2024-01-14 06:16:08
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s book “Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors” was offered to filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov for its film version, later produced by the Dovzhenko studio.
Serguei Paradjanov was an Armenian filmmaker born in Georgia on January 9, 1924. He married the daughter of a Ukrainian diplomat, Svetlana Scherbatiuk, with whom he had a son, Suren. A year before her divorce, in 1961, he films “Ukrainian Rhapsody,” an interwar melodrama celebrating the countryside and tradition of Ukraine. One of the criticisms he received was that of representing women in terms of exoticism.
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky fought once morest the Soviet bureaucracy and was part of Prosvita, an organization that supported the development of the Ukrainian language and culture. The novel “Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors” from 1911, emerged as a consequence of the encounter with the Hutsul people during their trip to the Carpathians.
Among Ukrainians, the traditions of the Hutsul people are considered to reflect the old beliefs of Ukraine as a whole. The script was filmed between September 1963 and August 1964. The novel did not fit well with Soviet ideology. The myth that is recreated in the film is that of youth that goes from innocence to the experience of loneliness and death. The early religious scenes, traditional clothing and Christmas scenes might be interpreted as the colonialist expression of the marginal and exotic other on the periphery of the Soviet Empire. The film was accused of folklorism, of historicizing the mythical story. The Soviet Union considered itself as a group of peoples from different nations who, while united, did not lose their distinctions as they built the Soviet man.
The magazine Iskustvo kino characterized the film as “national”: the intensity of the people’s courage, a rural sentimentality. This was considered to be the rebirth of Ukrainian national cinema and, by extension, Ukrainian culture in general. The interpretation was the following: nationality did not reflect secessionism or, what was considered the same, “bourgeois nationalism.”
At the premiere of the film, there was a protest at the Ukraina Theater in kyiv. Rumors of the protest reached Moscow. The film was shown and then reached the West under the name “The Fire Horses.”
The protests were carried out precisely in this film because the Hutsuls are considered the ancient (proto) Ukrainians with the image of a rural Ukraine as the basis of national identity. On the other hand, we have the use of language. The Hutsul dialect represents the sign of “Ukrainianness” and the film was shown without being dubbed into Russian.
After the protest, the party apparatus and the central authorities in Moscow targeted Sergei Paradjanov. And he himself signed the petitions to ask for open trials and not arrests without trials for those convicted. Years later, the filmmaker was accused of Russifying Ukrainian culture by exploiting traditions for his own filmic benefit. A Ukrainian writer, Alexei Korotyukov, exiled in the US, concluded that “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” was made at the cost of violating a nation’s culture.
Between 1965 and 1966 Paradjanov filmed “Kiev Frescoes”, a film that was filmed according to the aesthetics of tableau vivant, motifs that reappeared in his most acclaimed film “The Color of the Pomegranate”. Kievski freski was filmed in order to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, what we in the West call World War II. The film does not describe the war, but rather examines daily life in kyiv, taking May 9, 1965 as the reference point; anniversary day of the liberation of the city from the Germans.
Paradjanov’s idea was not only to commemorate the victory but to reflect on the conflict between war and art.
The film that was going to celebrate the triumph over Nazi Germany focuses on portraying how the Ukrainian people returned to real life following the Great Patriotic War.
The censorship commission of the Dovzhenko film studio criticized the lack of “personal connection” of the characters with the war and the appearance of traces of the bourgeois world. The unflattering representation of the military spirit in soldiers was seen as a reason to suspend filming. On the other hand, what Paradjanov called “reality” in the description of the city of kyiv was far from the socialist reality of Vertov’s films.
Surrealism as an aesthetic was an obstacle to Russia’s goals. The framing, the graphic art, the abstraction of the staging, the visual compositions as still life motifs and the actors with their mime movements did not favor, according to the authorities, the homage to the military legacy of the war.
However, the director used all these aesthetic materials for his other film: “The Color of the Pomegranate.” In both, his central concern was the role of the artist. In a memo dated October 1965 from the Goskino branch in Ukraine, the film was considered to have “a distorted, even pathological, perception of reality, with a taste for affirming human loneliness, delirium and spiritual unease.”
At the same time that the filming of “Kiev Frescoes” was canceled, many Soviet films were censored: “Andrei Rubliev” by Tarkovsky, “Asya’s Happiness” by Konchalovsky, “The Commissar” by Alexander Askoldov. After a controversial speech he gave in Minsk, the Ukrainian KGB arrests Sergei for having had meetings and correspondence with foreigners from capitalist countries. Finally, under various accusations, he was sentenced to five years in prison in a strict corrective labor colony.
Clearly Paradjanov’s films moved away from the realistic construction of homo sovieticus. Using fragmentation and collage, the filmmaker brings Modernity into a geography that was governed by other codifications. The aesthetic question for Paradjanov is a political question, the scenes of him devoid of links or raccords, exiled from the illusion of a spatial or temporal continuum are subjected to explicit cutting, the images of him shine and disappear. Sergei films the arabesque. Element of Islamic culture, the scenes move articulating some signs in others, masking, getting rid of a hardened meaning.
After his release, following years in prison, he said: “they thought that in prison I would become an anti-Sovetchik. I kept myself busy studying people who were incarcerated.” In prison he created oil paintings, film sketches, mosaics, ceramics, pen miniatures, dolls, pop art. “I will take revenge with love: words that confirm his view of his world.
Sergei Paradjanov, the filmmaker whose revenge is aesthetic.
* Writer. Fragment of the prologue to the book “Discovering Ukraine”.
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