Armenian director Sergei Parajanov, who died in 1990, receives double-exposure at the 22nd Flanders International Film Festival Ghent, where two documentaries - US director Ron Holloway's Parajanov: A Requiem and French director Rouben Kevorkiantz's Paradjanov: Le Dernier Collage (Parajanov: The Last Collage) - cast new light on the legend of Soviet Cinema.
Acclaimed for his artistic originality, lyricism and experimentalism once attributed to his film institute teacher, Alexandr Dovzhenko, Parajanov was in 1974 sentenced to hard labour for "deviationism". A wave of international protests led to his release five years later.
Before his death at the age of 64, Parajanov - who was born in Tblisi, Georgia - made 11 features, seven out of Ukraine, and a couple of short films. During the last five years 12 documentaries have been made about him, but Holloway and Kevorkiantz are the first Western filmmakers to attempt a portrayal.
"Parajanov was everything - his work was Gesamtkunst more than filmmaking. And he was one of the great dreamers in world cinema."
Ron Holloway
US-born, Berlin-based film journalist and director of documentaries (on Elem Klimov, Aleksei Gherman and Nikolai Gubenko), Ron Holloway met Sergei Parajanov at Baku in 1988, when he was editing his last film, Ashik kerib. "In three days we became close friends - he was the kind of man who either liked you or not - and we agreed to start the documentary during the Munich International Film Festival, which would honour him with a retrospective," Holloway recalled.
"We filmed for three days, and it was the last time his progressing cancer and diabetes allowed him to perform this way. His strength was disappearing in front of our eyes, yet he continued to talk about his work and his suffering in prison."
"Second part of the production was due when he himself began to lense his last autobiographical confession to the Armenian people. It was delayed for a year, then he shot for one day, fell fatally ill and was taken to hospital. And I was left with a trunk of film."
Three years later Holloway completed Parajanov: A Requiem, and after showing at Venice in the Windows to Images programme, it has toured 19 international festivals. Besides the Parajanov interviews, the film comprises 19 excerpts from 11 of his films, including Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, which introduced Holloway to the Georgian-born director at the Montreal fest before he became a cause celèbre.
"Parajanov was everything - and nothing. He was a fabulous seeer, but his life was like a dream: it vanishes. And nobody will be able to imitate him."
Rouben Kevorkiantz
"It has been a long time I have been dead, but I have memories to tell" is how French director Rouben Kevorkiantz - mainly credited for his animation and television work - starts his first documentary, Paradjanov: Le Dernier Collage (Parajanov: The Last Collage), completed only three months ago, but already performing at its third festival.
"When I met Parajanov, he was already a dying man, and he kept talking to me about a short film he had made about a 19th-century portrait painter, Agop Ounatanian - did anybody know where the print was? I realised that this man, who never signed his work - and whose characters - mainly reach people - always face the painter, as Parajanov's the camera, was a key to his universe." After four years of research in collaboration with Armenian cinematographers, Kevorkiantz had been able to find all Parajanov's films. With the director no longer alive, he combined the first interview with fragments of his films, recollecting his past life, his childhood, in combination with his dreams and nightmares - seven stories by Parajanov, surrounded by his friends.
"We shot the film in eight countries, three of them in war, and they would not always guarantee our security," added Kevorkiantz. "The film has been long underway, not only because of the research - but with Parajanov no longer among us, we rewrote the script three or four times, in an attempt to penetrate this extraordinary genius."
Jørn Rossing Jensen.
© Moving Pictures International.
[Home ] [Content ] [The Sponsors ] [The Team ] [Comments ] [Help ]
