Paradjanov on DVD

Discuss internationally-released DVDs and Blu-rays or other international DVD and Blu-ray-related topics.
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Tommaso
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#51 Post by Tommaso » Sat Dec 02, 2006 6:18 am

No idea, really, but it makes sense, as the main character's world is now completely drained of colour (metaphorically) after the death of his girl.

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MichaelB
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#52 Post by MichaelB » Tue Dec 12, 2006 9:54 am

My piece has been written, submitted and accepted, and should be published in the next issue (February 2007 coverdate, out this time next month).

Many thanks to everyone who helped with my research, especially Tommaso for drawing my attention to the new French releases in the first place. I've been wanting to see a decent copy of Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors again for literally years!

Incidentally, on the subject of the black-and-white sequence, I seem to remember that this was always a part of the film (it certainly seems intentional, as it's intercut with colour footage, and Tommaso's interpretation rings true), but I'll need to dig out my taped-off-Channel 4 copy to confirm.

On the other hand, what presumably wasn't intentional was the pronounced sound dropout (lasting several seconds) on the FsF Colour of Pomegranates towards the end (it's at the point when the man working on the wall shouts 'Sing!'). I checked with the Kino and the Japanese discs, but they were OK (the Kino also sounded pretty awful, but that sequence was at least intact). Despite this, I concluded that the FsF edition was still probably the Pomegranates disc to go for if you weren't obsessive enough to buy more than one, but the definitive DVD still hasn't been released yet.

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Tommaso
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#53 Post by Tommaso » Tue Dec 12, 2006 11:18 am

MichaelB wrote:My piece has been written, submitted and accepted, and should be published in the next issue (February 2007 coverdate, out this time next month).
Fine, any chance you could post it here, or will there be copyright issues?
MichaelB wrote:On the other hand, what presumably wasn't intentional was the pronounced sound dropout (lasting several seconds) on the FsF Colour of Pomegranates towards the end (it's at the point when the man working on the wall shouts 'Sing!'). I checked with the Kino and the Japanese discs, but they were OK (the Kino also sounded pretty awful, but that sequence was at least intact)
Hmm, yes, that irritated me too. I had forgotten how it was on the Kino, of course, but now that you say that on the Kino the sound is correct, I wonder what happened during the restoration on the FsF. Did they perhaps replace this passage from a different print and 'forgot' to synchronize it with the original sound? An indication for this would be if the Kino at that moment looked especially battered, and FsF would have had to use different materials. In any case, probably not intentional on Paradjanov's side (though one never knows with him, and it could also be that he intended this to be silent, indicating that dreamlike state the protagonist is in). Not a major drawback, though, in my view.

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MichaelB
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#54 Post by MichaelB » Tue Dec 12, 2006 12:42 pm

Tommaso wrote:Fine, any chance you could post it here, or will there be copyright issues?
There will be copyright issues, I'm afraid - once they've accepted it, it's no longer my property. But none of it will come as a surprise to anyone who's been reading this thread: it's just a bit more polished and coherent.
Hmm, yes, that irritated me too. I had forgotten how it was on the Kino, of course, but now that you say that on the Kino the sound is correct, I wonder what happened during the restoration on the FsF. Did they perhaps replace this passage from a different print and 'forgot' to synchronize it with the original sound? An indication for this would be if the Kino at that moment looked especially battered, and FsF would have had to use different materials. In any case, probably not intentional on Paradjanov's side (though one never knows with him, and it could also be that he intended this to be silent, indicating that dreamlike state the protagonist is in).
It's 100% definitely not deliberate - for starters, there's a subtitle over a silent passage! Which is what alerted me to the sound dropout in the first place. The sound is also pretty dreadful around the dropout, so maybe that's the best they could get. (That said, I've got two DVDs and a VHS with that portion of soundtrack in place, so it can't have been that difficult!)

Murasaki53
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#55 Post by Murasaki53 » Mon Dec 25, 2006 7:07 pm

Having recently watched Colour Of Pomegranates and Ashik Kerib I have to say that I was both fascinated and yet utterly mystified by both these films, Pomegranates especially.

Just how is one to make sense of these movies? I couldn't get a handle on them at all. Are they meant to be playfully surreal with more than a passing nod to silent cinema? And how much am I missing through my unfamiliarity with Armenian culture and music?

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Tommaso
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#56 Post by Tommaso » Tue Dec 26, 2006 6:23 am

I guess one misses a lot if one is not familiar with the culture(s) they depict. I could only make sense of "Pomegranates" after reading the text screens about Sayat Nova's life on the French dvd, for example.
Are these films meant to be surreal? Dunno, really, I always approached them rather from the perspective of both painting and music. That is, just SEEING those images and how they are composed, their specific quality as images and the connections between them, not so much trying to figure out the remnants of narrative. They are perhaps more like 'meditations' on a specific culture, best experienced or rather inducing a dream-like state of mind. That connects them to surrealism, of course, but without the typical 'intellectual' or psychological stance that many surrealist films (think of "La coquille et le clergyman", for example) have.

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#57 Post by Murasaki53 » Tue Dec 26, 2006 10:33 am

"... just SEEING those images and how they are composed, their specific quality as images and the connections between them..."

This is what I like so much about the films I've seen so far. Which brings me to a question I forgot to ask in my previous post: is Forgotten Ancestors different in terms of style & content from the other films? I know very little about this film apart from what I've read on the imdb website.

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HerrSchreck
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#58 Post by HerrSchreck » Tue Dec 26, 2006 11:03 am

THE COLOR OF POMEGRANITES is one of the saddest films I've ever seen.. so relentlessly, poetically, brutally-honestly sad. The nature of the interior torment of the hypersensitive artist, who experiences life in such alienatingly powerful degrees-- versus the flatness of the aesthetic experience of the common man who is devoid of empathy for The Other and exponentially & ongoing calculating of existential implications of Man In The World-- has rarely been so beautifully (almost operatically, in the seriousness of the pathos of suffering) rendered. One of the finest experiments in the history of the cinema-- an attempt to duplicate the hazy, non-linear operation of the mind when confronted with, for example, deep poetry or illuminated manuscripts. Pictoblocks, association blocks, disjointed extrapolations, yet always thematically cohesive. Raw aesthetic power.

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Tommaso
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#59 Post by Tommaso » Tue Dec 26, 2006 12:18 pm

Murasaki53 wrote: Which brings me to a question I forgot to ask in my previous post: is Forgotten Ancestors different in terms of style & content from the other films?
Well, it has an easy-to-follow narrative ( a sort of Romeo and Juliet story), but that doesn't mean it's conventional. It has a very archaic, dreamlike quality, too, and here already Paradjanov manages to get a similar unity of images and music as in his later films, although it's not 'surreal' the way "Pomegranates" is. Hard to describe, really, because it's pretty unique but imagine a mix of "Ashik Kerib" and Tarkovsky's "Rublev", and you get a vague idea. Best watch it, you will not regret it :-)

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#60 Post by MichaelB » Tue Dec 26, 2006 3:37 pm

Murasaki53 wrote:Which brings me to a question I forgot to ask in my previous post: is Forgotten Ancestors different in terms of style & content from the other films? I know very little about this film apart from what I've read on the imdb website.
It's not too hard to discern the same hand behind it, but it's quite different in several respects - as Tommaso correctly points out, it has a halfway conventional narrative at base (even though it's by far the least interesting aspect of the film: my guess is that Paradjanov cleaved to the narrative outline of the source novel as a sop to the authorities), and whereas the later films tended to adopt a highly formalised, almost tableaux-like mise-en-scène, in Shadows the camera is as much the protagonist as any of the characters.

This film has some of the most exhilarating mobile cinematography I've ever seen, and in many ways I'm sorry that Paradjanov never carried on down this particular route. Right from the opening scene, when Paradjanov depicts the death of the protagonist Ivanko's older brother from the point of view of the tree that crushed him, the camera barely stops moving - when it's on the ground, it's hand-held, but it also often takes to the skies in exhilarating crane shots that I suspect were inspired by the ecstatic opening of Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (which Paradjanov must have seen, and probably not long before he started shooting his own film: aside from the aesthetic similarities, the younger incarnation of Ivanko is the living spit of Kolya Burlayev in Tarkovsky's film).

But while the Tarkovsky is in black and white, Shadows is in colour -if that isn't the understatement of the century. It's more a series of demented psychedelic explosions than anything vaguely realistic (most memorably, Ivanko's father is murdered to the accompaniment of red-tinted horses leaping into the air), and is 180 degrees removed from the socialist realist aesthetic that dominated much mid-century Soviet film. The music's wonderful, too - decades before "world music" became fashionable, Paradjanov was resurrecting ancient Ukrainian folk tunes and arrangements, many of which are performed onscreen (and I love the way he can't resist circling his deep-focus camera round the horn players to create a startling 3-D effect).

I too saw this film knowing next to nothing about it - I was lucky enough to be in Paris when it had a big-screen revival, and I liked the title (Les Chevaux du feu or Horses of Fire). To be honest, this film really needs the biggest screen possible, though it still packed one hell of a punch on my 43" setup a few weeks ago.

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zedz
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#61 Post by zedz » Thu Dec 28, 2006 5:29 pm

Paradzhanov's films are so unlike anybody else's that it's easy to assume that he has a uniform individual style, but as noted above, there are significant stylistic differences between the films. There's a particularly dramatic difference between the hyper-kinetic, psychedelic Shadows and the still, hieratic tableaux of Pomegranates. His films are also informed by the different cultural traditions on which he was drawing for each film (e.g. Georgian, Armenian, Ukrainian). Paradzhanov was highly attuned to regional character and traditions (this is one of the reasons he was so loathed by the Soviet government) and gives them full expression through his films.

He's not much one for conventional movie narratives, but his films are nevertheless based on traditional storytelling forms and not that hard to follow once you tune into that. In the case of Pomegranates, we're seeing a symbolic biography of the poet, with each scene representing a chapter from his life. The difficulty is that Paradzhanov represents both actual and abstract events through visual symbols (hence the personification of the poet's muse, the use of the lute, the images of blindness). This symbolic language may be unusual for film, but might be familiar from other areas, such as the representation of the lives of the saints in religious frescoes, or the conventions surrounding the depiction of the Stations of the Cross. If Andrey Rublyov made a film, it might look a bit like The Colour of Pomegranates.

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#62 Post by atcolomb » Sat Feb 10, 2007 1:41 pm

I NEED HELP!...I have been trying to buy Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (AKA..Wild Horses of Fire) from some of the French web sites but am having no suscess since i can not read French. I did try Alapage but can not get thru it. Can anybody help?....

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Der Müde Tod
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#63 Post by Der Müde Tod » Sat Feb 10, 2007 2:12 pm

atcolomb wrote:I NEED HELP!...I have been trying to buy Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (AKA..Wild Horses of Fire) from some of the French web sites but am having no suscess since i can not read French. I did try Alapage but can not get thru it. Can anybody help?....

At Alapage, search for "CHEVAUX DE FEU" (the French title), this will get you to the DVD. If that still doesn't help, pm me, I'll be ordering from Alapage in the near future when I have decided what else to buy.

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#64 Post by atcolomb » Fri Mar 30, 2007 5:31 pm

I just received the Films Sans Frontiers version of SHADOWS and also a VCD of the movie from a website called UKRAINIANMUSIC.COM, so i decided to do a comparison to thoses two and my Home Vision VHS tape. The VHS tape has a blueish color to it with lots of scratches on the image, the VCD has weak colors with lots of scratches and no english subtitles and the Films Sans Frontiers verson is sharper but a little darker than the other versions and also some digital distortions but that could be from my PAL to NTSC player. I hope one day there will be a region 1 release from Criterion or Koch Lorber to see this great film in a great looking dvd release.

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Barmy
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#65 Post by Barmy » Fri Mar 30, 2007 6:53 pm

Still shocking to me that his pre-Shadows work (such as Tsvetok na kamne (1962), Ukrainskaya rapsodiya (1961) and Pervyy paren (1959)) has not been released in any video format. These are all amazing films.

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miless
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#66 Post by miless » Fri Mar 30, 2007 8:53 pm

Barmy wrote:Still shocking to me that his pre-Shadows work (such as Tsvetok na kamne (1962), Ukrainskaya rapsodiya (1961) and Pervyy paren (1959)) has not been released in any video format. These are all amazing films.
a possible Eclipse release?
(probably not, but nice to think about)

ivuernis
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#67 Post by ivuernis » Sun Apr 01, 2007 7:00 pm

The recent Magic Cinema festival held a complete retrospective of all 14 of Paradjanov's surviving films aswell as 14 documentaries, 8 films by filmmakers with "elective affinities" (Dovzhenko, Fellini, Pasolini, Tarkovsky), 8 "Armenian Friends", 5 "Russian and Georgian disciples", and 4 Paradjanov-influenced films from Iran!

The programme notes can be downloaded here

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jsteffe
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#68 Post by jsteffe » Sun Apr 01, 2007 10:11 pm

I joined this forum late, but since I'm currently writing a book on Paradjanov, I wanted to offer my own thoughts on some of this.
ivuernis wrote: From what've I've read the "Yutkevich Cut" was made from the original negative, i.e. the original negative was re-cut to produce the "Yutkevich Cut". The "Director's Cut" was a copy made from the original negative BEFORE it was re-cut by Yutkevich. Therefore, it seems there is no original negative of the "Director's Cut", hence the better quality of the "Yutkevich Cut" and the degraded quality of the "Director's Cut". As you say it would be great if a splice of the best bits of both versions could be merged to produce a superior "Director's Cut".
As far as I can tell, this is correct. I wrote an article on the production and censorship of the film for a special issue on Paradjanov in The Armenian Review a few years back, so I did quite a bit of research in the Goskino (State Film Committee) archives in Moscow. To set the record straight, the "director's cut" of the film is really the officially sanctioned--and thus already censored--Armenian release version of the film which Moscow only reluctantly allowed Armenfilm to release within Armenia. They didn't "ban" or "shelve" the film, but they also didn't approve it for release in other republics or outside the USSR. However, Soviet film critics were allowed to see the film upon request--unlike, say, "Andrei Rublev."

Yutkevitch was a consultant on the Script-Editorial Board in Moscow and thus was familiar with the project while it was still in the script stage. He liked the film on the whole despite some reservations.

When it was clear that Goskino USSR would not allow any kind of release outside Armenia, Yutkevitch peformed some minor cuts and reordering of shots to help it get distribution throughout the Soviet Union, which it eventually did on a limited basis. Paradjanov himself objected to further cuts, but many years later he saw the Yutkevitch version and thought it wasn't so bad. He was also grateful that Yuktevitch had in effect "saved" the film by helping it get seen.
One other thing I also read before, the original name of the film was "Sayat Nova" afaik. The name "The Colour of Pomegranates" was given to the film by Yutkevich after he re-cut it.
Actually, Paradjanov was forced to abandon the title "Sayat Nova" earlier because the censors felt it took too many liberties with Sayat Nova's life. The Armenian release version is in fact entitled "Nran Guyne," which is Armenian for "The Color of Pomegranates." Apparently Gevorg Hayryan, then the head of Goskino of Armenia, suggested the title and Paradjanov okayed it.

You'll also notice that the Armenian release version pointedly removes almost any reference to Sayat Nova's name or poetry, except in the body of the film (such as the song "The World is a Window" towards the end. The poetic title cards that introduce each section were written by Hrant Matevosyan, a noted author at that time.

Ironically, one of the things Yutkevitch did in "fixing" the film was to include some poems by Sayat Nova, thus reinforcing the link to Sayat Nova as a historical figure, which was an initial point of contention.

Thanks, by the way, to you folks for bringing the four hours of outtakes to my attention! I knew they existed--I saw the negatives in the cans in the Armenian film archive--but I'd never heard about the Italian broadcast. The outtakes really shed light on the film as a whole, as I'll explain in the book. I'll make sure you get an acknowledgement, of course.

I agree wholeheartedly with MichaelB that the Japanese disc looks by far the best. While the print material is not ideal--and probably never will be, the Japanese disc is the best transfer. It really "pops." Compared to the very old transfer on the Kino DVD that even predates Kino's release, the French FsF disc obviously looks better with its new transfer of the Armenian release version. However, it's overly contrast-boosted and I also think they bumped up the color way too much. I've never seen the color on a 35mm print of the film look as "hot" as it does on that disc. As a result, the image loses a lot of fine detail. So yes, the Kino transfer is washed out, but in a way it's more honest to what they were working with at the time.

After seeing the more rich and subtle color and the vastly improved image detail on the Japanese disc, I hate even to go back to the so-called "director's cut" in any DVD incarnation. It made me fall in love with the film all over again.

MichaelB, congratulations on your review, which I'm sure will be valuable. I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I'm glad Sight and Sound had the wisdom to give something like that the green light.

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Kirkinson
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#69 Post by Kirkinson » Mon Apr 02, 2007 3:17 am

ivuernis wrote:The recent Magic Cinema festival held a complete retrospective of all 14 of Paradjanov's surviving films aswell as 14 documentaries, 8 films by filmmakers with "elective affinities" (Dovzhenko, Fellini, Pasolini, Tarkovsky), 8 "Armenian Friends", 5 "Russian and Georgian disciples", and 4 Paradjanov-influenced films from Iran!

The programme notes can be downloaded here
Wow! Attending that retrospective would be like dying and finding out that not only is there a heaven, but God is Paradjanov. That would have been a sublime experience.

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jsteffe
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#70 Post by jsteffe » Mon Apr 02, 2007 12:11 pm

ivuernis wrote:The recent Magic Cinema festival held a complete retrospective of all 14 of Paradjanov's surviving films aswell as 14 documentaries, 8 films by filmmakers with "elective affinities" (Dovzhenko, Fellini, Pasolini, Tarkovsky), 8 "Armenian Friends", 5 "Russian and Georgian disciples", and 4 Paradjanov-influenced films from Iran!
This is the most thoughtfully organized program on Paradjanov that I've ever seen. Too bad I wasn't in France!

They've shown Paradjanov's early features on 35mm in the U.S. None of these remotely matches his work from SHADOWS onwards, but you can see him trying to break through with an original style here and there. They're basically second-tier Soviet genre films and would be completely forgotten if Paradjanov hadn't directed them. They're not nearly as assured as Tarkovsky's first film, or for that matter, the early films by contemporaries such as Tengiz Abuladze, Marlen Khutsiev, or Alov and Naumov.

ANDRIESH is a knock-off of the fairy-tale films of Ptushko and Rou, only not as good. THE TOP GUY (Pervyi Paren') is a second-rate tractor musical long the lines of Ivan Pyriev, but it has some fun, subversive elements and a good cast. It was actually a popular success when it came out. UKRAINIAN RHAPSODY has some visually striking moments (especially the dream sequence!), some allusions to Dovzhenko and Eisenstein, and an interesting flashback structure. But again it's still a low-budget genre film--in this case a wartime melodrama--with fairly crude production values. There was even a letter from a viewer, published in Iskusstvo Kino, complaining about what a bad film it was! (Actually, it's not that bad.) THE FLOWER ON THE STONE is an anti-religious propaganda film, but it has a lot of vivid Sergei Urusevsky-style camerawork and is easily the most visually polished of his early films.

Of the documentary shorts, the most interesting is GOLDEN HANDS, the one on Ukrainian folk art. You can see him trying to come up with creative ways to present Ukrainian folk material, though the script is overburdened with Soviet ideology.

The one to look out for, IMHO, is KIEV FRESCOES, which is actually the screen tests for the unfinished project (his follow-up to SHADOWS) edited into a 13 minute short. You can see a clear stylistic connection between this and THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES.

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miless
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#71 Post by miless » Mon Apr 02, 2007 12:57 pm

ivuernis wrote:The recent Magic Cinema festival held a complete retrospective of all 14 of Paradjanov's surviving films aswell as 14 documentaries, 8 films by filmmakers with "elective affinities" (Dovzhenko, Fellini, Pasolini, Tarkovsky), 8 "Armenian Friends", 5 "Russian and Georgian disciples", and 4 Paradjanov-influenced films from Iran!

The programme notes can be downloaded here
looking through this program, I was surprised that Tarkovsky's Stalker was not shown (as the film was apparently an allegory about, and dedicated to, Paradjanov and his troubles with the Soviet system and his imprisonment... at least according to several sources that I have read)

ivuernis
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#72 Post by ivuernis » Wed Apr 04, 2007 12:53 pm

jsteffe wrote:This is the most thoughtfully organized program on Paradjanov that I've ever seen. Too bad I wasn't in France!
Indeed! Short of his lost student film Moldavian Tale and Children to Komitas (the documentary he directed for UNICEF - also lost unfortunately) I don't think there is anything missing from this programme. I knew there were also several documentaries about Paradjanov but I never imagined so many.

If I'd known about this festival earlier (instead of coming across it just as it was ending!) I would have been tempted to take the short trip to Paris for it. Damn my luck (or lack of), a few years ago I was unable to make a screening of Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors and The Colour of Pomegranates at an arts festival here in Ireland, tickets bought and everything but events transpired against me.

P.S. Good to see his Armenian contemporary Artavazd Pelechian also represented at the festival who Paradjanov once described as his favorite filmmaker. Another neglected filmmaker if ever there was one, although he has been regularly championed in France by Godard among others. I read recently that he might finally be getting a film into production again after almost a quarter of a century.

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jsteffe
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#73 Post by jsteffe » Fri Apr 06, 2007 4:08 pm

Fellow Paradjanovian MichaelB, I just read your review of the Paradjanov DVDs in the February 2007 issue of Sight and Sound. I think the evaluations of the DVDs are on the mark and the review does a nice job of succinctly characterizing Paradjanov's aesthetic, it almost goes without saying.

This is mostly speculation, but I have some ideas about the Ruscico soundtracks for SURAM FORTRESS and ASHIK KERIB. I read somewhere in a Russian-language article that SURAM FORTRESS was one of the negatives that Gosfilmofond had returned to Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, something that they later regretted. Considering that the Georgian film archives had a major fire recently, I'm not even sure if the negative for SURAM FORTRESS even survives any longer. For all we know, at this point Gosfilmofond may not have any print with an intact Georgian-language sountrack. I'm going to ask them about this. At any rate, Ruscico may not have had access to a Georgian language track when they did the transfer if the original negative was in Georgia. At least the color is nice.

As far as I know, SURAM and ASHIK KERIB were distributed throughout the Soviet Union, like so many non-Russian Soviet films, with those awful, hastily done Russian voiceover translations. (Many films were fully dubbed, of course.) Those Russian distribution prints were what they sent to the U.S. for the Paradjanov retrospective several years ago. Russians seem to be used to them as a way to watch foreign-language films, which is why Ruscico offers them as soundtrack options, even if no one else in the world likes them. Ruscico's other Georgian films all have Georgian-language soundtrack options, at least.

Now for ASHIK KERIB, Paradjanov shot the film in both Georgia and Azerbaijan and produced it through the Georgia Film Studio. He brought in Azeri-speaking actors to dub the voices (obviously Sophico Chiaureli does not speak Azeri!), but the Georgia Film Studio imposed the Georgian overdub afterwards for distribution in Georgia, and that was how it was shown overseas. The film was shown in Azerbaijan, but I'm not sure whether it was with or without the Georgian overdub. The Russian-language print I saw was an incredible travesty that lays the Russian voiceover on top of the Georgian/Azeri mix, thus pushing the original Azeri down to the bottom and making it almost inaudible.

I for one am grateful that the original Azeri track even survives for ASHIK KERIB, though I never thought the Georgian overdub hurt the film too much. Unlike those awful monotone Russian overdubs that seem determined to strangle all the life out of whatever film they translate. The film's original sound designer, Garri Kuntsev, passed away only very recently, so it's possible that Ruscico worked with him to create the new surround track from the audio materials. I've never liked Ruscico's track 5.1 sountracks, and oddly enough this is the only one that even sounds decent. That's why I think Garri Kuntsev may have worked on it.

One comment on the review itself--you seem to suggest that Paradjanov's interest in authentic regional cultures rather than the "ersatz, state-approved" variety was probable source of his difficulties with the authorities, but based on my own research I'd have to say the matter is considerably more complex. I think you have to qualify the notion of cultural authenticity in Paradjanov's films, since in many instances he invented rituals and costumes that looked "authentic" but really weren't. The authorities did criticize him for failing to live up to the tenets Socialist Realism because of the difficult, "formalist" nature of his films--in other words, for not being accessible to a mass audience.

There is more than one reason behind his December 1973 arrest, but keep in mind that it came at the time of a big crackdown and Party shakeup in Ukraine, including the removal of Petro Shelest. In my view, key factors were Paradjanov's role as a father figure to young Ukrainian intellectuals, the fact that his apartment was a popular gathering place, and because he was an outspoken critic of the arrest of other Ukrainian intellectuals several years before that, around the time that SHADOWS was released. More about that in my book, if and whenever it gets published.

At any rate, your DVD review fills a long-standing gap. Hopefully some enterprising distributor will take up the cue and issue better editions of these films.

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Kirkinson
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#74 Post by Kirkinson » Tue Apr 10, 2007 3:58 am

jsteffe wrote:the Georgian film archives had a major fire recently
This is an interesting bit of information. When did this fire occur? I always thought that perhaps Georgia Film didn't have the resources for proper preservation, restoration, and release of their older films, but this fire might explain why prints I've seen are almost uniformly decimated even for Georgian films of the 1990s. It's a tragedy if all they have to work from in most cases are poorly cared for release prints.

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jsteffe
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#75 Post by jsteffe » Tue Apr 10, 2007 12:47 pm

The fire happened two years ago. Here's a link a short BBC story on it.

Note that the damage doesn't seem to have been as extensive as it might have been, but even 25% is a tragedy.

I believe that most of the negatives from the Soviet era, even for non-Russian films, are still kept at Gosfilmofond. The situation I mentioned with The Legend of Suram Fortress negative going back to Georgia (if the article I read was correct) was apparently an exception. But with Georgian-Russian relations being what they are these days, the Georgians will have a devil of a time trying to get any materials from Moscow.

I can attest personally to the incredible headaches that the Russian travel ban caused for the Tbilisi International Film festival last fall, which included desperate, last-minute re-routings of film prints. I will never under any circumstances use Moscow as a layover again if they are going to leave travelers stranded just to prove that they can still shove their former underling republics around whenever they feel like it. On the positive side, I was able to get a last-minute ticket via Istanbul, which is a gorgeous city.

But the main point is that this doesn't bode well for access to Georgian films in general.

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