Let the summer never come again

Text about love and war

Alexandra Aroshvili

The article is dedicated to Alexandre Koberidze’s film “Let the Summer Never Come Again” (2017), which attempts to create a portrait of Tbilisi through a love story that has been interrupted by war. Thanks to capturing the essence of the city with the use of quite unusual technique, the film manages to escape the clichés of the contemporary cinematography and the practice of presenting the third world or post-socialist countries in an exotic way on the art market – a specific feature of modern Georgian cinema. From this point of view “Let the Summer Never Come Again” can be considered one of the most interesting and distinguished works of the recent years.

The narrator tells us about a young man who arrives in Tbilisi from a village. The camera thoroughly studies the city that he has to get familiar with, but he gets familiar with a person instead, the one who helps him multiple times. In the film their encounters are presented as love. However, the relationship ends when the young man’s friend decides to leave for Afghanistan, creating a situation that makes us aware of a distant war. The young man leaves the town to return to his birthplace while the story transforms into unending portrait of the city.

The film is shot with the use of a low quality cell phone camera and lasts for 3 hours and 20 minutes. Georgian audience had a chance to watch it during the Tbilisi International Film Festival in December 2017. Since then it has been screened at the other international film festivals as well and was awarded several important prizes: among them the Grand Prix of the Marseille Film Festival and award of the German Film Critics’ Association for the best experimental film of the year.

Writing of the following text was motivated by the desire of theoretical reading of methodology (or methodologies) that was (were) used in the film. The article was partly inspired by several meetings and in-depth conversations with the author. Correspondingly, it is also of an experimental character and is written more in a form of a prosaic collaboration with the film rather than its review.

Time intervals in the footnotes are related to the film timing.  Developing a stream of free-form analysis, the text discovers different philosophical and scientific concepts in the language of the film.

• City as a trauma

Experiences repeat themselves. It is not known if this happens all the time or only occasionally, with what regularity or sequence. I don’t know to whom these experiences belong: the nature or civilization, humans or animals, history or different epistemic systems. I don’t know if this is the behavior of the experiences or the actors; if the rule of repeating and/or synchronizing changes their basic scenario or these are only details that transform themselves. I am not aware of the fact if time is linear or nonlinear, story is a new or an old; is the love trauma retrospective of a war or is war itself a result of the reproduction of love.

„I don’t know”- is a fantastic phrase – a state that can serve as a starting point for a real investigation [1]. „I don’t know“ - is the first objective prerequisite for understanding of the reality after continuous statement of „I know“. It is a blank page that should once again be used for writing down of a new text; a place where love and war – these two disasters like natural calamities meet each other at the point where all kinds of knowledge are tested and all kinds of arms get recharged to shoot the bullet of experience at the previously available beliefs.

And until one (person’s) story turns into another (one’s) life there exists the room for their telling. These rooms resemble open wounds that gives you an opportunity to see what’s on the other side of your perspective. This kind of panorama widens the pupils thanks to the shock therapy and becomes perceivable only through the trauma. Similar to relocation into another - until recently unknown city -  love can be assumed or guessed as a happening. However, it is impossible to calculate exact scale of its impact. Trauma is an experience, preliminary effect of which is hard to imagine.

For example: desire to do much more than it’s necessary, possible or imaginable can result from a trauma, as our prior narrow "frame of reference"[2] and a limited vision can’t find its own boundaries and widens momentarily and infinitely. This way you can shoot a film which continues infinitely or write a work that develops continuously. The field or topic does not matter. Overworking soothes the pain. It can incorporate and assimilate in itself everything the author needs to get liberated from. In parallel there exists danger that the trauma will swallow the opportunity to do something without allowing to complete it on your own. The trauma is impossible to end, escape or hide from the same way that you can’t get out of your own city. A damaged eyebrow can’t be hidden by a bandage [3].

Here the term „trauma“ offers a short, conditional description of the results of risky and passionate activities like penetration into an unknown city: its reading, moving around, remembering and return back after total alienation. Love can be used as a metaphor of getting familiar with new things through triggering painful associations that are connected to the memories of the past, are dangerous and unsubmissive to the will. Even if at some point everything has forever engraved itself on your mind as the smell of war [4], love has no end, a story-always has. Everything, what is based on the reproductive power of love can at the same time be the retrospective of war.

The film, which is a subject of collaboration through this text, does not tell us about the origins of the stories or what let to their creation. It does not ask the questions “why”, “when” or “where from” trying to avoid the main question of “what”. It does not offer modelling of the possible answers. Response to the question “what” is known to the extent of possibility of being familiar with anything related to a city, story or one of the involved persons. In the film the story is told by a voice, a narrator and not our perception. This helps to avoid any interpretation from the very beginning. A voice just repeats certain sentences in order to get rid of the danger of ricocheting important details.

If a script does not contain all possible combinations of its interpretation and is based on the concept that there are a lot of things we don’t understand [5] but are known only to the phenomenon, happening or any of their real analogues, this completely changes the standard methods of discussion, objective storytelling and subjective listening [or opposite].

The method of telling a story of a city in a way that tries to avoid interference of the desire to interpret reality turns every vertical and invisible shape into horizontal one [6]. “Let the Summer Never Come Again” is a film where everything is in abundance in the most positive way. The film presents attempts to capture the layers of infinitely widening horizon that is later described with a code word “city” – a [moving] living organism that houses millions of material and immaterial objects, creatures, narratives; possibilities to repeat the stories that should never return like the summer, which turns into a main catalyst of the traumas; memories of melted butter and a smell of switched off fridge, deadly field, hot storm of war that specifically destroys everything happy. Things that should not have ended because of the war will find their place behind the diaphragm like a humus that develops new roots and transforms into the main precondition of war – resentment, an engine of permanent immortalization of trauma.

Despite the fact that every story of this kind resembles another narrative about the love or war, in the first place it looks like a story of a city. A real journey starts at the moment when the resemblance is not prompted by desire to read the city in a specific way. It is similar to a phrase from the mute, a doomed song of an unnoticed Japanese female singer:

„My hometown disappeared. The way I walk on - 

the only thing is left.

City – I’ve fallen in love with

Is my new hometown now (hometown of new me)” [7].

In reality this story has never been written down or told to anyone. It does not have any origin and unfolds the way that can be absorbed by bitter muteness of love, absence of language in love [8]. It does not have specific features and does not bear anything new in itself. It only returns as a reincarnation and reminder of old unsolved problems. Like love it is not afraid of being perceived as something trivial without any location or a ground point. Methodologically the language of the film repeats the mute mode and presents impersonal subjectivity when a person is defined as a young man but is not called by a name. Here it is impossible to know where do we come from. Your new memory starts from the point when someone else asks you: Do I know you?

These kinds of stories are not created or invented. They just illustrate what happens in the city in parallel to them. This is the answer to the question how – a slow observation of how realities emerge at the moment of their action; how a city transforms itself into a synchronized portrait of all those stories that undertake radical steps to escape it with the help of the only weapon – its own story.

One city is a more complex and difficult phenomenon than any territory, microcosm that is squeezed in the frames of a formula or theory, time section or unity of ideas and feelings. Despite the fact that it has its own boundaries or rules it does not present a closed circle. This can only be understood when you leave your own city but can’t escape it [9] because the flow of feelings, chaotically moving signs and symbols, unity of circulating goods and inflowing physical bodies constantly transfer it into entire universe while you only follow their symmetry. It is a difficult phenomenon to demonstrate, however sometimes overwork lets us peek into this microscope, show us an empty page that is filled with the text in the process of storytelling and is synchronized with the present and the future. This window will be opened by a person who becomes friends with “I don’t know” through the pain of the city as a trauma and follows it with his head down, carefully avoids all recipes of interpretation. However, he does that not in a neutral way of bourgeois depoliticized distant arrogance, but on the contrary, through convergence with the new social realism like a night watch of the empirical in creation.

• Walking through a minefield with a camera

When we try to establish the frames for uninterrupted flow of constantly renewing inflows and meetings, their synthesis and emerging realities, we find ourselves face to face with the following unexpected thing: the city provides on its territory a space for love and at the same time for war. However, the war is not placed next to the love, but inside it, like its internal essence.

I know this creature and therefore I know this city. It is located on the territory where people still walk on the ruins of the old empire at the same time refusing to acknowledge this fact [they just reject their experiences]. The past is forgotten through harsh imperative of amnesia. Constant hysteric striving towards building the new creates an imbalance of the space. This type of a city is first frozen and then imported into the present as a secondary space, mechanical life. It resembles a prepacked geographical product that is accompanied by a constant fear that you see everything for the last time. Everything that did not disappear yet is nostalgic, because it will never be produced again in future. This city has a necrophilic soul: it is merciless towards painful transformations, observes with cold-blooded arrogance constant transformation of life into poverty, poverty into violence, violence into death, air into poison, landscapes into hellish ugly objects, labor into humiliation, body into the battlefield. Like every infatuated person, a city that finds itself in the middle of the mutation and experiences extreme pain is so attractive that it gives you an opportunity to become openly violent. You try to demonstrate your love to it when you in fact don’t feel it; you use and abandon it; document, show and erase like a very special exotic artefact; distribute and sell its images like pornography.

Love, which is the only weapon that should have aided us to break through the circle of hell, is counterproductive here. It studies and repeats the pathos and often consciously or without knowledge applies it in even more brutal way. The actions repeat because the idea of love will without any doubt transform into the notion of the war that happens under radically unequal circumstances. Radically unequal city offers the space where love is turned into the war. And I know this city as a trauma. Here you need to be extremely careful as it houses internal creature of the war. Here nondisclosed meaning is permanently rejected because of the already declared one, permanent risk is encouraged by the safety, vulnerability of one phenomenon depends on the boldness of another, silence is nourished by the narrative and love of one person and is exchanged into the war of another.

In two days after the war has broken out, I understood that the war hadn’t broken out two days ago. Two completely different and mutually exclusive elements encounter each other in order to turn into two poles of one unit. Love and the city connect with each other as the symmetry inside the story, with a retrospective memory of the war. The love remembers the trauma and transforms itself into the war. The past relocates into the future where with every turn of the film it spreads like metastasis. The film strip is the past in itself because everything it reflects has already happened. However, when I watch its circling, I can’t figure it out if it moves forward or backward [10].

When the city is treated by its inhabitants the same way they treat each other, need for radical expression of principled ethics that is able to document the reality in a different way emerges.

If we succeed in avoiding social pornography; if we put aside the never-ending interpretations of the origins and reasons for narratives and instead, focus on the parallel present (constituted in the actual process of development of those narratives) in a much more careful manner, than the one suggested by the city's own tempo, the limited speed of our thinking in it, and the standard chronometer of cinema, we might see a world that is being created in continuity and/or exists as a parallel universe. These are the cities of the animals, trees and leaves, silhouettes of unknown people, shadows and lights, wind and railway stations, lights of the street lamps, celestial bodies, plastic bags and fountains, monuments, dancers and military personnel, metro stations, mixed up music, kids and the elderly. These towns exist in parallel to the thousands of the other unknown ones inside the city we know.

If we say that exaggeration of details is just a poetic tool with no direct connection to the social reality that would mean that we turn a blind eye on what’s happening. This technique to reject unexplored details and refer the unknown method to something creative in order to place it next to something more important, in reality belongs to the mantras of academicians with no fantasy, technocrat economists and superficial activists. It does not have anything in common with the real science. Let’s leave it in its dead reality. „Let the Summer Never Come Again“ can serve as an illustration of the fact that it is possible to produce an extremely sensitive film without focus on “social” issues; make a political statement without sending out political messages; show homosexual relationships as part of authentic context and its offspring and not as its opposition; reject the identity politics and all predetermined agencies derived from it.; show uncontrolled constructions and the city, which is branded by new capitalism without demonstration of relevant objects at the same time focusing on the details and vitally important elements that are unbearable to the eye and the psyche and are captured by the camera that is not able to differentiate the details.

In order to attack the linear character of abovementioned superficial mantras once again, we can interpret the film in a wrong way and observe one of its dimensions as if all other things the film is telling about are reduced to this one line. For example, the film has a specific economic dimension that follows the story as an underlying issue. If there was no warning about the fact that we are watching a love story, at a certain moment we could have thought that behavior of the protagonist [11] can be explained not through resentment of love but the fact that he is in debt of another person. It is interesting that another side [the debtor] that remains beyond the communication can always interpret the events this way. Differently than the spectator he has no prior awareness about his own story. Debt as a prerequisite of love could become an interesting concept in the city where the amount of debt is much bigger than amount of love stories. However, exaggerated details tell us that economic behavior can’t be reduced to economic action only. The film can’t exclusively tell us the love story; political issues are not solely created through political methods etc.

Walking through a minefield with a camera can be an interesting method against full commodification of post-socialist space [12] at least in the field of art, but this method is interesting because it can also be used by the scholars, anthropologists, programmers, public servants and the others. We talk about the research methods that refuse to produce the overview of existing literature, do not acknowledge existence of hypothesis. This can also relate to the practice of documenting that makes it impossible to carry out prior classification of materials because it casts the doubt on the relevance of these methods i.e. need for radical expression of principled ethics.

If at a certain point the film becomes completely autonomous and distant from its prior goals, script does not interpret the reality, the city is not presented as just a location for a story, a question arises: what did the author want to say? It may have happened that the film resonated to the author and thus erased away the traces of initial motivation. Technology and reality (camera and the processes that are captured by its lens) are able to answer the questions we are consciously avoiding to ask or haven’t asked yet.

This is own answer of the film to the prevailing phrase “I don’t know” and desire to “do much more”. The answer proves existence of the method – a real cinema has its own empiric character and if not now, in the past it has definitely operated as a union of technology and science [13]. This medium still provides an opportunity for observation of free flow of time, getting familiar with the present (during the process of its creation) and checking reality that talks to us about the possibility of its complete understanding at the finish line.

What happens when the war (love story) ends? If the experiences repeat themselves, what are the results of their observation? Does the film move forward or backward? What happens after the beliefs are processed, “I don’t know” is filled with new knowledge, a shocked pupil narrows down again, the abundant work soothes the pain?

„At the end there is a solitude,

Like a last star of the universe,

Which is hard to understand.

It resembles the result,

A fulfillment for an amazing work, beautiful existence.

He will be presented a never-fading flower:

Here it is, your solitude!“ [14]

The filmstrip, a material symbol of retrospective memory, has its own length. At a certain moment it ends. At a certain moment the trauma transforms itself and liberates the solar plexus [15]. Time is nonlinear [16]. You approach a lonely tree in the middle of a field [17] and intuitively sit down under its brunches. This happens beyond the city. This is a decision about becoming eternal friends with the solitude. Unlimited agreement with the methodology of slow observation, pact of calmness. The summer will come back again, but now it will take a shape of an agreement between two sides.

Notes:

[1] [1:57:36 – 1:59:23]

[2] In physics, a frame of reference (or reference frame) consists of an abstract coordinate system and the set of physical reference points that uniquely fix (locate and orient) the coordinate system and standardize measurements.

[3] [47:10 – 48:30]

[4] [1:27:45]

[5] [1:00:45; 1:01:16; 1:01:45]

[6] [09:17 – 12:07]

[7] Hako Yamasaki, Wandering.

[8] Roland Barthes, Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. ”The Absent One”

[9] „Woman, Moon, City”; Alexandra Aroshvili, 2014

[10] [1:26:32]

[11] This episode refers to the scene where the young man gets rid of the only device that can enable communication with the loved one.

[12] Within a capitalist economic system, Commodification is the transformation of goods, services, ideas and people into commodities or objects of trade.

[13] “Cinema is not magic. It’s a technique and a science.” inscription on the wall. Scene from the film “Class de lutte” (1968) by workers’ collective “Medvedkin Group”.

[14] Besik Kharanauli.

[15] The biggest nerve formation that is located outside the central nervous system directly behind the stomach.

[16] In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. The same principle can be applied in reference to the economic formula of salary calculation [1:03:04 – 1:03:55], which after interaction of certain variables results in a completely unexpected equation. According to the rules of math it is impossible to generate this kind of result; however complex (nonlinear) formula of calculation of reality generates this variable

[17] The tree that is not in a complex situation. [2:20:24 – 2:20:40]

2018