Ashik Kerib
Saturday, August 17 at 5pm SERGEI PARAJANOV: SURREALIST POET OF SOVIET CINEMA Ashik Kerib dir. Sergei Parajanov, Soviet Union, 1988, 35mm, Georgian with English subtitles, 73 min.
Parajanov’ s last completed film was dedicated to his friend Andrei Tarkovsky who died two years earlier. It is a retelling of a popular romantic myth in Azerbaijani culuture with music and color playing important roles.
The Ashik Kerib wants to marry his beloved, but her father opposes since Kerib is poor and he expects rich prospects for his“ daughter from heaven.” She vows to wait for him for a thousand days and nights until he comes back with enough money to impress her father. He sets out on a journey to gain wealth and encounters many difficulties.
In recounting Mikhail Lermontov’ s fable, Paradjanov dispenses with conventional storytelling devices in order to present a boldly unique cinematic experience. Glorious tableaux, exquisitely composed, choreographed and photographed, are combined with intertitles, images of early Russian artwork and a haunting blend of traditional and contemporary musical forms, all of which combine to form an enthralling and utterly unique cinematic experience.
The Color of Pomegranates
Saturday, August 17 at 8pm SERGEI PARAJANOV: SURREALIST POET OF SOVIET CINEMA The Color of Pomegranates dir. Sergei Parajanov, Soviet Union, 1968, 35mm, Armenian with English subtitles, 74 min.
Keynote presentation by James M. Steffen whose forthcoming book The Cinema of Segei Parajanov( University of Wisconsin Press) will be released in October 2013.
Sergei Paradjanov’ s baroque masterpiece The Color Of Pomegranates was banned in the Soviet Union for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to“ Socialist realism;” its director, a tirelessly outspoken campaigner for human rights, was convicted on a number of trumped-up charges and sentenced to five years of hard labor in the gulag. A wave of protest from the international film community led to his release in 1978.
Aesthetically the most extreme film ever made in the USSR, Parajanov’ s hallucinatory epic account of the life of the 18th century Armenian national poet, Sayat Nova, conveys the glory of what a cinema of high art can be like. Conceived as an extraordinarily complex series of painterly tableaux that recall Byzantine mosaics, the film is a dreamlike icon come-to-life with astonishing beauty and rigor. It evokes the poet’ s childhood and youth, his days as a troubadour at the court of King Heraclius II of Georgia, his retreat to a monastery and his old age and death.
There has never been a film like this magical work. It fully justifies critic Alexei Korotyukov’ s remark:“ Paradjanov made films not about how things are, but how they would have been had he been God.”
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