MOVIE CAPSULE : ‘PIROSMANI’ CELEBRATES A LIFE

“Pirosmani,” which screens at the Fox International in Venice today through March 6, was reviewed in The Times on Oct. 26, 1978, when it played at the Westland Twin Theaters. Following are excerpts from that review:

“Pirosmani” is one the best films ever made on the life of an artist. Filmed in Soviet Georgia in 1971 by writer-director Georgi Shengalaya, its subject is Nikola Piromanishvili--called Pirosmani--a primitive painter little known in the West.

Like various Hollywood movies about great artists, “Pirosmani” attempts to emulate the direct, almost naive style of the painter--and succeeds superbly--but that’s where the similarities end. In what is only his second feature, Shengalaya eschews exposition and, indeed, all the conventions of the film biography, to trust in the power of the image to convey the story of Pirosmani’s life. This reticent approach allows for a gradually accrued emotional impact that is stunning because Shengalaya (who also directed the recently shown “Journey of a Young Composer”) possesses a sense of the visual as acute at that of . . . Pirosmani himself.

As bleak and austere as this film is, it is also liberating and even exultant in its celebration of the sheer beauty of simplicity, in art as in life. “Pirosmani” (Times-rated: Mature) unfolds like a series of portraits, still lifes and pastoral scenes, punctuated by snatches of tinkly music and such everyday rural sounds as the creaking and groaning of a wooden wagon wheel. Yet for all its deliberate composition and carefully muted colors, “Pirosmani” never seems studied or self-conscious. It’s too overflowing with a passion for life for that.