“Is what you’re doing worth a child’s tears?” a stranger asked Georgian filmmaker Nutsa Gogoberidze as she was heading off to make her film Uzhmuri (1934). She was at a train station with her five-year-old daughter, Lana Gogoberidze, who was clinging to her dress and pleading with her not to go. Nutsa left, whether her child was crying or not, and the resulting film was a masterpiece. But the question lingered long in Lana’s mind for the decades to come. That those decades were filled with years of political repression, imprisonment, heartbreak, and, eventually, a healthy dose of cinematic expression, only deepened the importance of the question for Lana. It also strengthened her resolve that yes, the perseverance of art (and her mother’s film) is worth the tears of a young child.
So recounts Lana Gogoberidze in her new documentary Mother and Daughter, or the Night is Never Complete, which traces the filmmaking lineage of three generations of Gogoberidze women. Nutsa, the first Georgian female filmmaker, was a pioneering voice in the 1930s; Lana, her daughter, is a stalwart of Soviet and post-Soviet feminist filmmaking from the 1960s to today; and Lana’s daughter, Salomé (Nutsa) Alexi, is a director in her own right and a co-director of Mother and Daughter. Lana, now 96 and a former member of Georgian parliament, is a living embodiment of the history and perseverance of Georgian cinema and culture throughout the 20th century, and her documentary is an invigorating testament to the power of art. Through archival materials, personal remembrance, and a liberal smattering of footage from the Gogoberidze women’s various films, Mother and Daughter weaves together a story of how politics, history, motherhood, and filmmaking intersected across their various lives.
Nutsa, who was sentenced to 10 years in the gulag and had her films destroyed during Stalin’s reign of terror, looms large over this story, and is largely its central subject. A largely forgotten figure in film history due to the long unavailability of her work, Mother and Daughter is, in many ways, Lana’s attempt to correct the soviet erasure of Nutsa’s career. Taking its subtitle from a poem by Paul Elard on the persistence of hope (“The night is never complete/There is always, as I say/As I stated/After grief an open window”), the film testifies to the perseverance of art and its ability to transcend political history to provide a light into the future.
This is borne out by the rediscovery of Nutsa’s long-lost films in Russian archives during the 21st century. While the first sections of Mother and Daughter provide an overview of Nutsa’s life as a filmmaker, the last stretch fully dives into the works themselves and their aesthetic power. Treating us to lengthy quotes from the two films Nutsa completed, Uzhmuri and Buba (1930), there is perhaps no stronger case to be made for Nutsa’s importance than in the rapturous images themselves. Compared by critics to Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes, Uzhmuri is a splendorous film about the rural poor in the Caucasus mountains, and it’s filled with Dovshenko-esque expressionistic montages of work, nature, and struggle. Even the few minutes of screen time Mother and Daughter devotes to a sequence of an ox drowning in a mud pit are plenty enough evidence to make a case for Nutsa Gogoberidze as a major world filmmaker. Mother and Daughter goes a long way to rectifying the mistreatment of Nutsa’s work, as well as bringing the mother-daughter relationship between Nutsa and Lana full circle. As Lana says in voiceover at the end of the film: “Once more, through the medium of cinema, my mother has returned. She has returned because dictatorship is temporal, while art is permanent.”
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