Becoming From Real Story to a Surrealist Feature Film in the Most Anti-Soviet Film, Tengiz Abuladze's "Repentance"

Abstract

Tengiz Abuladze's film "Repentance", which was completed in 1984, is still considered as the most anti-Soviet film of the twentyfirst century. The third part of the trilogy - this is what Tengiz Abuladze called a combination of films of completely different genres and styles – “Invocation”, "Tree of Wish", “Repentance". What did the director mean by the unity of the screenings of Georgian literary masterpieces and the film created with the original
script? The paper will provide an analysis on this issue.

"Repentance" was on the "shelf" for three years. The film is based on a real story – the fact that happened in Samegrelo, the deceased was exhumed for revenge. The original version of the script was also designed for narration in a completely realistic cinematic language. In the first version, the avenger, the protagonist of the film, was a man, a house painter. Tengiz Abuladze was going to choose the role of avenger between Tengiz Archvadze and Gia Peradze. In the final version, the story became the fruit of the memory and imagination of a woman who baked cakes, which was filled with seemingly completely incompatible characters, details, circumstances. What caused such changes? The paper analyzes their cause-and-effect relationships in detail. The author of the paper, was an assistant on this film and tells us about the filming, the process of creating metaphors and the formation of the film's stylistics from the position of an eyewitness and a participant in the process.

The story of making this film is directly related to the policy of the then First Secretary of the Central Committee of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze. Shevardnadze started the game of democracy and "Repentance" was created under his direct patronage. In the political game, Shevardnadze successfully played the role of a progressiveminded democrat, but this did not prevent him from shooting the main actor of the main role of "Repentance", Tornike Aravidze, – Gega Kobakhidze. In the paper will be analyzed the sociopolitical situation in Georgia and the Soviet Union in the eighties and the status of Tengiz Abuladze's film in this situation.

The paper also analyzes the circumstances that prevented the release of the film for 3 years and the subsequent situation when the triumph of "Repentance" took place worldwide.

The main virtue of "Repentance" is the creation of generalized artistic faces along with the position of the director. But the characters in the movie also have specific prototypes. One of the topics of research is a comparative analysis of the actions of intellectuals, real people and heroes of "repentance" in the 1930s.

The aim of the research is to analyze the symbolic-metaphorical cinema language of "Repentance" and the influence of stylistics on the artistic quality of the film.

Tengiz Abuladze stated in one of his interviews – "One of the biggest mistakes of all time is ours, and not only ours. It is a fatal crime that a very large part of the society considers the difference between good and evil, but in fact this difference is absolute. "Repentance” was the first cinematic victory in the fight against the evil empire, and it remains so in the twenty-first century. In addition, the paper analyzes the scholarly quotes and the opinions of prominent contemporary artists – Revaz Chkheidze, Giga Lortkipanidze, Robert Sturua, Akaki Bakradze, Avto Makharadze about "Repentance", memories from the working process.