There Once Was a Singing Blackbird (Otar Iosseliani, 1970) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Kirk Johnson

Well, it was kind of inspiring to see that even at the start of his career, Iosseliani had most of his primary obsessions firmly in place. In particular, Singing Blackbird foregrounds the director's puckish, apolitical embrace of truancy. As with Monday Morning, Farewell Home Sweet Home, Brigands, and nearly all the others, Singing Blackbird takes great delight in profiling a protagonist who is never where he's supposed to be, shirking responsibilities that he finds trivial, but nevertheless manages to get by on his boyish charm.

Now to be fair, there has always been a bit of a conservative streak in Otar, and Singing Blackbird, which focuses almost exclusively on its main character Gia (Gela Kandelaki), presents a snapshot of undiluted male prerogative. It's always men, and in particular men of culture and learning, who are permitted to give the slip to their bosses, parents, and lady friends, and while there's no point denying that this speaks of Iosseliani's old-school chauvinism, it's hard to get too mad about it. These characters, like the films themselves, are utterly harmless, since the director makes sure that nothing of great significance is ever at stake.

Gia is a musician, a member of the orchestra for the Tbilisi Ballet. He plays the kettledrums, and has an irksome habit of showing up only at the exact moment he has to play his part. Now, this bothers the conductor and the head of the ballet, to be sure. But they can only get just so mad, since he always comes in on time, is a fine musician, and -- this seems significant to Iosseliani -- is capable of keeping the score running in his head, despite other distractions. So the film pokes fun at Gia but seems to implicitly agree that he is special, and therefore entitled to flout the rules.

Although it's a bit too reductive to suggest that Gia is a stand-in for Otar, he does seem to at least be a surrogate for the filmmaker's camera. During his day, Gia meets up with various friends, all of whom he gloms onto and follows into places that, strictly speaking, he does not belong. He flirts with an old girlfriend, who lets him into the biology lab where she works. He sees a doctor buddy, who lets him watch an operation. And he manages to narrowly keep avoiding the head of the ballet, who has summoned Gia to his office for a bawling-out.

At one point, Gia just narrowly misses being hit by a large falling plant. In later Iosseliani adventures, this would perhaps be a set-up for some kind of running gag. But in Blackbird, it serves as foreshadowing, a device I would never have thought Otar would truck with. As with most of his early films made while Georgia was still an SSR, authorities shelved Blackbird for being "too formalist." But this is a film that not only subverts official Soviet doctrines about the value of work and the relative lack of value (or at least the cog-like replaceability) of the worker. It also implies that a fellow like Gia is indulged because, despite his unreliable work ethic, he is seductive and likeable.

[SPOILER] So was Otar trying to play ball by having the carefree Gia meet a tragic end? After all, if he had followed the simplest of rules, like crossing at the corner instead of the middle of the street, he would not have been hit by a car. If this was an attempt at punishing this intellectual cad, it is halfhearted at best, and I suspect Soviet censors saw right through it. It would take another half a decade, with the emergence of the Italian Autonomia group, until the Marxists could develop an Otar-approved rallying cry: fuck work!