For Christine Gölz
"Dissident in its very nature", "cosmopolitan, life-affirming": Lana Gogoberidze's cinematic work can be characterised initially with the words which she herself employed in her 2019 autobiography bearing the title "I Drank Poison Like Kakhetian Wine" to describe the emergent Georgian cinema of the 1960s and '70s.
Created over a period of more than 60 years, her films are also very different from one another in terms of form, style and choice of subject matter – perhaps mirroring the fact that their maker has also had (and continues to have) many occupations in her life alongside screenwriting and filmmaking: she is a passionate literary translator, especially of English-language poetry, she served as a member of parliament and floor leader in her country, she has been an activist for international networking among women in cinema (as president of KIWI – Kino Women International) as well as a permanent representative for Georgia on the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. And, as her current, intensely autobiographical film THE GOLDEN THREAD / OKROS DZAPI (2019) reveals in a scene, Lana Gogoberidze is an ardent sports fan on top of it all: the main character, writer Elene (played by Nana Dzhordzhadze, another significant female director from Georgia), sits in front of the television, completely captivated by Roger Federer's "elegant and noble" tennis game, when an old admirer interrupts her viewing of the match with a phone call. A trivial athletic digression?
Precisely as trivial and true-to-life as the (all too) human quotidian existence that is always an element of Gogoberidze's on-screen worlds. One of many threads, interwoven with her critical treatment of gender roles, with the relationship between generations, with questions of a political nature. Her films largely focus on the lived experiences and perspectives of women, typically on the fortunes of individual human beings (or specific groups of them) in the context of (totalitarian) history. Plus, the director's enthusiasm for building scenes around beautiful, highly expressive, unusual faces is palpable.
Both the reappraisal of Lana Gogoberidze's cinematic oeuvre and corresponding efforts to make it available to a contemporary audience are long overdue. An uninterrupted international reception of her work has on the one hand been hindered by the fact that the director was obliged to grapple repeatedly with Soviet censors, then further compounded by the fact that the dramatic years of social and political upheaval in Georgia from 1989 on burst in in the midst of her directing career, and on the other hand by the fact that Georgian film history is archived at the Russian Gosfilmofond, as is the case for the majority of former constituent republics of the USSR, and here itis only with great effort that the threads could finally be taken up again in the past years. The programme of this year's goEast Homage gathers ten feature films from her thirteen directorial works in total. Six of the films have been newly digitised recently, thanks to the efforts of the Georgian National Film Centre and its director Gaga Chkheidze, as well as further Georgian and international institutions.
In Gogoberidze's family, filmmaking follows a matrilinear logic. Lana Gogoberidze was born in Tbilisi (then Tiflis) on 13 October 1928, and brought up by an aunt. Her father, Levan Gogoberidze, fell victim to the Great Purge in 1937: "Like millions of others over the course of world history, the revolution adopted my father at first, then made him its weapon, then finally swallowed and annihilated him", as Gogoberidze writes. Her mother, Nutsa Gogoberidze (1902−1966), Georgia's first female director, was arrested in the same fateful year as a "family member of a traitor to the fatherland" and survived tens year in the gulag, before returning to Tbilisi at the age of 45. Lana, a young woman by then, had to get to know her own mother all over again. Nutsa Gogoberidze had initially studied philosophy at the university in Jena. Her 1934 fiction feature UZHMURI was one of the first Soviet features directed by a woman. Before that, she had realised the film THEIR KINGDOM / MATI SEMPO (1928) with her friend and colleague Mikail Kalatozishvili (later Kalatozov). Her first solo outing as a director was the "cultural film" BUBA from 1930. One of Lana Gogoberidze's daughters, Salomé Alexi, has also followed in the family tradition. Alexi appears as an actress in several of her mother's films and has herself become a successful filmmaker.
Since she was initially prohibited from studying film, Lana Gogoberidze majored in literature at the university in Tbilisi. Her dissertation was devoted to one of her favourite poets – Walt Whitman, whom she admired for his independence, individualism and yearning for true freedom. A thoroughly "un-Soviet" poet, though Stalin had once quoted him in a letter to the Russian writer Demian Bedny, which meant that the choice of topic for the dissertation couldn't be quashed. Finally, Gogoberidze did indeed manage to take up directing studies at Moscow's All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). Her teachers were Sergei Gerasimov, Mikhail Romm and Sergei Yutkevich, while her fellow students included Kira Muratova, Vasily Shuhshin, Andrei Tarkovsky, Eldar and Giorgi Shengelaia and Otar Iosseliani, to name but a select few.
To date, German audiences are relatively familiar above all with the film that first garnered Gogoberidze international attention: SOME INTERVIEWS ON PERSONAL MATTERS / RAMDENIME INTERVIU PIRAD SAKITKHEBZE, from 1978. Considered one of the first feminist films in Soviet cinema, the story revolves around Sofiko (in a magnificent performance by Sofiko Chiaureli), a journalist who lives and breathes her work, whose husband is in the process of leaving her for a younger woman and who struggles with the ghosts of the past. Sofiko interviews Georgian women about the conditions in their lives – in a certain sense, a polyphonic study of female experiences. The film just barely managed to make it past the censors, because, as Andrey Sakharov wrote to Lev Kopelev: "It is the first film to describe the horrific state of anxiety in which Soviet citizens constantly find themselves in a precise and unadulterated manner." Berlin's Arsenal – which keeps two further Gogoberidze films and an important collection of Georgian films in general accessible in its archive – restored and digitised the film in 2019. In the booklet for the accompanying DVD release, Bettina Schulte Strathaus writes: "Rarely in the cinema of the Soviet Union and its republics had the private been shown so politically, and in contrast to many of her female colleagues, Lana Gogogberidze also never found it necessary to distance herself from a feminist point of view. There is no equality, as she demonstrates beyond a doubt, and freedom always takes precedence over peace and harmony."
Lana Gogoberidze was never "just" a feminist against her will. Out of the gate, her fiction-feature debut from 1961 – still realised in the midst of the Thaw – nonchalantly relates no less than three stories from the perspective of three female main characters. In a virtually revolutionary move, UNDER ONE SKY / ERTI TSIS QVESH breaks with the male gaze, by having the protagonists' looks at the men they desire become determining (during episodes set in 1921, 1941 and 1961). In the third instalment, for instance, it is the architect Rusudan, creator of the sports arena in Tbilisi, who, at the construction site, is at first mesmerised by a mural, and then by the man who painted it. Ultimately, she is forced to come to terms with the fact that he already loves another. As later in SOME INTERVIEWS ON PERSONAL MATTERS, the older woman regards the younger "competition" here. But rather than ceding space to jealousy, a bitter-sweet, complementary happy ending dipped in quiet irony emerges: the younger lover looks to the summer sky, remarking on its beauty, whereupon Rusudun corroborates, with a gentle smile: "I've never seen such a beautiful sky."
1965's I SEE THE SUN / ME VKHEDAV MZES, which Gogoberidze has explicitly excluded from the ranks of her auteur films, deals with the damage inflicted on life by war. Once again here, there is an impressive staging of gazes, a thematization of seeing. For instance, during a church scene: beneath the watchful eyes of a giant depiction of the Virgin Mary – a large fresco on the dome – the mail carrier breaks down in front of the assembled village community, for his role in delivering death notices. The films features two youthful protagonists: the orphan boy Dato and blind Khatia, who can only "see" the sun and the aforementioned young man, whose moral character and love she can sense. At first glance WHEN ALMONDS BLOSSOMED / ROTSA AKVAVADA NUSHI (1972), another film about adolescence, seems to portray a care-free clique of teenagers, before evolving into a tale illustrating how the law of the father must be broken in order to make emancipation a reality. Here it is Khatuna who insists on holding the handsome athlete Zura morally accountable for his deeds.
Whereas the fate of individuals, the victims of Stalinist crimes, was still one subject among multiple themes treated in SOME INTERVIEWS ON PERSONAL MATTERS, with THE WALTZ ON THE PETSCHORA / VALSI PECHORAZE in 1992 Gogoberidze was able to realise the film that, in her own words, she had always had to and wanted to make. It is based on the documentary stories her mother told about life in the Gulag and on Gogoberidze's own childhood memories. The struggle for survival of the mother and her fellow captives is largely shot in black-and-white. Letters are sent to the daughter, read by the mother's off-screen voice. While this storyline unfolds in parallel, the child encounters a chekist in her parents' former apartment in Tbilisi. A deeply unsettling perpetrator-victim relationship ensues.
Perhaps the most opulent among Gogoberidze's films is the ballad DAY IS LONGER THAN NIGHT / DGES GAME UTENEBIA. An entry in the competition programmein Cannes in 1984, it entertains with folk poetry and folkloric elements and was shot on-site at spectacular locations in the mountains of Georgia. Fascinating here once again: the exceedingly beautiful face of its female lead, Darejan Kharshiladze (as Eva). The most cheerful film in the Homage programme, however, is the musical COMMOTION / AURZARI SALKHINETSI (1975). Singing, dancing and culinary indulgence in abundance, as well as naive painting à la Pirosmani, seem to be trying to prove the oft attested joviality of the Georgians.
Gogoberidze's cinema is rich with the sense of being alive and lived history, poised on the edge of the abysses of war and terror, where poetry and prose, dance and music, can help one to survive – the sublimation of traumatic experience. The joy of sitting down together with friends and family at a long, lavishly laden table. And the graceful tennis playing of Roger Federer.
Gaby Babić
The author thanks Erika and Ulrich Gregor This essay was initially published in the catalogue of the 22. goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film 2022 and is reprinted courtesy of the author and the festival.
Thanks to Gaby Babić and Heleen Gerritsen, director of goEast.
