Meet Part | Mothers Daughters
The Author’s Statement on the Video Essay
- Abstract
- This audiovisual essay places Chantal Akerman’s Les rendezvous d’Anna / Meetings with Anna (France/Belgium, 1978) in dialogue with Lana Gogoberidze’s Ramdenime interwiu pirad sakitchebse / Some Interviews on Personal Matters (Georgia SSR, 1978). The piece centres the filmmakers that carve out a “room of their own” by not conforming to an expected style of film practice, be it European art house in the case of Akerman or Soviet logocentric melodrama in the case of Gogoberidze. Although made in different contexts – Akerman worked mostly in Belgium and France, Gogoberidze during this stretch of her career in Georgia, when it was part of the Soviet Union – I was struck by these films’ thematic, ethical, political, and personal resonances. Both films feature ambitious women whose identities are substantially shaped by the traumatic events drawn from the authors’ own lives.
- Keywords
- Chantal Akerman, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, Lana Gogoberidze/Lana Ghoghoberidze/ლანა ღოღობერიძე, Nino (Nutsa) Gogoberidze/Nutsa Ghoghoberidze/ნინო (ნუცა) ღოღობერიძე, Sophiko Chiaureli/Sopiko Ch̓iaureli/სოფიკო ჭიაურელი, trauma, film, video essay, feminist videographic diptych, postmemory, nonhierarchical space, split/multi-screen techniques, women’s film, auteur cinema, arthouse cinema.
- Table of contents
- no
One of the aims of my project is to begin to resituate the work that Lana Gogoberidze (also spelled Ghoghoberidze) had made during the Soviet period within a wider cinematic context, rather than viewing it from the position of the Soviet imperial binary of centre versus periphery.1 Gogoberidze is known among film devotees, but whereas Akerman’s oeuvre has been the subject of research since her groundbreaking feature Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Belgium/France, 1975), the Georgian director’s work still awaits sustained scholarly attention.2 Gogoberidze’s retrospective at Berlin’s Arsenal in 2024, the lifetime achievement award she received at the 2024 Tallinn Black Nights Festival, and recent screenings in Europe and Asia of her documentary Deda-shvili an rame ar aris arasodes bolomde bneli / Mother and Daughter, or the Night Is Never Complete (Georgia/France, 2023) augur well for a serious engagement with her career in the coming years.3
Another aim of this piece is to create a nonhierarchical space in which women filmmakers and their characters can “speak” to one another. “Meet Part | Mothers Daughters” is a “feminist videographic diptych”, to use Catherine Fowler’s term (2021; 2023). At its most fundamental, feminist videographic diptychs take “two or more women as their focus and compare them in some way, often, but not always, using split/multi-screen techniques” (Fowler 2023). The diptych, whose origins in Western culture date back to the folds of a written tablet and the hinges of a wooden altarpiece, operates on multiple levels in an audiovisual context. Placing moving image objects in different visual and sonic orientations vis-à-vis one another may offer unanticipated aesthetic, political, affective and other resonances. Importantly, the feminist videographic diptych does not produce power relations frequently entailed in the act of comparison (Fowler 2023). Rather, this method allows for a more empathetic engagement to emerge thanks to the video essay’s distinctive capabilities. Although the material conditions of production differed in the filmmakers’ respective contexts – which are most evident in the quality of the film stock they had access to, for example – Akerman and Gogoberidze faced distinct pressures of patriarchy. By narrowing the focus to mother-daughter relations, underlying trauma and their formal figurations, my piece creates a nonhierarchical space in which Les rendezvous d’Anna / Meetings with Anna (France/Belgium, 1978) and Ramdenime interwiu pirad sakitchebse / Some Interviews on Personal Matters (Georgia SSR, 1978) resonate affectively.
“Two-ness”, Fowler writes, “also affords different ways of thinking about the single image, depending upon how many other images are added to the visual field […] Immediately more conceptual and perceptual layers are added to such images, which exist simultaneously in themselves and in a kind of familial relation” (ibid.: italics in the original). My video essay explores the potential of such a familial relation while also highlighting the singularity of the main characters and the associated autobiographical and fictional material that comprises the diptych. Gogoberidze’s Sophiko (Sophiko Chiaureli) is a successful journalist in her early forties who works in the letters department of a newspaper. At twenty-eight, Akerman’s Anna (Aurore Clément) is already an accomplished filmmaker, travelling across Europe to present her work. In addition to the heroines functioning as the surrogates of their authors, the other, most important, form of two-ness is the relationship between mother and daughter: the cinematic portrait and its real-life model. In both instances, this relation is indissoluble from a family tragedy contained in a much larger historical trauma. For Anna, as for Chantal Akerman, it is the Holocaust. Akerman’s mother Natalia, familiarly known as Nelly, was arrested when she was a teenager and deported to concentration camps, first in Belgium and then in Germany. In 1945, during the death marches, she was saved by French soldiers, who brought her and her companions to a hospital and fed them “bite by bite” (Brenez 2012). Throughout her life, Akerman wanted to know more about her mother’s experience, but like many survivors, Nelly was reluctant to speak about it. For Sophiko, as for Lana Gogoberidze, it is the Great Terror unleashed by Stalin on Soviet society in the mid-1930s. Her mother Nutsa Gogoberidze, herself a filmmaker, was arrested in 1937 as the wife of “an enemy of the people” and sentenced to ten years in the Gulag. Lana was a child when her mother was arrested and seventeen when the two reunited. The filmmaker recalled that she “had to get used to saying the word Mother” (Attwood 1993: 227). The mother-daughter node is the core of my feminist videographic diptych. The configuration of meetings and partings – “I don’t know if we meet or part”, Gogoberidze says, looking at an old photo – gives an additional conceptual layer to my piece while reinforcing its two-ness.
Akerman and Gogoberidze continually engaged art to revisit, evoke, and transform these personal and historical catastrophes.4 Griselda Pollock characterises Akerman’s films and art installations “as a long journey home, namely as a journey towards the trauma that is finally claimed and transformed” (Pollock 2010: 3; italics in the original). In her autobiographical documentary Mother and Daughter, or the Night Is Never Complete, Gogoberidze is explicit about what cinema has done for her: it has brought her closer to her mother, who was absent for most of Lana’s childhood. In both instances, the figure of the mother is overlaid with a traumatic experience. A journey towards the mother, then, is a journey towards the traumatic event. Atraumatic experience may be either witnessed first-hand or felt in the form of postmemory. Postmemory, according to Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer,
describes the relationship that subsequent generations bear to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma or transformation of those who came before – to events that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these events were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation […] (Hirsch and Spitzer 2020: 14).5
Meetings with Anna inscribes the notion of postmemory into the film’s spaces, gestures, sounds, the movement of trains, bodies and the camera. For example, when the Moscow-Paris sleeper train that Anna rides comes to a screeching stop in the night, my mind goes to the horrors of deportations as they have been passed down to us, mediated by different manifestations of cultural memory. The film’s linearity is dramatised by the movement of the train, which travels in one direction. When the train halts, its labouring breaks seem to fight time’s unidirectionality. Some Interviews, conversely, addresses the trauma largely through flashbacks. However, it is not a typical flashback that smoothly, or dramatically for that matter, joins the present and the past. When a memory enters Sophiko’s consciousness, it convulses the film via a repeated cut, buckling the surface of the narrative and of time.6 Two scenes are repeated three times: Sophiko’s memory of the night of the arrest and the day her mother returned from the camps. To create a rhyme, I introduce repetition into Anna’s approaching her mother in an empty hall of the station. Akerman’s signature duration gives way to a dialogic involvement with the other work. Videographic diptychs activate “the layered nature of looking” and listening, offering “non-linear and vertical perceptual and conceptual manoeuvers that are spatially and temporally complex” (Fowler 2023).7 Through such perceptual and conceptual modalities in “Meet Part | Mothers Daughters”, the films speak to one another across diverging experiences, geographies, and historical circumstances.
One of the most significant differences between the diptych’s protagonists is how they inhabit and are constituted by their environments. Although not an entirely conventional character, Sophiko is anchored in the domestic and familial roles of wife, mother, and caretaker. We see her preparing meals, being a hostess, taking care of her ageing aunts who raised her, and mediating between her adolescent children. But most importantly, Sophiko’s sense of identity is tied to a concrete place, which in turn is inseparable from her relationship to her mother and her mother’s past. Some objects surrounding the adult heroine in her home witnessed the original event. The wall tapestry whose figures present-day Sophiko absent-mindedly traces with her finger is the same that young Sophiko, in a flashback, touches on the night of her mother’s arrest. The object, whose comforting presence initiates a haptic response as if to corroborate a memory, functions as a bridge between past and present. The tapestry hung above Sophiko’s bed on the night of the arrest - now it watches over her elderly mother’s sleep. Sometimes the camera, in documentary mode, catches the character’s movements on Tbilisi streets. Sophiko’s personal geographies are part of her identity, which is embedded in the sense of place that Some Interviews foregrounds through its narrative and visual style.
Anna’s habitat comprises hotel rooms and hallways, train stations and adjacent restaurants, spaces made concrete in their compositional symmetry and presentation by the slow-paced camera. Their attraction for Anna lies in their threshold status, unburdened by context. She is a wanderer, her travel bag invariably in tow. Anna moves through these spaces as if in a dream. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of deterritorialisation, which disavows social conventions, Ivone Margulies describes Akerman’s protagonist as someone who is detached from social norms due to her being an artist (Margulies 1996: 164). “Exile and nomadism, then”, Margulies concludes, “have a progressive thrust – they reject the values of domesticity” (ibid.).8 At the film’s end, Anna arrives in her apartment in Paris, which strikes one as disconsolate, barely inhabited, with her bedroom similar to a hotel room. The last shot is of her lying on the bed fully clothed (always ready to leave) in near darkness, listening to the messages on the answering machine. “Anna, dov’é sei? Where are you?” a voice asks on the recording. The voice belongs to the Italian woman whom Anna desires but is unable to reconnect with in her nomadic existence. Indeed: Where is Anna? Constantly on the move, here and there, unoriented towards a fixed destination – towards a home.
Through their choice of themes, focus on women protagonists, and play with form, Akerman and Gogoberidze recreate and traverse again and again the topography of personal pain, familial relationships and history, tirelessly exploring the various linkages of the autobiographical material to the matrix of historical mass violence. The formal negotiation of these concerns compelled me to look closely at these two films together, to create a diptych that generates reciprocity. This comparative method is not about flattening the differences between the two artists, their experiences, and aesthetic and formal approaches; instead, the video essay suggests – through a “poetics of differences” – points of solidarity, broader resonances, and the possibility of feminist community (Neuman 1992: 213). What would Anna and Sophiko say to each other if they met? Would they speak about their mothers? Would they walk along a Tbilisi street or sit in convivial silence as the train carries them across a European landscape still so animated with history?
Viktoria Paranyuk
Pace University
vparanyuk@pace.edu
Notes
1 On some level, Soviet melodrama and European arthouse cinema may seem disparate, but the filmmakers and the two films under consideration are comparable as they appreciably defied normative ways of cinematic storytelling.
2 Examples of important research on Akerman include monographs, such as Ivone Margulies’s Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (1996), Corinne Rondeau’s Chantal Akerman passer la nuit (2017), Marion Schmid’s Chantal Akerman (2010); edited collections, among them, Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman, edited by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (1999), Chantal Akerman: Afterlives, edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson (2019), Intérieurs sensibles de Chantal Akerman: films et installations, passages esthétiques (2024), edited by Olga Kobryn, Macha Ovtchinnikova, and Eugénie Zvonkine; and a multitude of journal articles. In contrast, western scholarship on Gogoberidze to date consists of several essays, such as Svetlana Boym’s “The Poetics of Banality: Tat’iana Tolstaia, Lana Gogoberidze, and Larisa Zvezdochetova” (1993), a profile and interview in Lynne Attwood and Maya Turovskaya’s Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era (1993).
3 https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/cinema/film-series/ein-leben-im-kino-die-filme-von-lana-gogoberidze/; https://poff.ee/en/news/p-oe-ff-honors-georgian-film-legend-lana-gogoberidze-for-lifetime-achievement-award/.
4 Akerman has addressed her mother’s experience and by association the Holocaust, directly or obliquely, in most of her fiction and documentary films, even in the musical comedy Golden Eighties (1986). Several of her video installations, an art form the artist began to develop in the 1990s, draw heavily on her cinematic work and also address the Holocaust – among them are D’Est: au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction, 1995) and Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide (To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge, 2004). Lana Gogoberidze’s oeuvre likewise reveals the director’s continual revisiting of the painful foundational memory and her mother’s tragedy. Her fiction film Walsi petschorase (The Waltz on the Petschora, 1992) is one of the most explicit treatments of the Stalinist purges and their impact on the life of her family. Gogoberidze’s most recent work, co-directed with her daughter Salome Alexi, is the autobiographical documentary Mother and Daughter, or the Night Is Never Complete (2023).
5 Alisa Lebow calls it “memory once removed” (2003: 35).
6 Lilya Kaganovsky calls Gogoberidze’s handling of the traumatic memory in Some Interviews on Personal Matters “a cinematic stutter”. The film “itself stutters”, argues Kaganovsky (Paper given at the Cinema and Poetry Conference, University of Maryland, College Park. April 21-22, 2022). A revised version of this paper will appear as: Kaganovsky 2026.
7 On a theorisation of the cinematic diptych, see Caroline Bem (2019).
8 Ivone Margulies links Anna’s nomadism to Akerman’s Jewishness and transnationalism. Akerman talked about nomadism which she identified, as Janet Bergstrom points out, “with Kafka, Jewish identity and deterritorialization: ‘I don’t know if you ever find your place…I think that goes back to my Jewish origin. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have a relationship with any place’” (Bergstrom 1999: 109).
Bio
Viktoria Paranyuk is a lecturer in the Department of Film and Screen Studies at Pace University, video essayist and freelance film programmer based in New York City. Her research interests include socialist cinemas’ engagement with history and with the politics of gender; environmental approaches to moving images; and theories of the senses. Her monograph Cinema of Sincerity: Soviet Films and Culture during the Thaw is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. Viktoria’s research has been published in Film History, Slavic Review, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays, and in edited collections, such as ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko (2024).
Bibliography
Attwood, Lynne and Maia Turovskaia. 1993. Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era. London.
Bem, Caroline. 2019. “Cinema | Diptych: Grindhouse | Death Proof,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58 (2): 1-22. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.2019.0000.
Bergstrom, Janet. 1999. “Invented Memories.” In Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman. Edited by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Trowbridge. 94-116.
Boym, Svetlana. 2018. “The Poetics of Banality: Tat’iana Tolstaia, Lana Gogoberidze, and Larisa Zvezdochetova” [1993]. In The Svetlana Boym Reader. Edited by Cristina Vatulescu et al., 114-135. New York.
Brenez, Nicole. 2012. “Chantal Akerman: The Pajama Interview.” LOLA 2.
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. 1999. Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman. Carbondale.
Fowler, Catherine. 2021. “Expanding the Field of Practice-based Research: The Videographic (Feminist) Diptych”. Journal of Media Practice and Education 22 (1): 29-60. https://doi.org/10.1080/25741136.2021.1832770.
Fowler, Catherine. 2023. “Feminist Videographic Diptychs: Introduction”. Special Issue: Feminist Videographic Diptychs. [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 10.3. https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.15455
Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer. 2020. School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference. Seattle.
Kaganovsky, Lilya. 2026. “Dysphonia as an Art Practice: Muratova, Tarkovsky, Gogoberidze”. ReFocus: The Cinema of Kira Muratova. Edited by Irina Gradinari and Irina Schulzki. Edinburgh University Press [forthcoming].
Kobryn, Olga, Macha Ovtchinnikova, and Eugénie Zvonkine, eds. 2024. Intérieurs sensibles de Chantal Akerman: films et installations, passages esthétiques. Villeneuve-d’Ascq.
Lebow, Alisa. 2003. “Memory Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est”. Camera Obscura 18.1 (52): 35-82. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-18-1_52-35.
Neuman, Shirley. 1992. “Autobiography: From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Differences”. In Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Edited by Marlene Kadar. Toronto. 213-30.
Margulies, Ivone. 1996. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Durham.
Pollock, Griselda. 2010. “The Long Journey: Maternal Trauma, Tears and Kisses in a Work by Chantal Akerman.” Studies in the Maternal 2 (1): 1-32. https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.82
Rondeau, Corinne. 2017. Chantal Akerman: passer la nuit. Paris.
Schmid, Marion. 2010. Chantal Akerman. Manchester.
Schmid, Marion, and Emma Wilson, eds. 2019. Chantal Akerman: Afterlives. Cambridge
Filmography
Akerman, Chantal. 1975. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Paradise Films.
Akerman, Chantal. 1978. Les rendez-vous d’Anna / Meetings with Anna. Hélène Films, Unité Trois, Paradise Films, ZDF.
Gogoberidze, Lana. 2023. Deda-shvili an rame ar aris arasodes bolomde bneli / Mother and Daughter, or the Night Is Never Complete. 3003 FimProduction.
Gogoberidze, Lana. 1978. Ramdenime interwiu pirad sakitchebse / Some Interviews on Personal Matters. Georgian Film Studio/ Kartuli Pilmi.
Suggested Citation
Paranyuk, Viktoria. 2025. The Author’s Statement on the Video Essay: “Meet Part | Mothers Daughters”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 20. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00020.392.
Paranyuk, Viktoria. 2025. Video essay “Meet Part | Mothers Daughters”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 20. https://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus/libraryFiles/downloadPublic/9.
URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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