Humans. Places. Time

Abstract

Nothing so accurately expresses visually time, epoch, political, economic, social or cultural condition of a country as architecture. Secular. Cult. Public or private. It is both changeable and timeless over time. It forever captures events, expresses and stores them in one way or another, in a state, in a form. Forms of public administration. Peace and war. Peaceful life or dramatic alternation of events are icons in the architecture of buildings, streets, cities or villages and the history of the people living in them (sometimes only a few years, sometimes centuries).

Cinema as the most "real" field of visual art, "close to life," which, although transformed into a new artistic reality, but the existence of human beings in the real environment (even the most unreal and conditional), naturally depicts characters settled in countries, cities, villages, streets, homes. Familiar or unfamiliar, in the data depicted with "familiar" or separated characteristic signs. It preserves the traces of their existence, history and transmits them to the future.

Just like in world cinema, a place in Georgian cinema – a street, a city, a village "natural" and "inevitable" in addition to the "use" and the workload in practice, has become a necessary and important artistic expression of the director's intention, an artistic metaphor. And as in all other cases (according to the variability of the idea, theme, concurrence of problems, urgency, etc.) different functions, meanings, different and versatile ways of representation, obey the approach. Always and now too. Obey the "law" of the variability of reality and its adequate on-screen reality, based on the requirements of artistic tendencies, directions, currents.

This is how the portraits of countries, societies or individuals were created, including familiar strokes and details (like image films or album-postcards) and unfamiliar buildings or panoramas that clearly and unequivocally express the director's intentions about the human spirit at different stages of existence.

The screening of "familiar" cities and "thus" showing them in the cinema had different reasons at different times. The faces of "unknown" and "hidden" places were painted in different ways, which represented and embodied the society of "familiar" and "unknown" people.

In both cases, cities / villages / streets have evolved into one of the most distinctive and self-coded systems of cinematic expression in cinema, with ways of deciphering it over time, with demolition, with construction, with demolition again, with rediscovery and demonstration.

It is a fact and I think it is important that over time, our attitude towards both historical reality and its imprint on the screen changes.