Photography of Peter Mettler (Toronto Film Festival/Indiana University Press, 2006).