Female Genealogy and Cultural Memory in Georgia

Abstract

Three generations of women creators of Georgian cinema belonging to the same family, the Gogoberidze family, will form the basis for this research, which aims to explore the notion of female genealogy through a multimodal ethnography. What type of memories does this female genealogy shape and how is it shaped by them? My research combines bibliographical research, interviews, and film analysis. By doing so, I examine how family memories as story-telling cross different expressive media and bridge generations by postulating the role of affective memory as key factor for the formation this genealogy. In addition to that, I pinpoint to the fact of the creative resignification of genealogy as part of these women’s engagement with cinema but also the social struggles of their times (feminism, anti-Russian politics, etc.).

1. Introduction

Being educated in social anthropology in the period of the transition to postsocialism, I was taught how the Caucasus and its ethnography was an area of interest for the Tsardom and later of Soviet ethnography since it gradually constituted the familiar Other, closely related to other colonial alterities such as the indigenous groups of Siberia or the nomads and Muslim kingdoms of Central Asia. The critique of the ethnographies of postsocialism soon postulated the ways the conceptualization of the Caucasus emerged through Russian Orientalism, where the categories of Europeanness, coloniality, whiteness, and Christianity strengthened the cultural superiority of Russia. By creating internal hierarchies and alterities, Tsarist Russia and afterwards the former USSR built its imperial/colonial self, which was often challenged by the West (Grant and Yalçin-Heckman 2007; Dettmering 2014). In this context, female memories and family stories remained overwritten by the patriarchal power of social discrimination and cultural Othering of the past and the postsocialist haste for economic transformation and Europeanization.

My research, here, looks at those female stories, of which a significant part remained less studied. My research focuses on the three women of the Gogoberidze family, Nutsa Gogοberidze (1903–1966), Lana Gogoberidze (1928–), and Salome Alexi (1966–), whose lives were embedded in the history of the country but also that of its cinema. My interest in the topic was developed during my last two-year research into film coproduction markets in three festival cities (Thessaloniki, Sarajevo, and Tbilisi) and the emergence of the idea of Europe (Sideri 2023). For this paper, I studied Nutsa Gogberidze’s literary work, Bednieri Matarebeli Tsinatkma Lana Gogoberidze (Happy Trains with a Preface by Lana Gogoberidze) (N. Gogoberidze 2011), Lana’s Gogoberidze, Rats Magondeba da Rogorts Magondeba (Avtograpiuli Romani) (What I think and how I think [autobiographical novel]) (2018). I also studied numerous interviews of Lana Gogoberidze and Salome Alexi on the Georgian and international press and TV or internet. I investigated these women’s narratives in complementarity with an interview with Salomi Alexi in Tbilisi (26 December 2023). Besides the written works, I studied the three women’s filmography as another mnemonic mechanism that could enrich my understanding of these women’s experiences and lives. In particular, I examined the two short films of Nutsa Gogoberidze discovered in the archives of the Russian Federation: Buba (1930) and Uzhmuri (1934). Furthermore, I studied the films of Lana Gogoberidze: Erti Tsis Kvesh (Under the Sky) (1961), Me Vkhedav Mzes (I See the Sun) (1965), Rotsa Akvavda Nushi (When Almond Trees Blossomed) (1972), Ramdenime Interviu pirad Sakiptkhebze (Some Interviews on Personal Matters) (1978), Dghes Game Utenebia (Day is Longer than Night) (1983) and Valsi Pekhoravi (Waltz at Petchora) (1992). Finally, I took under consideration the works of Salome Alexi: Si on allait à la mer (1996), Bedniereba (Felicita) (2009), and Kredit Limiti (Credit Limit) (2014).

Aim of the Study

My central conceptual tool is genealogy as a narrative (Williams 2004), which could help me postulate how female experiences are shaped, address, and challenge official history. I will consider genealogy in the way it shapes biological family continuity but also symbolic families and creative networks. At the same time, a significant part of my research is played by multimodality (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019). In this paper, I examine three kinds of stories and forms of story-telling: the three women’s writings (texts), their cinematic productions (films), and their narratives (oral stories). This multimodality will help me investigate the ways female memories are (re)produced and transmitted through different generations. This multimodality could also enrich the ethnography of the Caucasus with less dominant perceptions and experiences. I will study how these three women’s memories and films capture culture and not only history through their specific lived experiences but also as members of a family of intellectuals and artists living in the former USSR. Do different expressive modes of remembering help them treasure difficult memories due to political and historical constraints but also their gender? How do their works shape their genealogy? Though what words, images, and emotions?

Kretsedemas (2017) underlined that genealogies as narratives always reflect spatial belonging since they position a subject within a territory, a community, and an extended family. Additionally, they position a subject in a time sequence that, in a sense, addresse the core issues of the fragility, death, and continuity of humans. Genealogies generate a chain of life from past to present, from death to life. That is why they were so popular in religious or epic narratives. In the 19th century and the context of empirical positivism and evolutionism, genealogies were used in social anthropology as a mnemonic tool that helped the societies of orality to organize their social life (kinship) and register their past as a community (Stocking 1987). Genealogies provided the discipline with a typology to classify social organization and patterns of residence, as well as biological relations illustrated in a depth of time (genealogical trees), and provided a fertile ground to shape regional comparisons of human societies.

For decades, these typologies seemed to reduce and naturalize cultural and social experience, as well as the polysemy of kinship into categorizations that reflected Western perceptions and needs for a normative and taxonomic logic. These classifications formed a distinct boundary between schools of anthropological thought, the British and French Schools (de Pina-Cabral and Leutloff-Grandits 2012), provoking fierce debates that shaped anthropological thinking about the nature of kinship itself in the 1960s (see Gellner vs Needham), when a new approach began to emerge. According to this approach, genealogies were not a biogenetic ‘given’ but a cultural construct understood as an imagined embodiment of kinship (Haraway 2016; Strathern 2005). In this context, genealogies were considered as narratives about the organizational structure of ascribed cultural relationships often naturalized to enhance its social significance (see the concept of ‘cultures of association’ developed by Janet Carsten (2000)).

The so-called linguistic turn in the 1960s paved the way for the work of Michel Foucault (2003), where genealogy turned into a key tool for questioning hegemonic discourses of social order and self-management. In addition to that, for Foucault, genealogy helped him reveal the underlying reasoning of the emergence of the Western modernity. His work, focusing on the production of a dominant causality and truth claims, attempted to trace the mechanisms and reasons that generate epistemologies of knowledge, institutional practices, and technologies of Self. Within this project, genealogy emerged as a method to construct an alternative to history. Instead of considering history as linear and continuous, genealogical investigation revealed uneven and random processes of dispersal and ruptures, which called into question the linearity of Modernity. Genealogy tried to go further, tracing possible ways of thinking differently rather than legitimizing dominant truths through documentation. The aim was to provide the subjects with the possibility to recreate the historical and practical conditions of their present existence (Tsibiridou 2022). However, how do these conditions become recreated in the context of particular families?

Using genealogy as part of family story-telling, A. M. Smith (2008) tried to understand how family culture is perceived by its members and is communicated from generation to generation. Smith’s work studied families in the USA through women’s narratives expanding in different generations. Her work aimed at placing these narratives within the wider family and community structures, shedding light on female experiences. As A. M. Smith (2008, p. 18) argued, “families construct their reality together, through a blending of family narratives, experiences, and artifacts. This blending is often accomplished through story-telling, and these stories within families have multiple purposes’’. These stories can often reveal an established family culture (rules of family formation, relations, rites, etc.), but also individual identity formation, as well as resistances of various forms to preconceived identity expectations, which many families have regarding their members.

To do so, Smith first postulated the ways genealogical research concerned as much the past as well as the present. For this reason, it was crucial to contextualize her findings in relation not only to factual data (historical context) but also to the meanings generated by the stories of family members treasured through different generations and exchanges. Smith challenged the belief that men make and write history, whereas women are bound in the domestic space to share stories or memories as stories with no testimonial value. In this line of thought, I will explore the stories of three women and creators as insights into the micro-context and emotional worlds where they live and produce. I will argue that remembering turns women into active agents that contribute to history and experience by ‘building across difference’ (Hua 2005, p. 202).

How did the three women and creators I studied transmit and exchange memories that shaped a family line and what memories were those? Which expressive means did they choose to evocate and make them visible? Expanding the research beyond the linguistic aspects of narratives (what people say) and looking into the creative work of these women gave me new insights into these memories and family stories. As Kress underlined, texts are constituted by the collaboration of different semiotic modes (see Sideri 2016). I will try to consider these different creative modes of expression not only as different spaces of communication but also as less logocentric and male dominated-modes of reflection regarding experiences and family history (Varvantakis and Nolas 2019). I argue that including these three women’s films as visual narratives helped me consider connections beyond the biological family and in the field of cinema and film networks. Exploring how their creativity shaped links with feminism, as it was expressed in cinema, can help us rethink the category of auteur (author), which dominated European cinema in the sixties and stressed male creative genealogies and a dominant male individuality. Furthermore, this broader approach to genealogy could help us revisit the way patriarchal relations are thought within the Georgian—and maybe the Caucasian—context, as my paper will postulate how female memories and genealogies are much more complex and ambiguous in the ways they entangle with family traditions in the area and beyond.

Astrid Erll (2011), studying the impact of the increasing use of media and digitalization on memory studies, stressed the importance of “travel” of memories. Τhe “traffic between individual and collective levels of remembering, circulation among social, medial and semantic dimensions’’ (ibid., p. 15) could supersede physical and symbolic borders and boundaries, often capturing transcultural aspects of memories often neglected by the more ethnocentric and bounded framework of analysis in previous decades. Traveling memories are also involved in media crossing but also circulation through different generations. Following memories within this transcultural/inter- and trans-medial perspective could help us, for Erll, deepen our understanding of the past. In my case, this intermediality from generation to generation and transmediality from text to film or family story-telling will become a way to trace the genealogy of these three narrators as women and creators. Although the three women had access to all three media (text/film/oral stories), it seemed that their stories found specific trajectories to travel and reveal themselves in each period and to cross borders and boundaries.

Furthermore, Erll’s (2014) work on the traveling of memories continued by taking into consideration also the issue of genealogies and how memories travel among and through them. Trying to draw the attention to generation in the literary and memory studies, Erll examined the different approaches to generations by stressing Karl Mahheim’s work and his idea of generationality. The latter as a concept, Erll (2014, p. 387) stated, connected the formation of “auto and hetero identities” which is crucial for the use of the concept of generation but she argued for an update of that distinction as digitalization and intermediality produced new realities. Trying to explore how generation could be a useful conceptual tool in the digital era where the circulation of memories through various media is the canon, Erll referred to the work of Mariann Hirsch and her idea of postmemory as “generational structure” and not as an “identity position” (Hirsch from Erll 2014, p. 399). This concept challenged the dichotomies between the biological and the social, the experienced, and the mediated. Drawing from that, Erll proposed the idea of “genealogies of mnemonic affiliation” (ibid., p. 400) as an idea where both the lived and the familial could interlace with the notion of generation in an era of increased speed and hyper-mediation, especially in the field of arts and artists.

This discussion is crucial for the way I am approaching how the three women remember family. The idea of mnemonic affiliation is a key term not only because it helps reveal contingency through time and media of expression but also because it assists my exploration of how this affiliation is shaped within rupture, silence, and invisibility due to political constraints and difficulties. Moreover, mnemonic affiliation encourages the examination of how this remembering is constricted through a multimodal crossing of media and periods of time. The memories that these women shared through different expressive media belonged in the same family but, at the same time, each one of them fertilized family stories with both their social experiences and creative visions. For example, I am examining below the most well-known film of Lana Gogoberidze, Some Interviews on Personal Matters (1978), which exemplifies this cross-fertilization between lived memory (the incident described below took place in late 1950s) and film (the film was produced in the 1970s). It was that fertilization that allowed different memories to travel in different media or to be hidden for decades to become voiced again when political and social conditions allowed it. Tracing this female genealogy of mnemonic affiliation, I am trying to postulate the women as particular cum historical subjects but also in connection with other women and how this type of affiliation is transferred to/through their art and social engagement.

2. Material and Methods

2.1. Family as a Story: From Text to Film and from Film to Text

There is a scene towards the end of the film, Some Interviews on Personal Matters (1978, 1:22:15), when the main character, the young, independent female journalist Sophiko, has found out about the extramarital affair of her husband and she returns home after spending hours at the apartment of her colleague and possible lover. The scene builds a theatricality through a different rhythm from the rest of the film, which, to great extent, is shot in the busy streets of the Georgian capital. At home, Sophiiko finds out that her mother lies on her deathbed. When she enters the room, a close up of her blue eyes takes her back in time. The flashback is dominated by the sound of a bell in contradiction to the jazz tunes of the rest of the film. People in black are waiting. At first, the viewer might think that there is a funeral. Then, a tall woman in black enters the room. Sophiko, with a hairstyle reminiscent of a child, stands with her back at the wall. She doesn’t move. The tall woman—the mother—approaches the childlike Sophiko and hugs her. Sophiko doesn’t move. Then, her mother takes a seat and washes her face with water. Sophiko can see only a black shadow in front of a Caucasian carpet hanging on the wall. Only after washing her face, the mother becomes recognized by Sophiko. ”Deda” (mother), Sophiko whispers, and we return to the present time, where the old lady lies dead on her bed.

The same scene is repeated in Lana’s autobiography published few years ago and also in other writings (L. Gogoberidze 2018; N. Gogoberidze 2011). It is interesting how transmediality, from text to film and vice versa, plays an important role in narrating what Lana remembers from her mother. What is interesting in the above scene is the fact that Sophiko and her mother do not change in age in Sophiko’s memory. She has remained that child–woman who does not know how to react to the return of her mother after the exile in the same way that, as a married woman, Sophiko does not know how to react to the knowledge of betrayal of her husband.

The specific film became the first to include autobiographical memories where the relation between mother and daughter rose so intensely. The moment of the encounter and recognition took place in the 1970s, when the first testimonies of the Stalinist atrocities came upfront (for instance, Gulag Archipelago was published in 1973) and a generation of people who did not experience Stalin’s terror as a collectively trauma grew up. In this section, I will examine this story of return and how it is transmitted through these three generations by referring to the lived experiences of Nutsa and Lana Gogoberidze. I will explore the ways these experiences were captured by these two women’s work but also by Salome’s interview. The objective of this section is to study the circulation of this family story from generation to generation and from media to media.

Born in a rural family with old roots in the far eastern part of Georgia, in Kakheti, Nutsa Khutishvili-Gogoberidze was one of the six children of Batlome Khutisvilisi. The region was for many years disputed between the kingdoms of Kartli (the ancestral state of Georgia) and the Persianized kingdom of the current state of Azerbaijan. Even when Kakheti was incorporated in Sakartvelo (Georgia), the local lords often challenged the central power, especially after the Russian invasion and the establishment of the colonial regime (see for example, the Kakhetian princes’ revolt in 1802). Batlome, as a teacher, aspired in the civilizational mission of many Georgian intellectuals in the 19th century–early 20th century (Batiashvili 2021), where education was considered an ideal both for access to modernity and Europe but also a way to a national awakening (see Suny 1994). Lana started her preface (2011) to her mother’s literary account of her exile in Siberia, with a family migration, a rural–urban mobility, but also an aspiring social mobility. Batlome and his family left the village of Kakhi in Kakheti and traveled to Tbilisi so that the children—boys and girls—could receive a proper education.

In her seminal work on “Rural Families in Georgia” (1988), Tamara Dragazde also examined gender roles. One of the issues she underlined was that Georgia’s history was full of military invasions. Feudal society gained capital, both real and symbolic, from the participation of men in these wars. At the same time, women stayed at home. Being at home, women were bestowed with domestic tasks, one of them being the cultivation and preservation of literacy and written tradition, the Great Tradition, for example, epic poetry and saints’ life, which even today is highly valued in Georgia. Russian colonialism since the 18th century made this task even more important, as the family duty for education and literacy turned to a national one (ibid., pp. 159–60). This was intensified in the 19th century and the emergence of Georgian nationalism. Studying this period among the privileged families of the country, Khatuna Gvaradze (2021) discussed what she called the women’s liberation movement. In that context, the education of young girls and women became an important issue for the national awakening.

Soon, the women’s question, as Gvaradze (2021, p. 158) stated, became interwoven with the national question starting with a few bourgeois women who had an “international orientation” in their studies. For example, women often traveled to Russia or Switzerland, or in Germany (Jena) like Nutsa, and then, it was broadened to include a demand for general education for all women. However, this movement, as Gvaradze pinpointed, re-traditionalized women’s roles as mothers and daughters to “emancipate themselves but also the country though taking up the role of national cultures and language transmission” (ibid., p. 187). Lana’s choice to refer to that mobility underlined the way the ideals of modernity were perpetuated during the Soviet times and they still are much appreciated in Georgian society.

After her studies in Germany, Nutsa was involved in cinema. Cinema was much embedded in modernity as an art, capturing motion and change. When Nutsa started to make films, socialist realism was the dominant paradigm. She made three films in her life, in the first half of the 1930s. The rise of Stalin in the Party’s leadership and the pogrom in 1937 against intellectuals led Nutsa to Siberia as her husband, Levan Gogoberidze, who was a Party member, and for a short period leader of the Communist Party in Georgia, fell from grace and was executed. Her films, produced before her exile, Buba (a semi ethnographic and socialist agitation film about the mountainous people of Ratcha (1930)) and Uzmuri (1934), a film based on a Georgian legend, seemed to pay particular attention to women. In Buba, the scene with the young woman’s effort to integrate her duties as a mother in the harsh life in the field stood out. Lana was almost ten years old when she lost her dad and mom due to Stalinism. In her autobiography, L. Gogoberidze (2018, pp. 102–3) wondered whether her mother was thinking about her as a child when she shot that scene in Buba (Lana was two years old when Buba was produced), showing how much the absence of a mother turned films into an important source of shaping in retrospect an affective bond between a mother and daughter. Furthermore, her thoughts showed how, even at an advanced age (she was in her 80s when she wrote her memoir), she had unanswered questions regarding her mother. Nutsa was not there to be asked, but her film was available when Lana was growing up. However, Nutsa’s work was forcibly sent to oblivion because of her stigmatization as an enemy of the people, according to Nutsa’s granddaughter, Salome. Nutsa’s films disappeared and nobody talked about her as an artist.

During the Soviet period, as Maia Barkaia underlined (Barkaia 2017, p. 34), Georgia was positioned in the premodern/religious/illiterate and backward cultural hierarchies. As a result, gender policies were part of the new civilizational cum ideological agenda of Soviet Georgia. The application of these policies that institutionalized female labor and their political equality did not seem to overcome cultural norms and expectations. Nevertheless, the so-called double burden, a term that summarized the inconsistencies of the application of gender policies in the Soviet Union and the continuity of patriarchal traditions on gender roles in the domestic space in parallel with the rising number of women in the labor force, became a permanent feature of the life of millions of Soviet women (Ashwin 2000).

“So, and I think, my theory is that she [Nutsa] never spoke about her previous life [before the deportation], because first of all, it was a really, really wonderful life which was stopped, like in [19]37. And my idea. Because now, if you watch this new film [Deda-Shvili an rame ar Aris Arasodes Bolomde Bneli, Mother and Daughter, or the Night is never complete 2023], you will see that what Lana is telling is that [even if] they went to the same place, Nutsa was with Lana, and Lana had a shooting for example, in these big studios [Qartuli Pilmi], which was one of the biggest film studios in Tbilisi, like right from here, and [Nutsa] was a companion to her daughter, without telling her that she had worked there. She just really didn’t. And I say, my idea is that she preserved her daughter from this heavy past. [...] But I’m wondering because, for example, there was Kalatozov. Nutsa worked with him and in the sixties when she came back at the end, in the fifties, why nobody told anything about her. Maybe, maybe, it’s not an easy way to say it, but I would say maybe [because] it was a woman”.

For Salome, Nutsa’ silence turned to a family story that needed to be explained. However, even today, Νutsa’s invisibility and silence, which was self-enforced, puzzles Salome. Working with hypotheses today when gender is much discussed, Salome believed that Nutsa’s (creative/public) Self was obliterated by the public memory because her grandmother was a woman: thus, a minor damage would be done to the Great Cultural Tradition of the country. However, what did Nutsa say and feel? Lana remembered her mother’s words during the period before the exile, when the signs of what was about to happen seemed to be there, “You ask from us to make ‘agitfilms” but we are in such a crossroad where loneliness is a death penalty” (Lana Gogoberidze’s preface from N. Gogoberidze (2011, p. 8) Bednieri Matarebeli). Nutsa had already made her third film, Uzhmuri (1934), where a female deity was believed to ask for sacrifices from the villagers in order to become tamed and turn the land fertile. The film was considered anti-Soviet as it did not praise the Soviet values. So, Nutsa’s exile as an artist seemed to have started before the physical exile to Siberia. where she stayed for ten years. Friends and colleagues like Kalatozov, mentioned in the interview, seemed to take distance from her, leading her to “loneliness” and then, her physical and artistic exile in Siberia.

When Νutsa returned, as Lana remembered, she tried to balance between the family life and work, experiencing the double burden that many Soviet women went through. Lana was almost twenty years old when her mother returned. Maia Barkaia (2017, p. 34) stated that following the postcolonial critique, the emancipation of women was constructed in the regimented interpretation of Otherness, as the latter was shaped by the dominant idea of modernity. In the case of women, their Otherness was constructed through their victimization from the oppressive traditions. Nutsa Gogoberidze worked mainly as a freelance translator and then she got a job at the Institute of Languages. In her autobiography, Lana remembered Nutsa, even before her exile, as always running for work (L. Gogoberidze 2018). Often the young daughter was entrusted to family friends, artists and intellectuals during the hours Nutsa was at work. From this upbringing, Lana learnt to love foreign languages and world literature. Nutsa seemed to have transmitted the cultural values of education and high culture to her daughter through the habitus that Lana was forced to experience due to Stalinization.

As much as Nutsa tried to bury her past, either because she wanted to protect her daughter or because she wanted to forget, the memories of the exile could not be suppressed forever. There is a big discussion regarding the Gulag Literature (Andén 2021), which examines the innate double nature of this genre. This double nature oscillates between the ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ but also the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’. Gulag survivors often explain in their writing that they chose to publish their memories as a moral duty to those perished, as well as a testimony. N. Gogoberidze (2011) Bednieri Matarebeli consists of six short stories. We do not know if she ever thought of publishing them. Her daughter found them and decided to publish them after Nutsa’s death and the fall of the former Soviet Union. When I was reading the stories, I had the impression that I was watching a film. The stories have a cinematic quality. Writing fiction seemed like making a film. The mise-en-scene of the stories included close ups to indirect and almost hidden glances, and a detailed description of the setting, often the cells or the yard behind the hermetically closed gates of the prison. The yard was a very important female social space between the public and the domestic in Georgia (Dragadze [1988] 2003, pp. 51–52). In Nutsa’s stories, the yard was a female space for escaping the dehumanization of the Gulag. There, women imagined their return home, their return by train, these happy trains that would reconnect them to family and friends. In 1992, Lana shot The Waltz on the Petschora which was based on Nutsa’s short story with the same title. The film followed a parallel narration, that of a young girl whose mother was in exile, and she escaped from the state orphanage to go back home, and that of the exiled mother who dreamt of her own and her co-prisoners’ return through a death walk in the snow covered steppes of Siberia. Again, Lana’s creativity matched her childhood desire, her connection to her mother in parallel stories of imagination, desire, and return.

However, this return was not as it was imagined. As Lana confessed years after the film Some Interviews on Personal Matters in the Preface she wrote for her mother’s book of short stories (N. Gogoberidze 2011, p. 12), “As I was wrapped up with her [Nutsa], I could not feel anything else but embarrassment”. Lana felt embarrassed as she could not remember the woman standing before her; she could not immediately feel Nutsa as a mother. In the film, though, this embarrassment is superseded by a symbolic, almost platonic scene that follows the first encounter. In that second scene, we follow the daughter’s POV, which tries to discern her mother but she cannot. She only discerns a shadow. When the mother washes her face with water, she becomes visible as a person in the daughter’s eye. Only then, they embrace each other. In a way, only the cinematic camera helped Lana really see and understand her mother’s and her own separation and reunification.

Konstantin Sergheievic Stanislavski developed his method of acting based on affective memory. “Recalling a memory does not only involve passing or recapitulating an already memorized event, but also activating images, similar correspondences with it, accompanied by its sensory qualities’’ (CuruŢiu-ZoicaŞ 2021, p. 130). Living more with absence and loss, these women seemed to have become engaged in a mise-en-scene of material and social worlds, where memory and imagination intersected and complemented each other, giving us insights into their own emotional worlds. Khalid and Helander (2006, p. 554) stated that there is an association between emotions and events that they called “affective matching”. These three women almost craft their memories by matching images, words, and silences to materialities, the yard, the Caucasian carpet, the Tbiliseli balconies and streets, and their books and films. These associations cross media (texts, film, and oral stories), forging affective bonds and biological or fictive families. Moreover, these associations let us have an insight into the ways affective memory (re)works not only family stories and feelings but also wider traditions of representation. Memories do not only craft family bonds but also the filmic tradition of Georgia and its cultural memory. Bartosz Wieczorek (2021) stated that during Khrushchev’s thaw in the 1960s, Georgian cinema started to develop the distinctive features, something I will develop further below, it is known for: individuality and poetry. These features are obvious in the above stories; what is experienced and how it is visually or textually narrated in the above stories draw from this tradition that crosses family generations and is attached to female family roles.

Arcangeli and Dokic (2018) tried to understand how affective memory works. The main question they tried to answer was what emotion is remembered in affective memory, that of the past (a narrated emotion) or its emotional result in the present (subjective feeling). To a degree, any act of remembering contains this dual perspective between the past and the present. Nevertheless, in affective memory, there is much more interdependence between the two perspectives (Subject/Narrator). This interdependence is reinforced by female subjectivity, which, as it is shaped within masculine dominant categories and patriarchal structures, became critical of such distinctions between the experienced and the narrated. In the above case, the three female creators turn their story-telling into a mise-en-scene that is rooted in their memories but also gives us an insight into how this tradition is crafted by women’ creativity that goes beyond traditional family roles. The props that the three women used to recreate their memories further added to this direction to intensify the imagination and emotional experience of remembering. For these three women whose memory and subjectivity was sealed by loss and exile, remembering the past is an orchestrated recreation that contributed to overcoming rupture and fabricated the past through emotional labor and care, where female agency through sharing and solidarity excels.

2.2. Women’s Networks

In Section 1, I tried to trace how genealogy was constructed among these three women through intermediality. I explored how and through what media their memories were expressed, stressing how much affective memory produced experience, as well as how much creativity contributed to daily bonds in dark times, absence, and loss. Here, I will examine genealogy beyond biological family in networks of women creators before and after the Cold War and how these networks became part of these three women’s experiences.

Salome, in her first student movie in ΙDHEC, Si on allait à la mer, told a story of a young migrant woman who left her country due to political problems to live in France. The film used family and personal memories in two ways. The first one was the black and white documentary-like images from the demonstration of April the 9th in Tbilisi, which acted as a push factor for the young female migrant. The demonstration took place in 1989 against the Soviet authorities and had several young people killed. The other was a scene/memory of a sea, which recurred the film under different photographic conditions, one more realistic and the other more dreamlike exposing feelings of nostalgia.

Talking with Salome about this scene, I pinpointed the fact that in L. Gogoberidze’s (2018) autobiography, a similar memory was described as the happiest of her life. Lana related the last time she visited with both her parents at the sea. Salome smiled, “Georgia is not a sea country. We are not really involved like [in sea]. It is also very special because it’s more a history of mountains developing in the country and not that much of the sea”. It is interesting how Salome connected that memory of the trip to the sea with her generation; this interlink between the individual and the collective can be also traced in her mothers’ memories. In Salome’s film, that deep blue frame of the sea turned to a symbol or a promise for happiness in opposition to the black and white frames she used from the demonstrations against the USSR on April 9, 1989. Not in exile like Nutsa but away from home for studies like Lana, Salome’s film used the same affective memory with the same ingredients, the sea, the oppression, and the experience of being away from home to talk about history and her family’s herstory. In a book examining a feminist approach to history, the late Gerda Lerner (2019, p. 186) tried to show how working against the “selective forgetting” of women’s contribution to history was initiated by a “holistic worldview” that connected women to the public sphere and history. Gogoberidze’s family lived and made films working towards this end, this interlink between the personal and the social.

Lana Gogoberidze underlined in her interview to Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Gogoberidze and Schulte Strathaus 2018) that she never was interested in relating the story of one woman but what was her intention was to address the social and historical aspects of female subjecthood. Her own habitus became a space of comparing other women’s stories. For example, the single-parent family both for Nutsa and Lana made them strong and independent. In their lives, there were all three of them surrounded by a circle of other women, for instance, the grandmother who raised Lana or other Georgian female artists and intellectuals who were always in Gogoberidze’s house or in the film settings where both Lana and Salome grew up. Asking Salome about this upbringing, she remembered,

“All these women, they were living like they were, like representing the sixties of, the European 68. You know, they were a small world. They had their own small world of these women friends with this kind of community. (...) And she (Lana) had really few women like that and their friendship was so strong. So and, and they really, it happened that it was like that, you know?”

Salome pointed out a female circle, a community of women, or as she phrased it above, a “world”, which created a space of female intimacy, care, and support but also creativity. This habitus created an affective memory that was transmitted from generation to generation among these three women. As Salome confessed, “when we grew up, we thought that all Georgia was like that but you know, we thought that this was normal. And later, I understood that Lana was keeping it like that”. This habitus in the Gogoberidze family was shaped through experiences like the death of the father, the exile of the mother, political stigmatization and migration, a one-parent upbringing and mothers as the head of the family, but also cinema and creativity, which seemed to compensate for any emotional losses. This habitus produced a female net of protection and emotional fulfillment to fill in the gaps from any tragedy or absence. At the same time, the reference of Salome to the 1960s was not coincidental (see Gorsuch and Koenker 2013). Lana’s life and the most productive work period was connected to the feminist movements and the political cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.

Studying in the post war period, first in Moscow and then in Paris, Lana found herself in the midst of these changes. When she started to study cinema, however, she found herself in the class of Yevgeni Yerasimov, having classmates like Kira Muratova and Andrei Tarkovski but also the co-ethnic Georgian artists: Elgar and Giorgi Shengelaia, Misha Kobakhidze, and Otar Iosseliani (L. Gogoberidze 2018, p. 156). Even since her first film, Lana showed an interest in women’s subjectivity and history. Erti Tsis Kvesh (Under One Sky) (1961) included three love stories of women in different periods (1921, 1941, and 1961). The three female characters followed their emotions and passion, paying the price. As Rachel Pronger (2021) commented, “Gogoberidze always leant into this definition. In practice, this has meant an unflinching commitment to female subjectivity”. Lana became interested in exploring women’s lives oscillating between the public and the domestic, their relations to family, lovers, other women, labor or society but also the Soviet system and history. She also explored these themes always positioned herself within the Georgian society and history from a Georgian woman’s perspective, which culminated in the film Dghes game Utenebia (Day is Longer than Night) (1984), where she related the Georgian history in the 20th century through a woman’s perspective and agency. At that point, there was a wider interest in national histories in the former USSR.

As Karla Oeler (2007) pointed out, in the 1960s, there was a proliferation of representations regarding “the cultural specificities of the republics in which they work” (p. 140) in the work of the Soviet filmmakers. Often these specificities drew from mythology and folklore (the most known case is that of Sergei Paradzanov). This shift towards the ethnographic particularity for Oeler was supported by the Soviet Nationality Policy since it mirrored the Soviet multiculturalism and did not protest against authoritarianism. However, Dušan Radunović (2014, p. 21) challenged this conclusion by stating that the engagement with “ethnic particularities of constituent nations” might have been “above all the symptom of the crisis of that reality—more precisely, of the ideological platform on which it stood”. In other words, non-Russian artists turned their back to the Soviet system and shifted to their own, national roots.

Following his line of thought, I would place his argument in the wider context of the cinema in the former socialist world adding a more transnational perspective to his argument. That national awakening emerged in opposition to a bureaucratic state that dehumanized individuals. The quest for “socialism with a human face” (see Bartlová 2019) seemed to become significant in many socialist countries and its cinemas (see for example, the Black Wave in the former Yugoslavia or the New Wave in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or Poland, etc.). Drawing from the French New Wave, which put forward demands for a fresher take in cinematic writing and form but also the rising critique against the Stalinist authoritarianism, this cinema tried to open a transnational dialogue among film creators and trends beyond the divisions of the Cold War. Almost ten years after her first film in 1972, Lana Gogoberidze continued the representation of strong women who stood against social wrongdoings and impediments. In the film Rotsa Akvavda Nushi (When Almond Trees Bloom), Gogoberidze examined Soviet corruption in a story of teenage love. How did the power of nomenclature corrupt young people’s consciousness? Could national cultural values act as an impediment? Did women’s sensitivity make them prone to social justice?

Lana’s well-known film, Some Interviews on Personal Matters (1978), followed the same issues, a journalist struggling to balance the double burden of home and work. In a text for her participation in the Tokyo Festival (1985) with this film, Lana wrote, “My films always talk about the female destiny in a dramatic way. I want to reflect upon the reasons of this destiny”. Lana was very conscious about her mission as a female artist and she seemed not to deny this label, but to endorse it by engaging herself in the examination and reflection of what this femininity meant, how it was formed through the years, but also from a well-placed, socially and culturally, position. Autobiography and experience were always present in Gogoberidze’s films. This experience included circles of female collaboration either more intimate, like I showed above, or more professional.

Kristen Ghodsee (2019) examined how in the last period of the Cold War (1970–1980), Second World women were very active in the development of a global feminist movement and networks, especially those shaped in the postcolonial Global South, a process supported by the geopolitics of the Cold War. Although often for western feminists, the eastern bloc and Soviet women could not be considered as feminists because they were considered pawns within authoritarian regimes, women in the socialist part of the world seemed to have been active in that period in shaping networks beyond nation-states and have a strong presence to lead and inspire in international organizations like the UN. In this framework, Lana put in practice what she cultivated as a second nature to care and support other women, especially fellow creators. In this way, she seemed to go against the dominant drive of the auteur cinema where creative genius and individuality were stressed (Vincendeau 1987). The masculine, white, bourgeois high art (see Jaikumar 2016) that shaped the European canon in that period was challenged in Lana’s engagement with forming a solidarity network of female filmmakers.

Since the mid-1970s, as the research of Pavla Frýdlová showed (Frýdlová 2019), there have been initiatives for a wider recognition of women’s contribution to cinema. For example, in 1975, there was a colloquium in Italy on Women in Film under the auspices of UNESCO. The same organization held a similar meeting dedicated to women that took place in Belgrade in 1976. In 1978, the international conference, Drug-ca zena took place again in the Yugoslav capital with an important contribution to women film directors. In this framework, in 1987, in Moscow, Lana Gogoberidze invited thirty festival participants from twenty-four countries to establish an organization of women in film to support and help each other through a variety of activities like organizations, meetings, seminars, festivals, etc. The initiative was named KIWI and the inaugural conference took place in Tbilisi between the 26 February and the 3 March 1988 (295–302). The network in those years was fully funded by the socialist governments in opposition to the scarce resources that women creators in the West had. The last meetings of the network took place both in 1989, one in Jurmala (Estonia) and Prague, a few days after the fall of the socialist government of the country.

The geopolitical changes in the 1990s brought the discussion of the past, identity, and heritage to the forefront. Europe itself was looking into its history trying to rewrite it in a more inclusive way. For the societies coming out from the socialist experiences, there was a more complicated agenda of economic reconstruction, social–political changes, and rewriting of the past. In Georgia, the formation of the new independent nation-states tried to leave behind the Soviet colonial history. As Stephen Jones (2014, p. 46) underlined, the country and the country’s elite never allowed memory and the past to die; how and which memories will continue or discontinue is the result of many dynamically interacting political, economic, and social factors. Breaking ties with the past was dominant in the process of transition and Europeanization that was implemented in the 1990s. Especially after the Rose Revolution in 2004, Saakashvili’s government tried to take distance from the past dominant in the public discourse (Karaia 2017, p. 7). In that context, Lana decided to dig out her family’s and mother’s film history.

3. Conclusions: Heritage, Genealogy and Ethnography

“Lana was almost afraid to go further not knowing what it was, if it was something, nobody spoke about it, maybe bad or too ideological or out of propaganda. And then, she started to look. And then as a person, a critic told me about the mental ideology of the 1930s, they will very easily disappear the person, but they very cautiously preserve the work. It was amazing everything was there, very well preserved” [interview with Salome Gogoberidze].

Definitions of heritage often try to capture what it is in relation to specific sites or meanings and values that are connected to different memories or understandings and experiences of memory (i.e., the official discourse about memory). The interrelation of the idea of heritage, especially in Europe with the formation of nation-states and the rise of nationalism, exerted an influence on its objectification to specific territory and culture. However, as L. Smith (2006, pp. 1–9) argued in her book The Uses of Heritage, the above definition were connected to what she called ‘authorized heritage discourse’, in other words, discourses of power that produce knowledge, ideologies, and relations often disseminated through policies, administration, and experts. Lana’s initiative tried to shed light on the non-authorial heritage, which, nevertheless, in that transformative moment for Georgia was about to become national postcolonial history.

Nutsa Batiashvili (2019), examining the state of the intelligentsia in post-Soviet Georgia, underlined that the negotiation with the past had been a central issue of the Georgian public space in those years. In a similar project examining the relation between memory conflicts and state-building in the Saakashvili period, Tamara Karaia (2017, p. 18) concluded that the politics of memory in Georgia was approached top-down. The main direction of the memory is an attempt to implement a hegemonic narrative through strategies of symbolization and victimization. In this context of coming to terms with the past and tracing “alternative versions of history” (Martínez 2017, p. 25), Lana’s decision seemed to address various needs: the recognition of the family past personally and nationally, to face the Soviet terror and its impacts on Georgia and Georgian artists, and to create a new Georgian archive of memory that remained handicapped by the Soviet policies. This agenda can explain Lana’s fear of what she was going to find in regard to Nutsa’s films.

As a result, I believe that for both Lana and Salome, rediscovering and bringing to Georgia Nutsa’s film was a process of revisiting the difficult family/Georgian heritage, that of Stalinization. Nutsa’s story and work seemed to bridge present time Georgia and the pre-Soviet one, which was crushed by the introduction of the Stalinist politics. The rediscovery of Nutsa’s work fitted the new vision of Georgian female propriety and morality (education, sacrifice as a mother, and victim of colonizers). Nevertheless, ethnography showed that finding the family’s heritage was not part of the symbolization agenda that Karaia underlined above. Rather, that was not the only use. Instead, the meaning of heritage has a communicative use.

Nevertheless, for Salome, the heritage that connected the three generations seemed to be much more affective and emotional; it concerned independence, economics and politics, social engagement, and mobilization through strong female networks.

Heritage, coming from Lana, “is feminism just to be really strong in this post-Soviet Georgia, I think it’s another circle. It’s a really new struggle because the financial independence is very difficult to, and I think it’s the most important issue to be responsible of yourself, like women and in Georgia. It’s really, of course, even much more difficult, like in Europe. So I think Europe so that the woman who can be really independent, like my grandmother, like Lana, managed in the Soviet period and now in this post-Soviet period to go on with it”.

For Salome and other Georgian female directors, a new circle of struggle began against the so-called reorganization of the cultural sector under Tea Tsulukiani, the Minister of Culture in Georgia whom Salome and her colleagues accused her of trying to Russify the cinema by supporting artists who embraced a more Russian-oriented agenda in their films. These women founded a new Georgian Institute of Cinema, trying to guarantee the independence of their work. The first event for drawing attention to their cause was in Berlinale in 2024, in parallel with the new documentary work of Lana about Nutsa. Salome is the head of this Institute, and her public email contains the name nutsa@. This going back to the family history but in a new context of social struggle renovates family and cultural heritage. In this process, the family memory and heritage is revisited in a creative way but in a new context (see Assmann 2011).

This paper tried to explore the way transmediality as part of a multimodal ethnography could help us trace how different generations of women of the Gogoberidze family remembered their lives by shaping a genealogy generated not only by kinship and blood but by creativity and, more importantly, care and emotional and social engagement with social and political issues. The different media helped me compare different aspects of their memory and creativity and how different or the same memories could be represented in different ways by shedding light on different experiences and aspects of family and national history. Their stories showed how they interacted with the backbone of Georgian cinema but also the social fights of Georgian filmmakers today. My examination showed how the three women shaped their genealogy through strong affective memories, which bring together their imagination and family stories, transformed into creativity, as well as in connection to broader communities, feminist or professional.

The New York Times commenting on the vivacity and versatility of the Georgian cinema in 2014 underlined that it fosters several cinematic clans, referring to families like the Gogoberidze family (or the Shengelaia family) who are engaged in filmmaking through generations (Hoberman 2014). The persistence of these families underlines the rootedness of the Georgian family within a creative and cultural tradition. Nevertheless, what my examination of this female genealogy revealed is the fact of how this rootedness did not turn women like the Gogoberidzes into submissive subjects to this tradition but instead contributed to their strong urge to address social and historical challenges and to open up and pave their way by shaping solidarities and affinities both with their past but also with other women in order to fight against inequality and injustices. By going back to their legacy and roots, but in a creative way, they do family in the way they make films. It seemed that this matching between the personal and the social and its continuous reinvention is the biggest heritage of this genealogy.