Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Ashik Kerib / USSR / 1988

Paradjanov’s last completed film, co-directed with Dodo Abashidze, leaves me with a sense that his filmmaking had settled too much into a system of rather static illustrations of extra-cinematic fine arts imagery. As facinating as the insights into Armenian, Georgian, Turkish etc culture are, in the end the film doesn’t breathe enough for me.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
08 Jan 2006 5:10 AM | Comments (4)

Comments / 4 total / Submit Comment

1. Good COnor Dunphy / 17 January 2006 / 5:05 AM

   Are you kidding? You must be forgetting the scene in which automatic weapons are revealed below women’s veils? That breathed holes through me in college days. But for the most part it is a boring epic adventure.

2. leo / 17 January 2006 / 11:16 AM / URL

   And wasn’t creating “systems of rather static illustrations of extra-cinematic fine arts imagery” sort of the point for Paradjanov, post-Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors? I will admit that I much prefer Sayat Nova / The Color of Pomegranates to his later films (especially The Legend of Suram Fortress, which I wasn’t too jazzed about when last I saw it), but the static-ecstatic mode of ethnography seems to comprise Paradjanov’s oeuvre.

   I’m sure there’s more at play here (the frequently cited parallels between the director and his protagonist, in the case of Ashik Kerib), but unfortunately there’s a notable dearth of good writing on Paradjanov in English.

3. Conor Pasteur Dunphy / 17 January 2006 / 2:05 PM

   I like your notion of collecting static illustrations. Can we infer that perhaps Paradjanov was a viewer of European Neorealist work or did that not get past the Iron Curtain, I wonder the genealogy of his cinematics.

4. Ian / 17 January 2006 / 5:44 PM / URL

   Leo, of course the static/ethnographic is the point of Paradjanov’s filmmaking. But as much as I love The Colour of Pomegranates, the subsequent films don’t move me in the same way; in fact, I’m slightly bored by them. Which no doubt says more about me than Paradjanov. In the end, I prefer the sense of baroque vitality that I get from Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors.