Women’s Bodies Situated: The Politics and Poetics of Movement and Stasis in Lana Gogoberidze’s Films

• In Event: Textures of Memory in Films of the Soviet Peripheries

Abstract

This paper explores spaces that the women protagonists inhabit, traverse, and imagine in two films of the Georgian filmmaker Lana Gogoberidze, Transfigurations (1968) and Some Interviews on Personal Matters (1978). From domestic interiors to an ancient cave monastery to Tbilisi streets, these settings are not merely attractive and functional locations in which Gogoberidze places her characters. Together with the visual pattern that repeatedly alternates between movement and stillness, they are sites of gendered encounters with the everyday, personal loss, and historical violence. In these films, movement and stillness – of the camera and of the characters’ bodies – formally negotiate the relationship between the fictional and the autobiographical, the private and the political, the narrative and the essayistic. The scenes in which the protagonists move through crowds captured by the camera from a distance, alternate with the scenes in which they are still and in close proximity to the viewer/camera. This back-and-forth pattern imparts a sense of suspension, or interruption. At crucial emotional points, we see Sofiko, Nato, and Eka suddenly pause their walking and other modes of motion. Such stillness seems to enact not only interruptions in the flow of cinematic narration and movement, but also in the characters’ personal history, figuring a pause in physical movement as loss.

Author

• Viktoria Paranyuk, Pace U