The Plea – 1968, Tengiz Abuladze
by Allan Fish (USSR 1968 72m) not on DVD Aka. Vedreba; The Prayer The whole village here gathered… p  Aleqsandre Jagarbekovi, Tina Ochiauri  d  Tengiz Abuladze  w  Tengiz Abuladze, Anzor Saluqvadze, Rezo Kveseleva  poems  Vazha Pshavela  ph  Aleksandr Antipenko  ed  Lusia Vartikyan  m  Nodar Gabunia  art  Revaz Mirzashvili  cos  Tengiz Mirzashvili Tengiz Archvadze (Aluda), Spartak…
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Wonders in the Dark
by Allan Fish

(USSR 1968 72m) not on DVD

Aka. Vedreba; The Prayer

The whole village here gathered…

p Aleqsandre Jagarbekovi, Tina Ochiauri d Tengiz Abuladze w Tengiz Abuladze, Anzor Saluqvadze, Rezo Kveseleva poems Vazha Pshavela ph Aleksandr Antipenko ed Lusia Vartikyan m Nodar Gabunia art Revaz Mirzashvili cos Tengiz Mirzashvili

Tengiz Archvadze (Aluda), Spartak Bagashvili (Gvtisia), Rusudan Kiknadze (woman in white), Otar Megvinetukhutsesi (Jokola), Nana Kavtaradze (Gaza), Zura Qapianidze (Zviadauri), Geidar Palavandishvili (Mutsali), Irakli Uchaneishvili (Musa), Ramaz Chkhikvadze (Matsili),

For those who know Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze through his most famous late masterpiece Repentance, The Plea will come as something of a revelation. And I use that term in a way not forgetting the original 27th and final book of the New Testament. Watching The Plea one feels that John the Evangelist was here, even Christ himself.

They weren’t the only ones, however. Nearly forty years earlier the great Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov came here, at 26, to make his first great film, the dramatized documentary on life in the Caucasian mountains, Salt for Svanetia. His film had depicted ancient stone towers, structures like sentinels from a distant past and how transport had finally connected Svanetia to the modern world. In The Plea, we’re back in time, but it’s not entirely certain how far. We’re told that the film is based on the poems of Vazha Pshavela, and as such we presume we’re around the turn of the 20th century. Yet in Pshavela’s work there’s a sense of something far more remote, as if he was merely a scribe taking down oral traditions going back centuries, after listening to storytellers in tents and caravans for countless hours.

It centres initially on a hunter soldier in a Christian village in the Caucasus who is sent out to deal with Kitsin raiders from the neighbouring hostile Moslem village. When he refuses to cut off his foe’s hand after killing him as an act of respect, he’s shunned by his villagers and sent into exile. He wanders through his own ‘valley of the shadow of death’, later coming to the Moslem village, where, too, he is shunned. He’s condemned and sent to be left to freeze to death atop a rocky mountain cemetery. Or maybe he’s not, for it’s never quite clear what is reality, what is dreamtime and what is illustrated rumination. And it’s a sense intensified by the most radical departure from traditional narrative that Abuladze employs. Rather than speaking in the traditional sense, his protagonists rather soliloquise their inward thoughts, their prayers, their pleas. It’s difficult then not only to distinguish fact from fiction but even time and place. An execution recalls nothing less than the road to Calgary…in the snow. The cemetery atop a hill could be an ancient Celtic stone circle. It’s a world unlike any we have ever known, and yet at the same time has a universal familiarity, because it’s the world of ‘the plea’.

It would be easy to look at the film and mark out its cinematic heritage; you can imagine debts to Tarkovsky, to Bergman, to Dreyer (a funeral somehow recalls Vampyr), to Vlacil, to Nicolaescu, to Ivchenko, to Paradjanov, but those we imagine such a link to are often anachronistic to the film’s making and, even were they not, Abuladze’s feels like a vision independent of any other. Its dialogue could be the contemplative final words of condemned men in cells. Its visuals, both harsh and magnificent, are dreamlike, often appearing like charcoal sketches brought to life by ant-like figures in soft focus long shot. Much of the symbolism may be lost on those without a knowledge of not only Pshavela’s work, but of Georgian traditions, songs, rituals and geography, so that the viewer may feel like a lonely traveller wandering through the valleys and mountains of the Caucuses, unsure of the path to safety. And while one must distinguish between the independence of the old Soviet states of the south, one can imagine the Ukrainian sand artist Kseniya Simonova, whose work has astonished Youtube viewers the world over, watching The Plea and seeing a similar inspiration. It’s a film of such far-reaching impact.