Ever since its release in 1987, Repentance, the masterpiece by the Georgian-Soviet director Tenghiz Abuladze, has shaken the very foundations of the conscience of millions of people, becoming and remaining to this day a fundamental manifesto of the seventh art for social and political freedom, for the liberation of thought imprisoned by the lies of repressive, criminal and deicide ideologies of every kind. A liberation achieved not in the name of earthly jurisdictions and laws, not in the name of ideologies of any kind, but in the name of God, of the voice of God that speaks within every human being. Herein lies the greatness, spiritual nobility and enduring legacy of the final part of the trilogy on tyranny (comprising the films The Prayer – 1967, The Tree of Desire – 1977 and Repentance), which crowned the work of this inimitable man and filmmaker.
Made in 1984, in the midst of post-Brezhnev stagnation, when political surveillance, though no longer so overt, was still very much in force, the final part of the great Caucasian’s trilogy was ‘held up’ for three years, only being granted the right to be screened after Mikhail Gorbachev took the helm of the Soviet Union; it was in that same year that the film achieved international success, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes, the Ecumenical Prize and the FIPRESCI Special Prize at Cannes, awards at the most important festivals in the Soviet Union (including six prizes at the NIKA Festival), a nomination for the American Golden Globe, and significant honours in Chicago and Poland.
The lifting of the ban on the film, along with other major dissident Soviet productions that had been blacklisted by the censors, was due to the efforts made by director Elem Klimov – who was elected president of the Filmmakers’ Union in 1986 – to appeal to the higher film authorities.
As the years passed and political regimes changed, it became clear that the most representative feature-length fiction film to encapsulate the monstrosity of the assault on human nature perpetrated by the totalitarian communist system – and indeed by any oppressive system – is Repentance.
In other words, Căința was perceived from the outset not merely as a masterpiece, but as a cult film and a symbolic film – that is, an impressive work of art and a monumental political and social parable: its aesthetic excellence, its psychological drama, its visual and auditory spectacle, as well as its status as a historical parable with a metaphysical core – all of these are self-evident.
The film, released under the title Pokaianie (Monanieba in Georgian), was produced at the Gruzia-Film studio in 1984 but, after several closed-door screenings among specialists and party officials – a mandatory practice at the time throughout the Eastern Bloc – the film was banned on ideological grounds, with the very question of the complete destruction of all its copies, right down to the master copy and the negative, even being raised. The irony is that it was none other than the reformer Eduard Shevardnadze, a compatriot of the director1 – the very man who, following a personal discussion with Tengiz Abuladze, had initially given the green light to the production of the screenplay – who would decide to ban the film’s release. Which, in the context of the era, was not necessarily to be blamed, as the film did indeed jeopardise the position and freedom of far too many people.
In fact, the shock and fear aroused by the first screenings in small circles had been so great that even a party activist from the reformist wing, such as Eduard Shevardnadze, the future champion of the movement for transparency and freedom of expression known as Glasnost, seems to have wanted to pre-empt the reactions of the conservatives, who still held the majority of leadership posts, considering it more prudent to ‘shelve’, at least temporarily, this manifesto-like film. High-ranking officials from cultural and party bodies, however, watched it in secret, paralysed by emotion and the almost sacred dread of the truth being exposed – a truth that had never before been spoken before the whole world. Here is what Aleksandr Yakovlev, a liberal-minded member of the central propaganda apparatus, a supporter of the Glasnost movement and future adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, recounts after watching the banned film with his family:
“I had learnt of this film from the chairman of the State Committee for Cinematography, who at the time was Filip Ermas. Then Shevardnadze rang me and told me that, as a Georgian, he felt embarrassed to deal with this case and asked me to grant Abuladze an audience. When he came to see me – I was a member of the Political Bureau at the time – he gave me the video cassette, which we watched as a family that evening. After the film had finished, we all simply sat in silence for about ten minutes. It had all been deeply moving. I felt that this film, which I ought to have put forward for discussion from the perspective of the struggle for creative freedom, could be of overwhelming importance. For it was not a genre film dealing with a niche issue, but rather raised, in the most general terms, the issues of human freedom, fear, betrayal and power. In practically every scene, people lie, yet the film is true. That is what first drew me to this film. And I promised myself that the film would be released in cinemas2’
Here is how the future president Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformer of the Soviet political system – the man who, once in power, would use Repentance as an argument to promote the movement for transparency of expression that underpinned Perestroika, namely Glasnost:
‘When we speak of repentance, we speak of “Glasnost” (transparency of expression), and when we speak of ‘Glasnost’, we speak of ‘Perestroika’ and thus we are, perhaps, speaking of the most prominent phenomena and events of that era. The release of the film Repentance had, on the one hand, the impact of a bomb going off, whilst on the other hand it was an entirely natural event, given that the ‘Glasnost’ movement was on the rise. The fate of the film Repentance was not a straightforward one. The ‘Glasnost’ era opened the floodgates to over a hundred films that had been gathering dust on the shelves until then (Road Check 3, The Commissioner 4, Kira Muratova’s films 5, and many documentaries). Even a film about Lenin had been banned – Sketches for a Portrait of V. I. Lenin, starring Mikhail Ulyanov – for portraying Lenin in a light other than that approved by the leadership of the time. I have seen them all and appreciate them greatly. I believe that, had the leadership of the time not taken a stand, this film too might have ended up [for more than three years – ed.] in storage. Even in those years [during the ‘Perestroika’ period – ed.], things moved very slowly’6
The monstrosity of totalitarian dictatorship – masterfully demonstrated by Abuladze together with his co-screenwriters, the writers Nana Djanelidze and Rezo Kveselava, and the entire creative team – lies in the disfigurement of the human face and of community relations by the oppressive political system, through the constant cultivation of fear, envy and hatred (conceptualised as ‘class hatred’), through institutionalised lies and denunciation, that is, in the expulsion of God from the individual and collective soul, and from the sphere of human relations. This amounts to hell brought to earth.
Over the last thirty years, plenty of books and articles have been published exposing the abuses of the communist system, but to publicly uphold these truths even whilst the regime was in power, in the ‘lion’s den’, which was still ‘active and ravenous’, required great, almost mad or martyr-like courage. That is to say, a courage and strength of character similar to those of Abuladeze’s protagonists in his tragic trilogy, a sign that these traits form a defining axis of his work.
Indeed, critics – such as film journalist Margarita Krasnetskaya, author of the first monograph on the director, 7 – have observed that all offeature-length fiction films by Tenghiz Abuladze, coincidentally also seven in number, just like Tarkovsky’s, are permeated by the luminous thread of the sacrifice of an innocent for a noble cause: ‘In accordance with the canons of classical tragedy, in every film by Abuladze [within the trilogy – ed.], the champions of goodness and justice perish. It is the woman who embodies the principle of light: the Virgin in The Prayer, the beautiful Margarita in The Tree of Desire, the painter’s wife in Repentance8”.
“Undoubtedly,” argues film critic Aleksandr Popov in 2021 9, “Repentance is the most significant cinematic event of the Perestroika era. The film not only set a new direction for post-Soviet cinema, but also, in effect, renewed the outlook on life for millions of people, ridding them of ideological illusions.” This same assessment and interpretation has been adopted by specialists ever since the very first reviews and analyses of the film – both in the Soviet Union and worldwide.
The film derives its status as an imposing, overwhelming political parable – underpinned by immense cathartic power – from the interweaving of classicised motifs drawn from the broader tapestry of the communist regime’s tragedies – seen as absolute darkness – with the luminous yet tragic fates of the characters – the executioners and victims of history. This fusion is symbolically, discreetly and repeatedly commented upon, much like a leitmotif, of general landmarks of universal culture, of ancient Georgian traditions and of the great Christian culture. Thus, the deicide and the fundamental criminality of any dictatorial system were demonstrated with the great persuasive power of catharsis.
‘The rejection of totalitarianism from the standpoint of Christian humanism, the identification of any cult of personality with devil worship, as well as the monstrous scale, in its sheer scope, of the tyrant’s cunning and duplicity, which transform him into an incarnate demon – all of this is expressed in Repentance at the level of the subject, as well as conceptually and stylistically,” summarises Aleksandr Popov himself 10.
In fact, unlike Soviet filmmakers categorised as metaphysical, such as Aleksandr Sokurov and Andrei Tarkovsky, or as postmodernists with mythical--transcendental undertones, such as Sergei Parajanov – whose works have required successive generations of hermeneutic study to unpack – Tengiz Abuladze practises a poetics that is seemingly easy to decipher. His message appears to emerge almost in its entirety from the very first viewing. The filmmaker does not rely on sophisticated, cryptic ambiguities that divert meaning, as Tarkovsky or Bergman, for example, do. The semantic layers of the film Repentance are fairly well defined; the symbolic codes are clear and have been correctly deciphered by both the public and specialists from the very beginning. This does not mean that they are any less profound in their spiritual message or any less fascinating. For the transfiguring power with which the discourse on civic conscience and human dignity asserts itself in Repentance draws its strength precisely from the aesthetic expressiveness and the dramatic and psychological tension taken to a fever pitch, which produce catharsis.
Even if certain Christian symbols – such as the torturers’ greeting, a mocking parody of the Gospel’s ‘Peace be upon this house!’ – were not easily decipherable by the Soviet viewer, who lacked a knowledge of the Bible, nevertheless, other Christian allusions and connotations – such as the noble countenance of the painter Sandro Barateli, reminiscent of Slavic icons of the Saviour, or the angelic features of his wife, Ketevan and their little girl, Nino – or the pose of Sandro’s hanging during torture, filmed in chiaroscuro from below, much like Western depictions of the Crucifixion, not to mention the marzipan churches on the cakes baked by the adult Ketevan, which form the film’s symbolic cover, punctuated, in turn, by the paradigmatic question: ‘What is the point of a street that does not lead to a church?’ – all these nuances and symbols were correctly identified and interpreted right from the very first reviews of the film.
‘Abuladze actively employs Christian symbols in his film to recount the biography of a provincial dictator, Varlam Aravidze, whose image and behaviour strangely combine traits of Stalin, Hitler and Beria, as well as the story of Varlam’s victims, likened to Christ through their sufferings. Living, authentic Christianity, imprinted in the sufferings of the martyrs, the confessors and all innocent victims—those sacrificed for the truth— is incompatible with the ideology of torture – and not just that of the communists (in this regard, the director’s demystification of Soviet Russia’s propaganda lies is highly abstract, with temporal and spatial references suggested by very few elements of the screenplay), but also with any lie underpinned by a deep-seated hatred of those who think differently and a tendency towards social homogenisation on all levels”11 – argues the same Aleksandr Popov in the cited publication.
We can see from these comments that, in the eyes of all categories of commentators (film buffs and experts alike), the film’s political and ethical dimensions overshadowed its aesthetic dimension, which was either overlooked or taken for granted. But the persuasive power of the political, ethical and social message, striking like the spear of an archangel of justice, stems precisely from the film’s dramatic tension, generated by the extreme confrontation between absolute good and absolute evil – that is, between purity, piety, courage, kindness and innocence, on the one hand, and institutionalised lies, envy, denunciation, social climbing, cruelty and unbelief, on the other.
Heaven and hell, brought down to earth, clash dramatically on a scale reminiscent of ancient tragedy, in an anonymous 20th-century Georgian town, where the tentacles of the political police are spreading their web. Unfolding with minimal references to time and place, the conflict takes on global and almost eternal resonance, encompassing, as a spectre of totalitarian experience, not only the Soviet world with its gulags, but also the entire socialist bloc with its political prisons, whilst also alluding to the police state of the Third Reich, with its extermination camps and political police, or to other concentration camp hells of totalitarianism from any time and any place. It is no coincidence that the torturers and political police officers are dressed not as Chekists (their direct historical model), but as Roman legionaries and medieval knights in armour, suggesting, by way of generalisation, the ubiquity and quasi-eternity of evil in history.
In keeping with the same conventions of mimetic, gestural and sartorial codes, the dictator Varlam Aravidze—the film’s central character (whose name in Georgian means ‘nobody’12— that is, one who has lost his soul), combines traits of all the tyrants from whom he draws his essence: Stalin’s malicious gaze and impenetrable smile, Marshal Beria’s pince-nez with blinding lenses, the feared head of the NKVD and a close friend of Stalin’s, the black shirt of ‘Il Duce’ Mussolini, Hitler’s cropped moustache, and also – according to the director’s statements – attributes of Pinochet and Pol Pot 13. All these elements come together to form a generic image of the absolute dictator, thirsting for blood, power and glory and incapable of compassion – in short, the Devil himself. However, those who experienced Stalinist repression at first hand, as well as film critics, identify Aravidze most closely with Lavrenti Beria, considered the chief architect of the purges of the 1930s. The haunting protagonist is masterfully portrayed by Avtandil Maharadze, a leading figure on the Georgian stage, who delivers an unrivalled display of virtuosity in the dual role he plays in the film: the eccentric, unpredictable and malevolent mayor Varlam Aravidze, and his son, the unremarkable Abel, a profiteer who has sold his conscience to capitalise on the privileges secured by his father.
Throughout this masquerade of the great confrontation between Good and Evil, between the Angelic and the Demonic, the representatives of the oppressive system are dressed in theatrical costumes, in a stage convention suggesting anonymity and the loss of self. The torturers wear black medieval helmets, which conceal their faces and portend misfortune – a sign of duplicity, of being subsumed into a system of power to the point of the self’s annihilation. The positive heroes, by contrast, are depicted in realistic terms, yet with timeless touches; their pure features and attire evoke the sublime found in Renaissance imagery and Christian iconography: the painter Sandro (a name alluding to Sandro Botticelli, one of the most refined and angelic painters of the Renaissance), his wife Nino and their daughter Ketevan also embody, both physically and spiritually, the same characteristics. But most strikingly – just as in Tarkovsky’s later films – the setting in which this group of exemplary, Christ-like characters lives bears witness – more so than the characters themselves – to their ideals. The Barateli family’s house-museum and art gallery, as well as the humble dwelling where Nino will live with her daughter following Sandro’s arrest and the confiscation of the family home – a common occurrence during the Stalinist persecutions; as well as the Renaissance paintings that the Barateli couple shelter in the church, sacrilegiously converted into a scientific laboratory – all these settings reflect the otherworldly aura of these two defenders of sacred values: morality, tradition, faith and the national spirit. ‘This is what the church means to us,’ the painter Sandro boldly retorts to Mayor Aravidze, who has set his mind on demolishing it. Despite Sandro’s courageous plea and the feeble opposition of the locals, the ancient church, nearly two thousand years old, will be blown up, and its defenders will pay with their lives for their act of Christian and patriotic witness.
But let us recall the story of the film.
Prologue: Ketevan, a woman still in her youth, is preparing cream cakes in her small kitchen on the ground floor of a patriarchal block of flats. A neighbour pays her a visit, bringing her the latest news, including the death of the town’s mayor, the ‘much-loved’ Varlam Aravidze, ‘a great figure and a benefactor of the city’, as he claims, boasting that he knew him personally. We witness a pompous funeral ceremony, with eulogies so grandiose as to border on the absurd and the ridiculous, reminiscent of the cult of personality surrounding Ceaușescu and other megalomaniac communist leaders: ‘Our much-loved Varlam Aravidze had the great gift of turning an enemy into a friend and a friend into an enemy’.
The theatre of the absurd continues in full force, establishing one of the film’s two central stylistic themes (the grotesque and the sublime). The day after the funeral, the deceased’s family and close friends are in for the grim surprise of discovering his stiffened corpse, sitting enthroned in the garden of the family villa. A superstitious fear shakes the town’s most respected family and their entourage, as if stripping away the cheap veneer of their professed atheism. The dead man must be buried quickly and quietly, and the matter hushed up. Yet the incident occurs, almost identically, on the second and third days, to the point of obsession. The sense of a curse upon the earth, which cannot bear to swallow the body of a great sinner, emerges from the depths of ancestral memory into the dormant consciousness of the rulers of the age. On a neighbour’s advice, the grave is enclosed within a barred cage, but the dead man ‘escapes’ once more, only to be discovered leaning stiffly against a terrace table. In the end, the pater familias is arrested: ‘that’s what the procedure requires’, says the policeman, ‘so that he can be legally reburied’. The scene evokes the most delightful moments of anti-totalitarian satire, from Ilf and Petrov to Eugene Ionesco’14’. At the same time, the prefecture launches a campaign to monitor the grave in order to catch the grave robber, a campaign in which the deceased’s grandson, the teenager Turnike, also takes part. At dusk, he fires a shot at a figure sneaking up on the grave. To everyone’s surprise, this turns out to be a woman: the confectioner from the prologue, the delicate Ketevan Barateli.
The following sequences are devoted to Ketevan’s trial, which forms the dramatic core of the film, triggering a series of flashbacks to the tragic life story of the unfortunate woman and her parents, Sandro and Nino, who were persecuted by the Aravidzes for the ‘crime’ of having defended a church from demolition. A distinguished lady, dressed in white, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a veil in the Belle Époque style of the Georgian aristocracy, is led into the courtroom by guards in black, dressed as medieval knights. The bench of judges wears Baroque wigs, emphasising the black-and-white colour scheme. The judges look bored; one of them is obsessively twisting a multicoloured Rubik’s cube 15. The surrealism of the costumes and the black-and-white contrast highlight the generic, somewhat metaphysical nature of the trial, which, in essence, does not adjudicate a specific historical offence, but rather the communist system’s fundamental assault on human dignity. Thus, alongside the register of dramatic situations and dialogue, a third stylistic register is established within the spectrum of the absurd: that of the costumes. All these elements work together to construct the film’s dimension as a sweeping political parable. The distinguished Mrs Barateli, whilst acknowledging that she exhumed the body, considers herself innocent, firmly maintaining that ‘As long as she is alive, Varlam will not rest in his grave’. She will dig him up again and again. ‘Revenge is no joy to me. It is my cross to bear!’
But can revenge be a cross to bear? Can it be a moral weapon? It depends on how revenge is understood! In this case, revenge is one and the same as confession, inevitably leading to martyrdom. An ancestral sense of the law of the land cries out in this woman’s conscience—a law according to which sins that cry out to heaven defile even the soil: unrepentant evildoers have no right to rest in the peace of the earth! In fact, there had been a real-life case – she tells the director – when, in the terrible year of 1937, a Chekist from the Mingrelia region, coveting a fellow villager’s wife, sent her husband – who was innocent – to a forced-labour camp and took his wife. Years later, when the Chekist died, someone would dig up his corpse every day and prop it upright against the gate of his relatives’ house: it was the unfortunate son of the unjustly deported man, who was thus avenging his shame, humiliation and ruined life 16. To sleep the eternal sleep beneath the gentle earth is a gift that must be earned at least through the very quality of being human – so suggests the ancestral wisdom of one of the oldest Christian peoples.
‘But what is the accused’s motive?’ – the prosecutors ask Ketevan. In reply, the accused tells them what Varlam Aravidze meant to her and her family. Thus we delve deeper into the film’s core of historical remembrance, where the personal and collective tragedies of Stalinist persecution are paraded in the opening credits.
As a child, Ketevan had witnessed the grandiose ceremony marking Varlam’s inauguration as mayor of the town and his hysterical, phantasmagorical speech, amidst the mindless cheers of the crowd – an exemplary pastiche of the cult of personality surrounding the great dictators of all times and places, but above all of the cult of Stalin. From this moment on, through hyperbole, the grotesque and absurd humour, the parable of the Stalinist regime becomes evident. We also witness the first displays of expressiveness and power from the protean Avtandil Maharadze, the actor playing Varlam, who portrays the magnetism of evil’s seduction like no other: a gallant yet domineering smile, theatrically condescending towards the obedient crowd, the dazzling lenses of his pince-nez, whose strident glint seems to make your knees buckle, the frenzied rhetoric of promises of a ‘happy future’, but with a passing mention of the ‘enemies of the people, who swarm everywhere and must be hunted down and unmasked’. In one of his speeches, the Dictator quotes Stalin’s sarcastic dictum about ‘finding a black cat in a dark room, especially when it doesn’t exist’ – a reference to the excesses of the secret police, forced to unmask real, but above all fictitious ‘enemies of the people’, in deranged campaigns of political purges in which the ‘quota of enemies’ to be captured had to be met in quantitative terms, much like production quotas. The parallels with the climate of terror during Romania’s ‘haunting decade’ become evident.
Whilst the crowd frenetically applauds the election of the town’s new mayor, in a spectacle of provincial farce, reminiscent of Jiri Menzel’s political satires, a crow and a gallows loom prophetically in the background, behind the Dictator.
The only one who does not enjoy the frenzied comedy is the painter Sandro: with a kind of foreboding, he closes the balcony door from which his little girl, Ketevan, is watching the street spectacle with naive fascination. Sandro Barateli, with foresight, closes the balcony window, whilst the director invites us not into the painter’s actual home, but into the home of his soul, the town’s old church – the most effective way, from a cinematic perspective, to sketch out his profound inner portrait.
A sublime Christian choral piece, which musically accompanies the careful sweeping shot of the church’s interior, provides a counterpoint to the raucous clamour and the masquerade of propagandistic rhetoric from outside, radically shifting the emotional tone. The camera focuses on frescoes depicting some of the most dramatic moments from the Gospels in the history of the Universal Church: the Last Supper, The Prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, the Apostle Thomas’s Recognition of Christ, on which the camera lingers at length, and the Expulsion of the First Parents from Paradise, when the soundtrack shifts from the Christian choir to a frivolous little jazz tune. Disconcertingly, the interior of the holy sanctuary is invaded by an electrical substation, whose multicoloured porcelain pylons, as vigorous as massive stalagmites, coexist brazenly with the ancient frescoes.
This postmodern mise-en-scène, in which the sacred space has been desecrated by the barbarism of omnipotent technology, is commented on in a voice-over by a quote from Einstein, spoken – as the film puts it – by the great scientist shortly before his death: ‘The fate of the modern scientist is tragic. Whilst inspiration leads him towards clarity and inner independence, through his almost superhuman efforts he has forged the weapons of social enslavement and the destruction of his own person. It has come to the point where political power has stifled him. Has the time passed when intellectual freedom and the freedom of the researcher could enlighten and enrich people’s lives? In his quest for scientific truth, has he forgotten his responsibility towards his fellow human beings and his own dignity? Our world is threatened by a crisis, the scale of which does not seem to be understood by those who are destined to decide the fate of humanity. The unleashed power of the atom has transformed everything, except our way of thinking. And as a result, we are sliding towards an unimaginable catastrophe. For humanity to survive, it must change its way of thinking.”
Sandro Barateli, together with a couple of gentle elderly people – the ‘elders of the town’ – explain to Mayor Aravidze the harmful effect of the power station’s vibrations on the church’s frescoes and fragile walls, urging him to save the place of worship by moving the experimental laboratory to a suitable location. ‘So you’re against science and progress?’ – Aravidze concludes inflexibly, reviving the stilted rhetoric of the agitators of the proletarian dictatorship. “We are against the kind of science that destroys works of art,” the painter replies bravely. “The church is practically a ruin anyway, and nobody goes to your church anymore! Gone are the days of obscurantism, when people were indoctrinated into believing they were created by God… and it was hidden from us that we are all descended from apes!” – interjects Doxopoulos, Aravidze’s docile henchman.
“The Church of the Mother of God is one of the most important monuments of early Christianity; it is a monument to culture. How can you not understand that destroying it means severing the vital roots that nourish and spiritually enrich the people?” – the painter continues his plea. ‘What if you were to throw the works of Homer, Tolstoy, Dante and Rustaveli into the fire; what if the music of Bach, Tchaikovsky and Verdi were to fall silent; what if we were to destroy Notre Dame and Tsetsekhoveli Cathedrals? ‘Our cathedral housed unique relics, which our ancestors had preserved for centuries to pass on to us. These have been lost, and now you wish to tear down the building as well?!’
At first, Aravidze comes across as cooperative, even caring and empathetic, seeming to understand the issue in depth and tempering the insistence of the narrow-minded Doxopoulos, who is pushing for the demolition of the church: “Doxopoulos, don’t you have a mother yourself? How old is she? If she falls ill, won’t you look after her? It’s the same with this church – a 6th-century monument. Are we to leave our mother unprotected in her old age? So we must thank these noble citizens for opening our eyes. I give you my word that I will spare no effort to resolve this issue.” Demonstratively, Aravidze tore up the order to demolish the church in front of everyone.
- 1
Descendant of political prisoners. At the time, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Georgian SSR and a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Subsequently, President of Georgia (1995–2003).
- 2
24 May 2011, Sergei Yurenen, ‘Repentance’, Radio Svoboda Archive, https://www.svoboda.org/a/24204605.html
- 3
Original title: ‘Проверка на дорогах’, 1971, the debut film by the eminent Soviet director Aleksei Gherman.
- 4
Original title: ‘Комиссар’, 1967, directed by Aleksandr Askoldov, a film that was banned for more than twenty years.
- 5
A prominent Soviet film director of Romanian origin.
- 6
Sergei Yurienen (Сергей Юрьенен), ‘Pokaianie, Radio Svoboda Archive’, 24 May 2011, https://www.svoboda.org/a/24204605.html
- 7
Margarita Krasnetskaya, ‘Tengiz Abuladze. The Path to Repentance’, Cultural Revolution, Moscow, 2009.
- 8
Margarita Krasnetskaya, op. cit., p. 118.
- 9
Alexander Popov. Lessons in Freedom: Dreams and Hopes in ‘Perestroika’ Cinema // Kinopress website, 17 February 2021, http://kinopressa.ru/5730.
- 10
Alexander Popov, Lessons in Freedom: Dreams and Hopes in ‘Perestroika’ Cinema (Part 12), https://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/7661/reviews.
- 11
Alexander Popov, Op. cit. https://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/7661/reviews
- 12
See Lilia Mamatova, ‘The Truth in the Artist’s Home’ // Iskusstvo kino no. 9 / 1994, p. 69.
- 13
See Lilia Mamatova, ‘The Truth in the Artist’s Home’ // Iskusstvo kino, no. 9 / 1994, p. 69.
- 14
In particular, from the play Rhinoceros.
- 15
A game of geometric reasoning, which was all the rage amongst intellectuals at the time the film was made.
- 16
See Lyubov Khazan, “Film director Tengiz Abuladze: ‘What sort of country is this? I dug Lenin up from his grave, and they gave me the Lenin Prize’” // ‘Gordon Boulevard’ magazine and platform, No. 22 (474) 2014, 6 June 2014, https://bulvar.com.ua/gazeta/archive/s22_66710/8621.html.