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Mystic Master: The Films of Sergei Paradjanov: The Stop Smiling DVD Review
The Stop Smiling DVD Review
Friday, April 11, 2008
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)
The Color of Pomegranates (1968)
The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984)
Ashik Kerib (1988)
Directed by Sergei Paradjanov
(Kino)
Reviewed by Michael Joshua Rowin
There’s nothing I’d love more to write than a review hooraying the arrival of Armenian-Georgian filmmaking genius Sergei Paradjanov’s films on DVD, and with Kino’s four-disc set simply titled “The Films of Sergei Paradjanov,” I have my occasion. But, unfortunately, for this collection I cannot give full approval. Though it compiles Paradjanov’s four most important features (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Color of Pomegranates, The Legend of Suram Fortress, Ashik Kerib), Kino’s release provides a terrific example of what can happen when quantity surpasses quality: unsatisfactory transfers, unnecessary documentaries, and missing credits that leave the viewer lost in a fog of incomplete information about Paradjanov’s career.
This is a disappointment because Paradjanov was one of the most unique, challenging, and mystical directors in the history of the cinema, let alone that of Russia — I can hardly imagine this treatment accorded to Fellini, Bresson, or Tarkovsky, Paradjanov’s peer and good friend. But Kino holds the cards here, owning as they do distribution rights to the most Paradjanov films in the US (Ruscico also has a couple of titles). And given that Paradjanov’s films claim a long history of censorship, re-editing, and abandonment, we should feel lucky enough to have anything available at all, let alone a set compiled in an even somewhat organized manner.
Playing wild theatric to Tarkovsky’s brooding ascetic, Paradjanov came of directorial age at Moscow’s famous VGIK institute, where he studied under legendary Soviet masters Dovzhenko and Savchenko. After eight movies produced under the strict dictates of Social Realism, Paradjanov found his voice with 1964’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a strong candidate for one of the greatest films of all time. Its violent, intoxicating immersion in a traditional Hutsul society living in the Carpathian Mountains marked his first attempt at a singular style: unmistakably avant-garde techniques — montages of iconography, abrupt changes in perspective, acting resembling human hieroglyphics — that evoke not the modern condition but the haunted pathos of “primitive” folklore and religion.
Shadows brought Paradjanov deserved recognition, but the quasi-ethnographic, purely unpolitical film also aroused suspicions among Soviet authorities. His next planned project was nixed, while 1968’s completed The Color Pomegranates (original title: Sayat Nova) — even more stylized than Shadows and relying on a striking tableaux format in its adaptation of Nova’s life and poetry — was banned and then forced to be recut. It is Paradjanov’s signature film, but also a compromised one. Most likely due to the loss of the original negative, Kino’s version is the sole transfer of the pack that suffers from fading and ghosting — an understandable setback, but if we’re going to one day demand a wholly satisfactory Paradjanov collection, the film should somehow be restored.
After Pomegranates, Paradjanov became no less than a martyr for cinema. Afraid of his subversive appeal, authorities sent Paradjanov to a gulag for several years on trumped-up charges. During the incarceration he devoted himself to collage and assemblage art (gorgeous works for which he is just as known in Russia), but his health worsened and after Pomegranates, he made only two features: the rarely discussed The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988). I would even go so far as to say they’re as masterful as Pomegranates, if not more so, combining attenuated forms of that film’s hardcore film grammar with more accessible storytelling, based as they are on tales of Georgian and Azerbaijani culture.
There’s no denying the quality of Kino’s content: Each Paradjanov film in the set (including the short 1965 experimental film Hagop Hovnatanian) is a world unto itself, a play of unsynchronized sounds (usually mesmerizing traditional music) and images that revel in artifice as much as life. Paradjanov’s cinema is one of extremes: scenes filmed from far off distances in order to frame subjects against sprawling action and formidable environments, tableaux of pure symbolic imagery, and Méliès-like jump cuts that enact the crudest, but most powerfully transformative, of cinematic magic.
Kino has decided to supplement these films with six documentaries. Ron Holloway’s 1994 profile, Paradjanov: A Requiem, contains the last interviews with the man himself, boisterous and larger than life even leading up to his death in 1990, and valuable footage of his pre-Shadows films and largely unseen later projects, but it’s also undermined by misinformation and sloppy editing. Another entry, simply titled Paradjanov, is just a reversion of Holloway’s film; short documentaries on renowned actress Veriko Andzhaparidze and writer Mikhail Lermontov (from whom Ashik Kerib was adapted) are nice but needless.
“The Films of Sergei Paradjanov” is overloaded: Along with a 2003 documentary on Tarkovsky and Paradjanov’s friendship and one on Paradjanov’s widow (which also lifts footage from A Requiem), there are short “featurettes” on Muslim music and Georgian architecture, neither one credited or voiced-over, and a short 1985 film dedicated to Paradjanov called Songs, of which there is little provided explanation or context. One updated and exhaustive documentary could have substituted for almost all this material, which proves that Kino’s lumping of its 2001 Paradjanov DVD releases together without new liner notes or commentary to guide the viewer may try for completion, but falls short of comprehensiveness.