Buba

 

Making of: Nutsa Gogoberidze: ბუბა / Buba (SU 1930).

Nutsa Gogoberidze: ბუბა / Buba (SU 1930).

Nutsa Gogoberidze: ბუბა / Buba (SU 1930).

ბუბა
SU 1930. Director: Nutsa Gogoberidze. 37 min
    Scen.: Nutsa Gogoberidze. F.: Sergej Zaboslaev. Scgf.: David Kakabadze.
    A documentary film.
    Prod.: Goskinprom Gruzii. DCP. Bn.
    Unreleased in Finland.
    Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato: Early Women Directors in the Soviet Union
    DCP from 2003 Film Production with English intertitles only, no Georgian, and music recorded and composed by Giya Kancheli
    E-subtitles in Italian by SubTi Londra.
    Introduce Salomé Alexi, the director's granddaughter, hosted by Bernard Eisenschitz.
    Viewed at Cinema Jolly, 30 Aug 2020.
    Buba is the name of a mighty glacier.

NUTSA (NINO) GOGOBERIDZE
 
Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020): "Nutsa Gogoberidze was born in 1902 the Georgian province of Saingilo (now Azerbaijan). Her father, a teacher, encouraged all six of his daughters to go into higher education. Fluent in Georgian, Russian, German and French, she studied philosophy in Tbilisi, then in Jena (1923–1925). On her return to Georgia she met the young Bolshevik leader Levan Gogoberidze, whom she married, despite her family’s opposition. She was hired by the film studio in Tbilisi, and with Mikhail Kalatozov (born Mikheil Kalatozishvili) co-directed a short documentary against the Menshevik government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918–1921), Ikh tsarstvo (Their Kingdom, 1928). Her first feature film, the impressive Buba (1930), bears a family likeness to Sol Svanetii (Salt for Svanetia), Kalatozov’s documentary of the same year. The film was banned almost immediately. Shelved in the archives of Gosfil’mofond, it was rediscovered in 2013 and made a sensation at film festivals. Her second film, Uzhmuri (1934), suffered from the repercussions of the dissolution of the Association for Proletarian Writers (RAPP) on 23 April 1932. Her screenplay no longer appealed to the taste of the moment. Sergei Eisenstein, Viktor Shklovsky and Alexander Dovzhenko intervened but the film was banned, then lost. It was found again in December 2018 at Gosfil’mofond. In December 1936, her husband Levan Gogoberidze, from whom she had been separated for years, was arrested on Beria’s orders. He was executed on 21 March 1937. Fired from the studio, Gogoberidze made her living by translating the tales of Perrault, under a false name. She was arrested in late 1937 as “a relative of an enemy of the people”, and condemned to 10 years’ exile, first in a camp in Potma, Mordovia, then in a camp for women in Vorkuta. When she returned from the Gulag, she took a job in the linguistics department in the University of Tbilisi. She died in 1966, having seemingly passed on the baton to her daughter, Lana Gogoberidze, an important Soviet filmmaker of the Thaw generation (and who refers to her mother in her 1978 film, Ramdemime interviu pirad sakitxebze, Some Interviews on Personal Matters). Her grand-daughter Salomé Alexi, a graduate of La Fémis in Paris, made her first feature film, Kreditis limiti / Line of Credit, in 2015." Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020)

BUBA

Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020): "This documentary was filmed in the Ratcha region in the North of Georgia, separated from the neighbouring Svanetia by the peaks of the Greater Caucasus. Buba is the name of a mountain village, whose ancestral poverty would be turned upside down by the arrival of Soviet power. It’s hard not to think of Salt for Svanetia, Mikhail Kalatozov’s documentary filmed the same year on the same subject, and in the nearby mountains. They also shared the same art director, painter David Kakabadze, who had been employed to build the set for Kalatozov’s Slepaya (The Blind Woman), filmed in the same region, and eventually banned. When, in superb shots, Gogoberidze shows us the storming masses of clouds above the Caucasus, or the villagers’ traditional dance, the syncopated montage has a familiar feel to it. The drive of the generation, and the thriving Georgian art scene is undeniable: for the avant-garde groups, Tbilisi was on a par with Leningrad. What is unquestionably unfair is that Salt for Svanetia is so famous and that Buba has remained invisible for decades. It bears comparison beautifully, complementing a constellation in which we also find Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes, made two years later. In Buba there are none of the violently discordant images to be found in its two illustrious cousins. We sense in Gogoberidze’s work her attention to and sympathy for those mountain dwellers of an old world, and, as was typical in Soviet cinema, for the children temporarily sacrificed to agricultural work, but who will build Socialism in the future." Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020)

AA: Nutsa Gogoberidze is the grandmother of a film family in three generations: her daughter is Lana Gogoberidze, and presenting this screening was her granddaughter Salomé Alexi.

From Nutsa Gogoberidze I had previously only seen the remaining fragments of Mati samepo / Their Kingdom (1928), co-directed with Mikhail Kalatozov. In 1930, Gogoberidze had a parallel but separate project with Kalatozov who shot The Salt of Svanetia while Gogoberidze directed Buba, about a hard-to-reach glacier.

The emancipation of women is an emphasis distinctive for this movie about the people in the sublime mountain region. The observations of the mountain people still living in a Middle Age mode of life are exciting, fighting the Earth from morning till night. The movie is of ethnographical value.

Muck is precious here. Already little children must participate in picking nettles. It's a patriarchal way of life in an extended family that consists of 30 members or more. Women in close-ups look celestial. Singing and dancing provide moments of bliss. Mighty clouds and turbulent rivers give a sense of grandeur.

Buba belongs also to the lumberjack films: there are mightly logging and rapid-shooting sequences. The waterfalls are extremely dangerous. The summer is short, and the harvest must be gathered on time. A small cloud can bring snow.

Traditional life is dangerous, but mineral springs contribute to healthcare. In the new world, children can be taken to health sanatoriums. Building dams takes us to the future of electricity.

The visual quality of the source of the presentation was duped in low definition, and the recorded score was slightly too obtrusive to my taste. Sound effects are jarring and distract from the experience of a distinguished film.