Foot Worship in General Audience Movies

This practice can humiliate human dignity. That is why, film directors have employed it to show vividly, how their protagonists suffer morally. And sometimes moral suffering is more difficult to endure than a physical one. So, foot worship presents a nice opportunity to plunge explicitly into the depths of misery without degrading to obscenity. Both Western and Soviet moviemakers willingly exploited this technique.

In a drama Tashkent — City of Bread («Ташкент — город хлебный», directed by Shukhrat Abbasov, produced by Uzbekfilm Studios, 1968), whose storyline develops in the post-civil war Russia ravaged by famine, a teenager has been forced to kiss feet of a young hoodlum in front of a street gang. But, to his credit be it said, the teenager manages to fight back. Another instance of the forced foot worship has taken place, when a reformed criminal in A Clockwork Orange (directed by Stanley Kubrick, produced by Warner Bros., 1971) licks the sole of a shoe in front of policemen and psychiatrists. Finally, business partners of a tycoon willy-nilly kiss feet of his daughter during a dinner party in a television mini-series Shadows Disappear at Noon («Тени исчезают в полдень», directed by Vladimir Krasnopolsky and Valeriy Uskov, produced by Mosfilm Studios, 1971).

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