Taming the Garden follows the uprooting of a mighty oak across land and sea
TAMING THE GARDEN (Salomé Jashi, 2021)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St.
Opens Friday, September 30
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“I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree,” Joyce Kilmer wrote in the beloved “Trees,” concluding, “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.”
Eccentric billionaire and former Georgia prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili is a kind of unseen god hovering over Salomé Jashi’s profoundly poetic documentary, Taming the Garden. The gorgeously shot film, which evokes the large-scale landscape photography of Edward Burtynsky, is a cinéma verité work that follows the moving of a glorious oak from its native home in the Caucasus to Shekvetili Dendrological Park, where Ivanishvili collects and replants trees that he likes.
Jashi, a former journalist born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1981, tells us virtually none of this; she traces the journey with no commentary, no interstitial text, no detailed information about what we are watching. Instead, Jashi, serving as director, writer, producer, and cinematographer (with Goga Devdariani), has us accompany the mighty tree as it ventures across land and sea, first carefully dug up by a somewhat ragtag group of workers, then transported by flatbed and a barge to its ultimate destination.
The beautifully photographed Taming the Garden features scenes that evoke painting and still photography
But in order to arrive there, the tree leaves behind a controversial wake. It is so tall and wide that it often can’t make it through the streets of small towns without other trees that line the blocks having to be severely trimmed or cut down themselves. Ivanishvili offers those trees’ owners money in exchange for chopping down the living, breathing trees; he also improves the quality of the roads the tree travels over. The residents of these villages argue over the decisions they are faced with, mostly speaking Mingrelian.
“Why do these trees have to suffer? Just so Ivanishvili can have his tree!” one declares. “They’re forcing me to do something bad,” another says, feeling he has no choice but to take the cash and let a tree on his property be chainsawed into timber. “They say they’d rather have a tree than a road!” a man complains. “Who gives a fuck about trees!”
“What is there to cry about?” a villager says to an elderly woman who remembers having planted a sapling more than half a century before; she is now in tears as she watches it come down. Someone else shouts out in wonder, “That man really likes trees!”
Beautifully edited by Chris Wright and featuring a natural soundscape by Philippe Ciompi accompanied by music by Karlheinz Stockhausen (“Waage”), Solage, Clément Janequin, and Ute Wassermann (“Strange Songs for Voice and Bird Whistles”), Taming the Garden is a visual and aural marvel. It is filled with images you are likely not soon to forget: the oak floating on a barge in the distance on the Black Sea; rusty piping being pushed into the dirt below the tree; dripping water that evokes the shadows of roots and branches growing; men clearing a path in a lush green landscape reminiscent of a Dutch painting; and the leaves at the top of the tree blowing in the breeze as it is driven down a street, as if moving from Great Birnam Wood to Dunsinane Hill at the end of Macbeth.
At one point a woman, standing in the street as others take cellphone video of the chopping down of a tree, makes the sign of the cross. “A tree that looks at God all day, / And lifts her leafy arms to pray,” Kilmer wrote in his 1914 poem. With Taming the Garden, Jashi (The Dazzling Light of Sunset, Bakhmaro) has created a deeply sensitive and eloquent cinematic experience that deals with one man’s power as it relates to the concepts of home and displacement. “Everything we do in this life will be weighed up in the next life,” one man philosophizes. Joyce Kilmer couldn’t have said it any better.