The Trip

It was supposed to be a trip for work. We went to film the president visiting a patriotic camp. He never arrived. It was the August war 'anniversary'. We waited the whole day for his spontanious decision to appear there, at the place that was burnt down last year during the war. The spontanious decision was never made. It was mostly cloudy and I sat at the beach. The waves were dark and the space was unlit. A guy was teaching a girl with big boobs how to swim. They were the same height and standing in the water touching their bellies he had grabbed both of her arms and would not let them go. The girl's face was serious, pretending to be frightened of depth of the water. The flirtation was so concealed but yet so obvious.

Then there was the evening sun. The light was warm and colorful.

No sun the next day. The whole morning, up until late afternoon we sat on a balcony talking this and that and even drank wine. I discovered a fantastic park in Zugdidi where I wanted to run in the mornings and drink coffee in the afternoon in a construction that I pretended would be a cafe, but is a run down shack now. Trees were tall and dirty ponds looked wild. The pond remimded me of a film, where a family - three kids and their parents swim in a village pond and it is frighteningly calm and quiet there.

In this region, Mingrelia, every second person wears black clothes, a sign of grief. It seems the war ended last year there. The grievance is such a big part of this culture. The cemetaries along the road and none behind each of them. A long row of large cemetaries overlooking the road. A car driving up to a dozen drunk man shouting out with joy seemed part of this grief, as if they were all about to die.

We were on the road again and I referenced Jack Keruak's 'On the Road' all the time. Even though I don't like the spirit of that book, it did influence me in a way in freeing the road. Cracking nuts in the back we drove through Guria and then to Imereti and then, after a night, after getting lost on a village road, but freeing a cow that had its head stuck in a wired fence, we hit the road towards Tbilisi - the end of the trip.

ჩიფსები და პატრიოტები

განმუხურის პატრიოტთა ბანაკი (მშვიდობისა და მეგობრობის ახალგაზრდული ბანაკი თუ ქალაქი, როგორც შესასვლელში აწერია), 7 აგვისტო

მუსიკა ჩაირთო Alarm, alarm... შეკრების მუსიკაა ეს. მზე ზღვაში ჩასვლისკენ იყო და პატრიოტები ბანაკის სხვადასხვა ნაწილიდან სტადიონისკენ მორბოდნენ. ასე 200 კაცი. რაზმებად დაეწყვნენ. ჩამწკვირდნენ. ყუთები ჩამოატარეს. DJ-მ თქვა – ვინც მე არ შემახვედროსო... რა არის–მეთქი. – ჩიფსებია. – თქვა და მერე სხვას გასძახა – კიდევ დარჩა? ხუთი დღეა მაგას ვჭამთ და კიდევ დარჩაო – დააყოლა.

რაზმებს ჩიფსები დაურიგეს. დორიტოები. მერე რაზმებმა ერთობლივად დაცხეს ტაში. ჩიფსების განაწილება მიდიოდა და DJ-მ სიმღერა ჩართო – "მაგრად დაჰკარი, მაგრად დაჰკარი..." რაღაც საბრძოლო სულისკვეთების სიმღერაა, ნელებში გადის. შენ გაიხარე, გესმის რაო – ვიღაცამ მიაძახა იქ სადაც ვისხედით.

მერე პატრიოტები თავიანთი კოტეჯებისკენ გაიქცნენ, ხელში დორიტოების პარკებით. ერთ ბიჭს მაისურის შიგნით ქონდა ამოდებული, ზოგს იღლიაში ქონდა ამოჩრილი, ზოგსაც პირდაპირ ხელში ეჭირა და მირბოდა კოტეჯებისკენ. ყველანი ერთად მირბოდნენ სხვადასხვა მიმართულებით, ჩიფსებით.

Herzog while filming 'Fitzcarraldo'

Of course we are challenging the nature itself... and it hits back. It just hits back. That's all. And that's grandiose about it. And we have to accept that it is much stronger than we are.

Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just... Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away.

Of course there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.

It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It's the only land where creation is unfinished yet.

Taking a close look at what's around us there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel - a cheap novel.

And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the starts up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

(speaking of the Amazons)



It's not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It's as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else. And I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. And we have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

Werner Herzog while filming Fitzcarraldo
from the Burden of Dreams

The Patriotic Camp (predeterminations)

What was my motivation to go there? It had been on my mind for the past four years – the patriotic camps.

The camp – collective

Patriotic – one idea

Now I understand that collective one idea is just the means for something bigger. But this something bigger was yet to come to my mind when I stepped in that circle with some predetermination.

The predetermination

I didn’t like the idea of patriotism in contemporary Georgia and the meaning it carries. I considered that preaching patriotism in these camps would be a complete ‘patriotic brainwashing’. At that time I identified patriotism with nationalism, superiority, fetishism of the past and constant readiness for war. When the camps were founded some military officers taught the ‘Patriots’ how to shoot. They lived in military tents and exercised much physically. They resembled a youth military unit.

I was wandering what these young people of 15-23 years old thought patriotism was. So I went for a research. Last year I recorded interviews where most of active camp participants claimed patriotism meant loving the country. And there came my next question.

-What does it mean to love the country?

The answers I received were almost similar. -Loving the country means fighting for it in war, defending Georgian traditions, toasting. I think these were the basic answers.

The primitivism of the idea of patriotism made me both laugh and outrage.
Some facts I knew about the camps at that time:

1. They sing/listen to a national anthem every morning.
2. They raise the national flag.
3. The camp is divided in squads. Each squad of around35 people has a leader.
4. Each squad has a name (სახელი), slogan (შეძახილი), credo (დევიზი), and a hymn (ჰიმნი) of patriotic nature.
5. They wear uniforms – a red cap that says patriot, a red t-shirt with the Georgian flag on the left sleeve, a rain jacket resembling the Georgian flag from the front side.
6. Young people are selected from all over the country and they spend 10 days together in wooden cottages that replaced tents soon after the camps were established.
7. The camps are supported by the Presidential fund.

I think that was it. And this year, with this knowledge about the camps I decided to spend the whole 10 days with them. These 10 days turned out to be an observation not only of them, but also of myself.
And now I know the name for them ‘the Patriots’ - they are the civil military unit, who, ‘if necessary, can go to war without thinking it twice’.

Transformed determination

The Leader is Always Right ლიდერი ყოველთვის მართალია

Will be coming soon…

responsibility list (incomplete)

Responsible to love. Responsible to communicate. Responsible to appreciate. Responsible to kiss. Responsible to comment. Responsible to care. Responsible to react. Responsible to reply. Responsible to call. Responsible to talk. Responsible to behave. Responsible to say. Resposible to complete. Resposible to be. Responsible to be here. Resposible to adopt. . .

Make other responsible to love. Make other responsible to communicate. Make other responsible to appreciate. Make other responsible to kiss. Make other responsible to comment. Make other responsible to care. Make other responsible to react. Make other responsible to reply. Make other responsible to call. Make other responsible to talk. Make other responsible to behave. Make other responsible to say. Make other responsible to complete. Make other responsible to be. Make other responsible to be here. Make other responsible to adopt. . .

I am the building

I am made of false brick. I have three floors. I wish I was sold to a wealthy businessman to refurbish me. But now my pieces are taken by various people not caring about me as a whole, but caring about my separate corners which now belong to them.

I am a tired being. I am both functionless and functioning. I am functionless because these different people who have nothing in common with each other have paralyzed me with their mixture of diversity and on the other hand I’m functioning because I’m now always noisy, chaotic, changing. As if they live over my dead body. Even a stray dog is attached to me and birds have nests in my window corners.

Let me tell you something. My hatred towards these people, my inhabitants, is overcome by compassion. I feel sorry for them. They are like ants dwelling in me. I am the only place for them. They live in me and they earn money with me. They rent me out. They sell things from me. They play in me. But they sustain me. They take care of me as far as I am need to them individually.

Nora, she is so caring. Her flat on my second floor is always clean. And items in her shop at the entrance door are always neatly arranged. Someone broke a window of her shop recently. How cruel. Must have been one of those young men playing cards in my hall every evening. They are the only ones not earning anything. Just spending on slot machines, gambling.

Someone trying to earn money is Nana. She lives on my third floor. She moved just recently and covered up my broken windows with polyethylene. Nana owes money to Nora and works next to her, in the restaurant which is my core, a fabulous construction of a soviet designer. Life must have been happy then. Or at least they were pretending that life was happy then. Now everyone confesses that life is a disaster. The meaning of it is to eat and die. Well ok, there’s some joking sometimes.

Tsatsia is the main joker, Nana’s companion. She loves to make explicit jokes. Dying her hair blond she still considers herself sexual, this short woman. Nana and Tsatsia together look like a puzzle that will never go together. Well, my whole inhabitants are like that puzzle. They have nothing in common accept that they are all poor. That is what unites them, something very basic and I myself, once being a hotel, have now become basic - a basic place for survival.



(working paper from doc.film project 'Restaurant Bakhmaro and Those Who Work There' aka 'The Building...')

The Fish

Now that I’m changing my attitude towards my life, towards who I am and what I represent, this gives me courage and this is because of a foreign city. Maybe this is once again an illusion and just a small blow of inspiration that will not last for long.

A hotel, a modern brick building, a tiny room with no place for a suitcase, white walls, a view on tall buildings and a monitor – a TV hung on the wall showing all the same aquarium with all the same fish (with a distinct yellow one) swimming routinely and continuously accompanied by some ‘underwater’ music. The monitor – the fish – switches on automatically as soon as you enter the room. And this calming ‘window’ into the harmonious aquarium carries in fact a convulsive neurotic movement with all the same calmness, all the same calmness, all the same…

I have been thinking on the way of protest recently with an idea never really coming to my mind. I haven’t been thinking enough or being courageous enough. And there it was - a way of expression by Niki de Saint Phalle, an artist, who had a gun, something like a hunting gun and shot colors instead of bullets at a specially designed wall expressing this or that. ‘She wanted to shoot at man, society, church… all the evils’ - an explanation said.



Art is protest, philosophy, psychology, self-expression, expression of anything, anyone, art is the individualism even put to the extreme. Art is a meaning, not beauty. A toilet seat can be a piece of art if it given a meaning. That was what Duchamp did but maybe this is the annihilation of art and not the opposite. A Spanish artist Pepe Espaliu (1955-93) found art in the meaning of masks. He was intrigued by African masks, which he wanted to see exhibited the wrong way around, so that the viewer would be struck less by the presence of the mask than the absence of the whoever.

A black man sat next to me in an open café and took a book “The Sex Lives of Cannibals”. He did not read it. He read newspapers. The sun was there with occasional clouds. I was reading J.M.G. Le Clézio, a futuristic novel The Flood.
“A world in which all objects, every atom could be expressed by the letter A, and every happening and construct , of whatever sort, traced out the formula of magic square:

A A A A
A A A A
A A A A
A A A A

- this is to say, in which they kept up a constant process of simplification and purification, until the moment (impossible to describe it) was reached at which event and object, chain and link, were merged in a single phenomenon, A. The moped moved along the section of street between corner X and street-lamp Y, with a fading sound and reflected light glinting out from its hubs. But the moped as such was limited to this particular stretch of street, to the sound it made, to a glitter of light. In a moment its motion would be arrested, perhaps for a thousand years, or alternatively it might repeat, again and again, that quick, rhythmic passage from corner X to street-lamp Y, till the movement itself because the expression of its being. The rain would always go on falling here, the sidewalk would stretch away to the right for all eternity, yet both would be something different, rain and sidewalk no longer; there would be no more moped, no more corner, no more street-lamps, either lit or unlit, no more peeling walls, no more sounds of chains or wet tires, no more bleak, chilly smells of dew-heavy smoke-drift hanging in mid-air; instead there would be a small, peaceful, undisturbed picture, a still-frozen image, dead before it had a chance to achieve immortality, part of a game which was no longer understood… Everything would come to this in the end. Meanwhile the water went on trickling down the gutters, and a whole host of small objects floated this way and that in the puddles along the road. It was the beginning”

I adored the idea of such constant repetition that then it turns into nothingness and an existence of a sound is determined by pauses in between.
The existence of me would be nothingness, dead, without these ‘pauses’, without other objects, humans, thoughts, emotions... breaking the constancy of it.


A painting by Francis Bacon (1909-92) – Three Figures and a Portrait (showing his lover who committed suicide)

He described his paintings as looking “as if a human being has passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events”.