Myth and Morality in Tengiz Abuladze’s “Pokaianie (Repentance)”

Abstract

Repentance (Pokaianie, 1984), Tengiz Abuladze's phantasmagoric film about the abuse of power, is the landmark film of Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost'. Its poetic but frank depiction of fascist double-think and Stalinist methods shocked viewers who first saw it in the late 1980s. The film uses the genre of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy and an ambiguously contemporary setting with provocative mythological features to induce catharsis in the viewer. Repentance had the greater aim of inducing catharsis in a nation that needed assistance in moving out from under its own Stalinist shadow. The essay examines this philosophical film by investigating the many complex, multivalent topics that use the analogical, non-linear language of image, metaphor, and symbol and that erase the traditional boundaries that separate past from present, reality from nightmare, absurdity from logic.