CUMBERTO/SPACE--Nato Vachnadze St.9 / 2nd floor--0105 Tbilisi--T +995 32 996892

Film nights, performances, workshops, round tables, exhibitions

November 2, 3, 4, 2007 8 p.m. Film nights
November 7, 2007 6 p.m. Opening Everyday Is Saturday (the exhibition)
November 8, 2007 1 – 3 p.m. Round table `Contemporary Art & Tbilisi. One + One`
November 8, 2007, 4 p.m. Inauguration of the future
Tbilisi Center for Contemporary Art (Shindisi)

Generously supported by Arts Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory (AIRL)
Embassy of Switzerland to Georgia and Armenia
Kultur Basel
Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council
Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation
Richard Massey, and the Friends of Tbilisi

THE RULE OF THE GAME (La règle du jeu)
An original scenario by Jean Renoir

The world is made up of cliques, and not just the whole world, but
every nation and every city. A city such as Paris has its cliques.
Some, in fact, transcend borders and are international.

Each of these cliques has its customs, its mores, indeed its own
language. To put it simply, each has its rules, and these rules
determine the game. And the smaller the clique, the harsher and more
complex the rules. That`s why groups of wealthy people, tennis player,
hors lovers, and, more simply, the people of a social set, live by a
code that is all the more severe since these groups stand apart from a
nation`s overall population.

In the film The Rules of the Game, the social set in question is
extremely wealthy, extremely fashionable; not a milieu of upstarts,
but good old authentic bourgeoisie.

The rules of the game these people play are therefore strict.
Sometimes, a few try to escape them. Maybe our aviator, André Cartier
[to become André Jurieu], thought he could shatter these constraints
by making his great flight around the world. In fact, he`s shattered
nothing at all. This flight makes him a hero, but this hero still
remains a high bourgeois.

Aline Dunouyer [to become Christine de La Chesnaye] doesn`t believe in
these rules. She figures she can follow her heart`s fancy, remain a
faithful wife or take a lover, however and whenever she feels like it.
But she`s wrong. Matters of the heart, or to put it more simply, the
relations between man and women, play a major role, one might even say
a social role in the this set; but they, too, are irremediably subject
to the rules of the game.

Aline`s husband, the great attorney Dunoyer, is in fact a ruthless
advocate of these rules, and in his entourage all human
activities—love, business dealings, drunkenness, drug use, vacations,
homosexuality—are subject to social protocols that are less apparent
than, but just as strict as, those practiced in the court of Louis
XIV.

The film, then, is the story of a young woman from a very wealthy
social set who tries to be happy by following the dictates of her
heart. Her old friend Octave will help her, but he will be caught out
at his own game and foolishly fall in love with the young woman. Aline
will give herself to the man she loves, the aviator André Cartier, and
she will do so in vain, because our pilot will prove to be too weak
for bourgeois conventions. This adventure would have had a pathetic
end were he not killed as a result of a tragic mix-up.

The theme then deals with Aline`s longing for a simpler, more
forthright life. It also concerns André Cartier`s love for Aline. Like
many other passions, this one begins out of simple curiosity and
gradually becomes a deep and inescapable feeling.

In this film, everyone is sincere. There are no vilains. The husband
sincerely loves Aline. Octave sincerely wishes the happiness of his
godchild and of his friend. But all these people will be weaker than
the rules of the game, and at the end of the film André will be
killed, Octave will go away, and Aline will remain with a husband she
doesn`t love. Even the second characters—for instance, a poacher who
is the gamekeeper`s wife`s lover—are subject to rule of their own.
This film will be set in a highly elegant environment. Aline has a
town house on the avenue Henri Martin, which must be the epitome of
taste and elegance.

The second part of the film takes place in a château in the Sologne
region, during hunting season.

(One of the preliminary synopses Renoir wrote for The Rules of the Game, 1939)