CRRC, ARISC and American Councils are pleased to announce the 15th session of the Spring/Summer 2025 Tbilisi Works-in-Progress series!
This week’s session will be in hybrid format in-person at the CRRC Georgia office and online via Zoom.
“Otar Ioseliani’s ‘Old Georgian Songs’: The Sight and Sound of Labor in Late Soviet Georgia”
Brian Fairley, University of Pittsburgh and ARISC Fellow
The renowned director Otar Ioseliani, who made three feature films in Soviet Georgia before emigrating to France in the early 1980s, was also an accomplished documentary filmmaker. “Old Georgian Songs,” which began production in 1969, is one of his least-studied films, a lyrical, twenty-minute montage of traditional vocal music from different regions of Georgia, with no voiceover and minimal on-screen text. Documents from the National Archives of Georgia, however, reveal that Ioseliani had greater ambitions for this film, which evidently ran up against logistical challenges or official resistance. In this paper, I offer a preliminary analysis of the film, placing it within the context of the 1960s revival of Georgian folk and sacred music—Ioseliani’s original title was aghordzineba, or “renaissance”—and Ioseliani’s abiding preoccupation with the meaning of work in Soviet society. By showing professional folk singers in their day clothes, not in the standardized uniforms of ethnographic ensembles, Ioseliani at once dignifies and demystifies the work of singing, juxtaposing the performers with footage of agricultural and manual labor. Less than a year later, Ioseliani would repurpose some of the audio recordings for “Old Georgian Songs” in the beloved film There Once Was a Singing Blackbird (1970), harnessing the sound of musical labor for an ironic critique of modern society’s obsession with productivity.
Brian Fairley is a postdoctoral fellow in Music and History in the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently in Tbilisi on a Junior Research Fellowship from the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus. His work explores the traditional music of Georgia, the history of multichannel recording technology, and theories of race and evolution in comparative musicology. He received his PhD from New York University in 2023, with a dissertation that was recognized by the International Musicological Society and the history journal Ab Imperio. Brian’s articles and reviews have appeared, among other places, in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, the Journal of Sonic Studies, and Ethnomusicology.
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Works-in-Progress is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the CRRC office at Chavchavadze Ave. 5 and online. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) Georgia, the American Councils for International Education, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC). All of the talks are free and open to the public.
In observation of the spirit of the Chatham House Rule, the talks will not be recorded, and we courteously request that the other participants refrain from recording and/or distributing recordings as well or citing anything expressed therein in the press without explicit permission. The opinions expressed in WiP talks are those of the speakers alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CRRC, ARISC or of American Councils.
