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Repentance: The Film Companion (KINOfiles Film Companion) by Josephine Woll
Tengiz Abuladze's allegorical film, made in Georgia, is the best known film of the Perestroika and Glasnost years. With its outspoken and controversial reference to the Stalin era and Stalin's place in the Soviet psyche, "Repentance" was originally shelved but ultimately released in 1986 to widespread popular and critical acclaim. This KINOfile investigates the production, context and critical reception of the film, and the people who made it, and provides an analysis of the film itself and its place in world cinema.
Paperback
First published August 24, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 28, 2025
Honestly i am glad it was an easy read. However i feel like i already knew most things that i read in this book. But it might be because i have seen the movie 4 times and wrote essays about it so i had to think to find all the symbols they mention in the book for people who dont have time to rewatch the movie this many times it could be a great read to understand Abuladze. Good start point but not too insightful. Will use the bibliography as well.
March 21, 2018
I read this book many years ago, after watching the film it describes. Here's a copy of the review I wrote elsewhere at that time:
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My understanding was that the movie was an artistic masterpiece containing a whole lot of references to Georgian culture and history, but that it was typically judged as simply falling short of expected film-making standards by westerners (including me) who largely didn't "get it". So I was hoping for a very detailed explication of all the symbolism and the cultural background in the film, something that would turn watching the film from just an intellectual exercise into an emotional experience.
The book gave me some of what I was looking for, but not nearly as much as I was hoping for. The book pointed at some of the film's allusions to both literature and other movies. It made sense of the color palette as a reference to the Georgian flag. It pointed to the significant lapses from spoken Georgian into spoken poorly accented Russian. It confirmed that the odd glasses are a reference to Lavrenti Beria, and went further to explain that _not_ seeing through them very well is sometimes the point. And it explained what several of the seemingly odd costumes were about, including that one of them was traditional Georgian wedding finery. However, I found a biography called "Young Stalin" that I was reading about the same time to be almost equally helpful, for example providing a much better explanation for the presence of a singing performance and poetry recitation.
It explained that a surreal -sometimes almost joking- overall flavor is one of the most sensible ways for a film to approach almost unbelievable events, that perhaps the single most important idea for getting into this film is that it really is (purposefully) at least as surreal as it first appears.
Perhaps most importantly, this book explained that the movie was considered to be difficult even by Soviet audiences. The age distribution of the viewers was dramatically skewed from its normal pattern. Acceptance was much higher among some lifestyles than others. And it was typical both for the audience to be standing room only at the beginning of the screening and for half the seats to be empty when the lights came up at the end of the screening. Published reviews varied so much one wondered if they were talking about the same film. And perhaps significantly, in many cases review judgments actually had much more to do with current politics than with the aesthetics of the film.
But despite the book's claim -stated explicitly in its introduction- that it's going to focus on the aesthetic aspects rather than the political aspects of the film, it winds up doing something quite different. It devotes much of its mindshare to demonstrating the importance of seeing the film as history, both its many references to real historic events of the past few centuries and itself being a historical statement. So although the book doesn't focus too much on the political context or current events, it doesn't (at least not to my mind) really focus on aesthetics either.
Much of the book is devoted to a very detailed "frame analysis". Shot by shot, it presents the Image, the Dialogue, the Sound, and bits of Commentary. Perhaps this is a common analytic tool used by film analysts (I don't know). What I found though was most of this frame analysis just repeated in printed form what I'd already picked up by watching the movie carefully. Only the Commentary column was of interest to me, and unfortunately much of that was sketchy and rather trite, with only a few gems of interesting new information.
----------
My understanding was that the movie was an artistic masterpiece containing a whole lot of references to Georgian culture and history, but that it was typically judged as simply falling short of expected film-making standards by westerners (including me) who largely didn't "get it". So I was hoping for a very detailed explication of all the symbolism and the cultural background in the film, something that would turn watching the film from just an intellectual exercise into an emotional experience.
The book gave me some of what I was looking for, but not nearly as much as I was hoping for. The book pointed at some of the film's allusions to both literature and other movies. It made sense of the color palette as a reference to the Georgian flag. It pointed to the significant lapses from spoken Georgian into spoken poorly accented Russian. It confirmed that the odd glasses are a reference to Lavrenti Beria, and went further to explain that _not_ seeing through them very well is sometimes the point. And it explained what several of the seemingly odd costumes were about, including that one of them was traditional Georgian wedding finery. However, I found a biography called "Young Stalin" that I was reading about the same time to be almost equally helpful, for example providing a much better explanation for the presence of a singing performance and poetry recitation.
It explained that a surreal -sometimes almost joking- overall flavor is one of the most sensible ways for a film to approach almost unbelievable events, that perhaps the single most important idea for getting into this film is that it really is (purposefully) at least as surreal as it first appears.
Perhaps most importantly, this book explained that the movie was considered to be difficult even by Soviet audiences. The age distribution of the viewers was dramatically skewed from its normal pattern. Acceptance was much higher among some lifestyles than others. And it was typical both for the audience to be standing room only at the beginning of the screening and for half the seats to be empty when the lights came up at the end of the screening. Published reviews varied so much one wondered if they were talking about the same film. And perhaps significantly, in many cases review judgments actually had much more to do with current politics than with the aesthetics of the film.
But despite the book's claim -stated explicitly in its introduction- that it's going to focus on the aesthetic aspects rather than the political aspects of the film, it winds up doing something quite different. It devotes much of its mindshare to demonstrating the importance of seeing the film as history, both its many references to real historic events of the past few centuries and itself being a historical statement. So although the book doesn't focus too much on the political context or current events, it doesn't (at least not to my mind) really focus on aesthetics either.
Much of the book is devoted to a very detailed "frame analysis". Shot by shot, it presents the Image, the Dialogue, the Sound, and bits of Commentary. Perhaps this is a common analytic tool used by film analysts (I don't know). What I found though was most of this frame analysis just repeated in printed form what I'd already picked up by watching the movie carefully. Only the Commentary column was of interest to me, and unfortunately much of that was sketchy and rather trite, with only a few gems of interesting new information.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews