Stalinism Caught Between Polyphony and Monophony: The Sounding of a Dictator in Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance

• In Event: Memory and Perestroika: Remembering the Past and Negotiating the Present in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film

Abstract

Tengiz Abuladze’s film Repentance (Monanieba, 1982 (1986)) is popularly regarded as one of the most emblematic films of perestroika. The delayed release of the film after four years of being shelved for political reasons coincided with Gorbachev’s campaign of reconsidering the Stalinist past and its crimes against Soviet citizens. This paper examines the sounding of the traumatic Stalinist era and its lingering traumas during perestroika in Repentance. Here, I analyze Tengiz Abuladze’s use of sound to confront and rethink historical narratives, reflecting on Stalinist repressions through allegorical sound storytelling. In collaboration with his scriptwriter and music designer Nana Dzhanelidze, Abuladze meticulously places noise and music at specific moments in the score. As the result, the film manipulates the musical disjunctions and noise juxtapositions not so much to signal the moral coordinates of the film as to mark the soundscape of perestroika as polyphonic or polystylistic. I argue that the film presages the policies of glasnost both in form and in content by creating an audiovisual critique of the totalitarian system and authoritarian figure of Varlam, which later redefined the depiction of Stalinism. By placing a dictator into a realm of clashing sounds from different eras and cultures, Abuladze emphasizes how this fragmented soundscape becomes an acoustic embodiment of perestroika’s anxieties and the rejection of the monophony of the past—a resonant reminder of the historical dissonance and constraints in which both the figure of power and the people are ensnared.

Author

• Anna Sbitneva, U of Southern California