Sergei Paradzhanov

Sergei Paradzhanov (1924-1990), Georgian film-maker. Working directly from the ethnic folk poetry and mythology of his Armenian-Carpathian ancestry, Paradzhanov ran against the grain of urban and mainstream Soviet culture, both in his life and in his films. His dissident stance and visionary talent brought him worldwide fame, but it also put him under the scrutiny of post-Stalinist repressive government agencies.

Born in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, Paradzhanov studied music during World War II, attended the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, and then, at Dovzhenko Studios in Kiev, began making experimental and ethnographic Ukrainian-language films such as Moldavian Fairy Tale (1953) and Flower on the Stone (1963), drawing on Gutsul folk culture and ritual for his expressionistic structure and imagery. Two masterpieces followed: Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), a delirious and hypnotic folk ballad of village sorcery, bloody feudal battles, and unrequited love; and Sayat Nova (1969; The Blood of Pomegranates), which evokes the life of 18th-century Armenian poet Arution Sayadian. Owing to charges of ethnic nationalism, this film was shelved until 1972, the same year that, in a general crackdown on the Ukrainian film industry, Paradzhanov found himself under arrest from what were regarded to be KGB-fabricated charges, which ranged from fraud to homosexuality to “incitement to suicide”. A closed trial ended with a sentence of six years’ hard labour in a maximum-security prison, making Paradzhanov a political prisoner in his own country.

International outcry forced Soviet authorities to release Paradzhanov in 1978, though he was rearrested in 1982, and was not free from persecution until the cultural openness of glasnost in 1985. Immediately commissioned to make the Georgian national epic, Legend of the Suram Fortress (1985), his success with that film led him to make the haunting and controversial Ashik Kerib (1988), a tale of a Turkish Muslim minstrel, based on a Russian story, shot in Azerbaijani and directed in Georgia by an Armenian Christian—all the contradictions of his life and work still evident to the end. He died of cancer in 1990. See also Russian Cinema.