Repentance · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A dead man is sitting in a garden. Someone has dug the mayor out of his fresh grave and set him upright among his son's fruit trees, in his good black shirt, as if he had come out for the air. The family buries him again that night. In the morning he is back.

That is the whole film in one joke, and the joke is a machine. Tengiz Abuladze made a comedy about a corpse with a scheduling problem and put inside it the largest accusation Soviet cinema had yet been allowed to make.

His invention is a single refusal, and everything follows from it: he will not tell you when the film is set. Varlam Aravidze wears Mussolini's black shirt, Beria's pince-nez, and the small square mustache that belongs equally to Hitler and to Chaplin. Men in medieval armor ride through the streets carrying automobiles and microphones. Nothing holds still long enough to be dated. That isn't whimsy. A dated terror is a closed chapter, and a closed chapter is an alibi.

Watch the scene with the logs. A delivery of timber arrives from the labor camps, and the women of the town go over the pile on their hands and knees, turning each trunk, looking for a name a husband scratched into the wood before he died. You don't watch that scene. You read it. Deleuze has a word for an image that has stopped working by action and reflex and now asks to be deciphered: the lectosign, the readable image. In ordinary cinema a shot tells you what comes next, the way a gun means a shot is coming. Here the image is a surface with writing on it, and the writing is the last thing a man got to say. Much of the film is spelled out like this, in props and surnames waiting to be picked up. Aravidze comes from the Georgian for nobody.

Then watch the joins. Guliko Omadze's cutting slides out of a courtroom into a field, or into a nightmare, with nothing to mark the change. No dissolve, no title, no music cue announcing a memory. Deleuze calls a cut like this irrational: not illogical, but a join that hands you no rule for crossing it. The shots don't connect. They sit next to each other with the gap left in view, and you cross it yourself. That is why the film destabilizes rather than merely puzzles. The connective tissue that would let you file each scene under real or remembered has been removed on purpose.

The removal turns the nesting into something stranger than flashback structure. Keti bakes cakes iced with little churches and reads that Varlam has died. Inside that, the exhumations. Inside those, her trial. Inside the trial, her childhood. Inside that, Abel Aravidze's dreams. A flashback carries a date; it says this happened, then. Nothing here is dated. Deleuze's name for the past once it stops being a line behind you and becomes a set of coexisting regions is sheets of past. You don't remember your way in. You move through them the way you move through rooms. Abuladze's structure is exactly that, so the terror it holds is not behind anyone. It is a floor of the building you are standing in.

Avtandil Makharadze plays Varlam, and also plays Abel, the son. One face, two generations. When the son starts dreaming his father, you are watching a man haunted by his own features, and the film's argument about inheritance stops being a theme and becomes a casting decision. Then the last move: the film returns to its first image, Keti at her cakes, and folds everything back inside it. Was there an exhumation? A trial? A crystal-image, in Deleuze, is an image where the actual and the imagined can no longer be told apart and the film declines to arbitrate. That sounds like a puzzle-box trick. It isn't. The film's claim is that the reckoning has not happened. A trial we could confirm took place would falsify the claim.

The performances come out of the Georgian theatrical grotesque, and they work at the level Deleuze calls the gest: a posture that exposes a social relation instead of a private psychology. Varlam on his balcony, running the arithmetic by which four out of every three citizens turn out to be enemies. A prisoner in the mass self-denunciation scene confessing that he tunneled from Bombay to London. Nobody is expressing an inner life; they are holding the attitude the system requires, and the attitude is the evidence. This is where the film touches a contract cinema traded on for a century: the camera records, the record is testimony, film doesn't lie. Abuladze is filming a state that made lying an official procedure and manufactured confessions to prove it. Deleuze called this the powers of the false, and he usually means it as an artist's resource. Here the police got there first.

The counter-move isn't truth-telling. It is the other kind of invention: Keti's testimony, a woman telling the story of her parents in a court that may be a dream. Deleuze's word is fabulation, someone caught in the act of legending herself and her dead into existence. Deleuze also argued that modern political cinema begins where the people are missing, where a filmmaker can no longer address a constituted people and has to help call one into being. A dynasty named nobody governs a town with no date in a country the film never names. Repentance was finished in 1984 and sat on a shelf until the Union of Cinematographers threw out its own leadership in 1986 and created a commission to release what had been buried. It reached enormous audiences and was fought over in the newspapers. It didn't find its public. It helped convene one.

The Church of the Holy Sacrament, converted into a laboratory and then wrecked, gives Deleuze's crystal-decomposition its clearest object: an inherited order keeping its outward shape while rotting from inside. Mikhail Agranovich shoots the town straight on, symmetrical, flattened into backdrop, and the whole chalky civic surface behaves the same way. The best joke in the film is a piece of music. Beethoven's Ninth, the hymn to universal brotherhood, in the mouth of a mass murderer.

None of this arrived from nowhere. Abuladze had been building it for thirty years. Magdana's Donkey (1955) climaxes on a village court judging a moral question in flat frontal groupings of non-professional faces: the tribunal was already his dramaturgy. The Plea (1967) put actors in high-contrast landscape tableaux reciting Vazha-Pshavela's verse straight into the lens, and that recitative frontality becomes the declamatory courtroom rhetoric here. The Wishing Tree (1977) taught him to render a whole society as a gallery of grotesques, each welded to one prop, and to stage communal cruelty as public procession, which is the template for this film's civic pageantry. From outside his own work: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible Part II for the tyrant's court as hieratic theater, held poses and hurled shadows, the lighting grammar of Varlam's chambers and the dungeon; Chaplin's The Great Dictator for the tyrant assembled out of costume parts and played with music-hall bravura, rebuilt for Stalinism, aria included; and Paradjanov's The Color of Pomegranates for the flattened proscenium, the performers addressing the lens, and the casting of one actor across several roles, without which the Makharadze doubling does not exist.

What it did to narrative is easy to state and hard to execute. It built a story that refuses to close and made the refusal the argument. Most political films end by delivering a verdict. This one delivers a verdict and then dissolves the court that issued it. The forward lineage is the melancholy part: Abuladze made no more features. What he seeded was institutional. He proved a parable could function as a tribunal, and that a shelved film could become a national argument.

So watch it for the joins. Every time the register changes without warning, notice that you crossed the gap yourself and that nobody gave you a rule. That gap is the subject. The corpse keeps coming back because nothing was ever settled, and the question the last shot leaves on the table isn't whether Keti dreamed the trial. It's what would have to be done, in daylight and by name, for the man to stay in the ground. Meanwhile she goes on icing little churches onto her cakes.