main films and their place in Soviet cinema
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January 31 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tengiz Abuladze, a director who defended the right to indifference to issues of Soviet modernity, and then directed “Repentance,” the most high-profile journalistic film of the 1980s.
In the system of Soviet culture, “republican” cinematographs had a special status. They were both under pressure and in censorship neglect. Caucasian, Central Asian, and Baltic studios were rarely allowed to make large, programmatic films, but they were allowed to experiment, to work within the system, but in enclaves of moderate freedom. The pressure from the center was non-one-dimensional and wave-like (for example, at the end of the 1960s the Moldavian new wave was defeated). Georgia had the least amount of it. This was partly due to the fact that the Soviet system of management there was closely intertwined with family traditions; officials and artists were linked by relationships of kinship and patronage. This played an important role in the fate of Abuladze.
The films of the republican studios had a task that stemmed from the moderately colonial structure of Soviet culture. They produced images of “their other.” To create them, you need to see what is native, long known as something other, to look through the eyes of an internalized other – for example, a representative of the imperial center. In addition, in order to produce “one’s own otherness,” a sample is needed—“someone else’s otherness.” The main foreign cinematography for the post-Stalin USSR was Italian neorealism. Abuladze’s first three films – “Lurja Magdana” (1955), shot together with Rezo Chkheidze, a historical drama about a lawsuit for a donkey between a matsoni merchant and a vile rich man, a lyrical feuilleton “Other People’s Children” (1958) about how a student sacrifices her adult life for the sake of caring about randomly encountered neglected children, the village idyll “I, Grandmother, Iliko and Illarion” (1962) – came closer to the manner of Rossellini, De Sica, and early Fellini than other paintings of the Thaw era. Progressive critics praised the films for their freshness and sincerity, while conservative critics criticized them for their “abstract humanism” and their derivativeness in relation to Western models. Be that as it may, Abuladze in many ways invented cinematic Georgia as Soviet Italy – a country of beautiful poverty, ridiculously sublime gestures, sun-drenched contrasts, conversations breaking into song, a country that exists not so much outside of Soviet times, but somewhere on the periphery of its course. More sophisticated directors have already worked with this picture as a finished product: Otar Ioseliani introduced doubt into it, Georgy Danelia brought it to the point of absurdity, but Abuladze himself quickly felt that such an image of the homeland was exhausted.
He invented another Georgia in “Prayer” (1967), a medieval mystery based on the poems of the late romantic Vazhi-Pshavela. The film features a poet, a maiden and a demon, they speak in poetry, look at the sky and hardly move. Abuladze’s fresco turn was clearly influenced by his friend Sergei Parajanov, but, unlike Parajanov’s slyly inventive films, “The Plea” was a film that was straightforward to the extreme. Nevertheless, she made an impression on her contemporaries. Partly – an ostentatious break with realistic conventions, partly – the ambition of the plan. Abuladze outlined his main theme in it: the struggle between good and evil.
After “Prayer,” he filmed the grotesque comedy “Necklace for My Beloved” (1971), in which a stupid Dagestan boy, in order to get the heart of the main beauty of the village, goes on a journey through strange territory – half the modern Caucasus, half a fairy-tale country with sirens and robbers. The film appears to be a departure from the lofty path outlined in the previous film, but in fact represents an important maneuver in it. In “Prayer” Abuladze masters fresco, in “Necklace” – popular print, naive art in the spirit of his beloved Pirosmani. The fresco reveals in the world the kingdom of eternal metaphysical laws. Naive brings elements of modernity into this picture – typewriters, collective farms, umbrellas – without destroying it, but making it a little more distant. These eccentric details serve as a guarantee that modernity is part of the same eternity with its struggle of opposites. We can say this: both the saint and the fool live outside of time. Together they transform the texture of reality into the material of a parable. Abuladze develops the synthesis of popular prints and frescoes in “The Tree of Desire” (1977) and takes it to the limit in his last and best film, “Repentance” (1984).
There are many semi-conspiratorial plots associated with the creation of “Repentance”. The film was started under Brezhnev and completed under Andropov. It was filmed in secret from the Moscow film authorities, with the direct administrative and financial support of Eduard Shevardnadze. Sometimes they write that Abuladze’s work was even supervised by certain progressive officials in the KGB, who considered it necessary to prepare the reform process. Nevertheless, the completed film lay on the shelf for two years in order to make waves in 1986, become the main sign of perestroika in culture and open a public conversation about the real scale of Stalin’s terror.
The heroic aura around “Repentance” makes it difficult to discern an interesting nuance. The very possibility of its creation, a situation where large amounts of public money are spent on a semi-clandestine project, is the result of a merger of administrative structures and the shadow economy – a merger that was widespread throughout the USSR, but especially noticeable in Georgia. It was for corruption associated with covering up underground guild workers that Vasily Mzhavanadze, Shevardnadze’s predecessor as First Secretary of the Georgian Central Committee, was removed from office. In “Repentance,” dictator Varlam openly resembles Mzhavanadze in appearance (he has exactly the same mustache). This apparently deliberate jab at the compromised boss makes the situation even more ambiguous.
However, the fact that a film about the Great Terror could be made at the end of the stagnant era in Georgia is not only a consequence of the economic opacity and moderate political liberality that reigned in the republic. It’s just that the Georgia that Abuladze created in his later films, the mystical arena in which the eternal struggle between good and evil unfolds, was the ideal stage for this venture.
“Repentance” is the same ahistorical film as “The Plea” and “The Tree of Desire” (Abuladze himself combined them into a trilogy). Its baroque excesses, which irritated those critics who were not hypnotized by the film – security knights in armor, the out-of-place sounding “Ode to Joy” and so on – serve precisely this purpose: to show that all this is happening in some kind of non-time , whenever. For all the recognition of the rhetorical moves of the Stalin era in the speeches of Varlam Aravidze, he himself is a figure not of a political pamphlet, but of a different genre. He is the tempter, the devil from the mystery. Hence his acting, dressing up, songs, antics. Varlam reigns not as a result of the political miscalculations and weaknesses of his contemporaries, but simply happens – literally like a jack-in-the-box, like evil, which is always right there. Only two things can save the world from its influence: the ritual of exorcism, the digging up of a corpse that has spoiled the earth, and the return to the light – that famous road to the temple with which the picture ends.
“Repentance” is a film-ritual. For Abuladze as an artist, this was an unconditional triumph. Rarely are the life-building ambitions of art realized in such completeness: the world around has changed, evil has truly wavered. It is not surprising that after this celebration he never took on a new film, although he lived for another ten years.
However, if you see in “Repentance” a picture with a certain political pragmatics, everything is a little more complicated. Rituals unite, but they also create fog. They do not explain, but conjure the past. From the point of view of those forces in the Soviet administration that contributed first to the production and then to the release of Abuladze’s film, it was such a curse – an attempt to present the Stalinist dictatorship, traces of which in one way or another permeated the Soviet world, as a temptation from which one could cleanse oneself. which means – to cleanse the entire system of other small and large evils, to be renewed as at baptism. In this sense, “Repentance,” filmed before Gorbachev came to power, was indeed a manifesto of perestroika as a political project. A high ethical note was supposed to cover up the ambiguity of the very situation of creating the film, its birth from intra-party intrigues, and the appeal to the eternal confrontation between good and evil as the engine of history – political confusion, the lack of a clear picture of the future.
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