UN MERLE CHANTEUR – AMITIÉ AVEC OTAR IOSSELIANI de Bernard Eisenschitz

By Bernard Eisenschitz

11 x 16,5 cm / 64 pages / avril 2024
isbn 978-2-35137-361-3

In French only

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Otar Iosseliani was born a Soviet citizen in Tbilisi on 2 February 1934, and died a Georgian and French citizen in the same city on 17 December 2023, at the end of a life of resistance, exile, cinema, humour, melancholy and vodka, and after twenty-one films between Aquarelle in 1958 and Chant d'hiver in 2015.

Bernard Eisenschitz met him in Moscow in July 1969. They became friends around the Bolshoi, Michel Simon, L'Atalante and a flat on Gorky Street.

This friendship gave rise to a cinematic companionship that lasted more than fifty years, first from afar - when the films of one of them reached the other - then from close up, with the filmmaker sometimes hiring the historian to act - for example in Les Favoris de la lune - and the historian writing regularly about his work.

“Le Temps compté” and “In vino veritas”, the two texts in this book, tell as much about this relationship of cinema and friendship as they do about the filmmaker's relationship with History, his country, the USSR and the craft of filmmaking.