Kievski Freski (Kiev Frescos)
Dir Sergei Paradjanov
1966. 35mm. 13 mins
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Size: 106mb
Source: TVrip (RaiTre) by Trep, via fitz
Paradjanov assembled this “film collage” from the rushes and tests that remained unscathed after the Soviet authorities halted the production of Kiev Frescos and ordered the negative to be destroyed.
When the Soviet authorities were imposing on a multi-national country the artificial conception of a “homogeneous Soviet people”, Paradjanov was defending those nations’ very diversity and uniqueness. Through films and documentaries (both by Paradjanov and others), this programme attempts to trace Paradjanov’s creative journeys through Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia.
Soon after the Soviet authorities stopped the shooting of Kiev Frescos (Kievski Freski) in 1966, Sergei Paradjanov left Dovchenko film studios in Kiev for Armenfilm in Yerevan. There he started work on a feature length homage to Sayat Nova, the pseudonym of the Haroutine Sayadian (Tblissi, 1712 - 1795), an Armenian poet and bard, who wrote in Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani.
“I was thirty-nine when a series of sad circumstances forced me to come to Yerevan. I am now forty-two…It’s hot. Peaches are two rubles a kilo. I’m suffocating in schemes and poorly ventilated hotel rooms, keeping company with cockroaches. I strongly urge that Sayat Nova be banned and that I be sent back to Kiev. I am willing to abandon the cinema. Kiev Frescos and the repression of Tarkovsky are more than enough for me”
In Sayat Nova, Paradjanov renounced the basic element of film narrative: change. Sayat Nova was released to a negative official and public reception in 1969. Paradjanov was accused of “secretism”, “decadent estheticism”, perpetuating an “excessive cult of the past” and “latent anti-sovietism”. Between 1969 and 1970, five film projects by Paradjanov were refused - Intermezzo (after the Ukrainian writer Kotsioubinski), The Fountain of Bakhtchisarai (after Pushkin), Isopovied (his first autobiographical confessions), Ara the Magnificent (Ara Prekrasny after Armenian legend) and Chamiram.
Two years later, a new version of Sayat Nova entitled The Colour of Pomegranates, shortened by twenty minutes by Sergei Yutkevich, was distributed in theatres in Moscow. After two weeks the screenings were stopped. Two years later, whilst taking the train from Moscow to Kiev, Paradjanov was arrested and accused of smuggling icons, homosexuality, spreading venereal diseases and inciting suicide. After a trial in-camera, on 25th April 1974 Paradjanov was condemned to five years imprisonment at the Dnipropetrovsk labour camp in Ukraine.
Three days before he was sentenced, Andrei Tarkovsky wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine, asserting -”In the last ten years Sergei Paradjanov has made only two films: Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors and The Colour of Pomegranates. They have influenced cinema first in the Ukraine, second in this country as a whole, and third - in the world at large…Artistically, there are few people in the entire world who could replace Paradjanov. He is guilty - guilty in his solitude. We are guilty of not thinking of him daily and of failing to discover the significance of a master.”
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From Cineaste, Vol. XXVII, No. 3:
Excerpted from “Paradjanov’s Films on Soviet Folklore” by Jonathan Rosenbaum:
“It’s astonishing how little we still know about Soviet cinema in general and Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1990) in particular, and it’s possible that Soviet history has something to do with this — a desire among many not to remember pointing to an even more basic desire not to know. Considering what a teller of tall tales Paradjanov was himself, it seems inevitable that he would only add to the confusion while he was alive rather than clear up most of the muddle. Writing about three Paradjanov features that were showing in Chicago thirteen years ago, I noted that his name couldn’t be found in Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopedia or in the indexes of books by Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, or John Simon (among many others), and lamented that, as far as I knew, no one anywhere had yet written a book or monograph about him. I was writing only a month after he visited the West for the first time — attending the Rotterdam Film Festival, where I was fortunate enough to be present — and this was only four years after he resumed work as a filmmaker following something like sixteen years of enforced silence, either as a prisoner or as a director whose proposed projects since Sayat-Nova in 1969 had all been rejected.
What were his crimes? In the Stalinist period, Paradjanov was reportedly detained in a ‘re-education’ labor camp for homosexuality. In the mid-Sixties, shortly before Khrushchev was deposed, he was attacked in the press for being a formalist; after he signed letters in support of Ukranian dissidents, he was called a “Ukranian nationalist”; he was never allowed to finish his 1965 Kiev Frescos due to “bourgeois subjectivism and mysticism” and “ideological deviation”; after many battles over his Armenian masterpiece Sayat-Nova, the film was reedited into a version twenty minutes shorter by director Sergei Yutkevich. After his next dozen or two dozen film projects were rejected (accounts differ), he was arrested in late 1973 for charges that ranged from dealing in foreign currency, speculating on artworks, and stealing icons to spread venereal diseases, inciting suicide, and homosexuality, and sentenced to five years of hard labor — a term eventually reduced to four years after a petition of protest was circulated interntionally. According to one account, he admitted to being bisexual, but it seems that most or all of the charges were specious and that his ‘real’ crimes were being an eccentric and a ‘troublemaker.’ (Yuri Ilyenko, cinematographer on Paradjanov’s masterpiece Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, who attended the trial, once told me that the man Paradjanov was accused of raping was built like a football player; considering that Paradjanov himself was roughly the height of Mr. Natural, the charge was visibly ridiculous.)
Four years later, he was arrested a third time, for attempting to bribe an official, then cleared of the charges after about a half a year in prison. The first feature he was able to make after Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964) and Sayat-Nova (1969) was The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984), followed by the much slighter Ashik Kerib (1988) two years before his death from cancer.”
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