Sergei Paradjanov: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by First Joshua (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 553 Igor´ Stravinskii’s debt to — and departure from — the example of his teacher does not merely restate conclusions already famously advanced by Taruskin and others, but takes the particular case study of Stravinskii’s work on a performing edition of Khovanshchina for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in which the younger composer managed to navigate between the creative influences of both Musorgskii and Rimskii-Korsakov. Lida Adler carries the debate into the early Soviet period, arguing that Rimskii-Korsakov’s example as both a pedagogue and a composer profoundly influenced artistic practice after the October Revolution. As is customary with the Bard Music Festival series, this volume is rounded off with a wide-ranging essay by Leon Botstein with offers a panoramic survey of Rimskii-Korsakov’s place in late imperial Russia and suggests that despite his longstanding interest in ‘lyricism and poetic beauty’ (p. 305), the composer was imbricated in many of the most urgent intellectual and ideological debates of the age. Rimskii-Korsakov and His World is to be welcomed not just for the many riches within it, but for its implicit call to continue the work of reconsidering the composer to whom it is so devoted. There are, after all, fifteen operas to be studied, as well as ‘dozens of wonderful songs, chamber music, and various orchestral pieces beyond Sheherazade’ (p. viii). Wadham College, University of Oxford Philip Ross Bullock First, Joshua. Sergei Paradjanov: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. KinoSputnik, 2. Intellect, Bristol and Chicago, IL, 2016. xix + 64 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. £20.00: $28.50 (paperback). Sergei Paradjanov, in Joshua First’s assessment, ‘was and remains a mysterious figure’; this despite the fact that ‘he became a film-maker of global significance’ (p. 1). First is correct on both counts. Despite the considerable literature on Paradjanov, much of it admittedly of marginal quality, research remains to be undertaken on Pardjanov’s upbringing in Tbilisi; his years as a film student in Moscow (at VGIK); and importantly on his ‘national’ or ethnographic films in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Paradjanov’s years as a director in Kiev (at Dovzhenko Studios) is, however, well covered in film scholarship. There is no adequate biography of Paradjanov. James Steffen’s study (The Cinema of Sergei Paradjanov, Madison, WI, 2013) is a noteworthy survey of the vicissitudes of Pardjanov’s overall career as a Soviet filmmaker. First’s previous monograph (Ukrainian Identity: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw, New York, 2014) does much to situate Paradjanov within an attenuated SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 554 Ukrainian cultural rebirth in the late mid to late 1960s. Both Steffen and First delineate the development of ‘poetic cinema’ and Paradjanov’s seminal role in that ‘movement’. Even so, it has proven challenging to decipher with any precision either the literary or cinematic influences on Paradjanov that shaped his oeuvre. Following more than a decade making (largely) forgotten genre films in Ukraine, Sergei Paradjanov directed four splendid ‘national’ films, each one rich in complex, often undecipherable, symbolism and ethnographic imagery: the Ukrainian Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors/Tini zabutykh predkov (1965); the Armenian The Color of Pomegranates/Tsvet granata (1968); the Georgian The Legend of Surami Fortress/Legenda o Suramskoi kreposti (1984), and lastly Ashik Kerib (1988) in Azerbaijan. Whatever the effect of the other films on cinematicaudiences,FirstastutelyobservesthatShadowsofForgottenAncestors ‘represented a golden age for Ukrainian and other non-Russian cinema, and it was largely based on the influence of this one film’ (p. 1). First’s useful companion volume to Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is wellillustrated with a brief plot summary; a table listing the film’s production credits; an introduction of sorts to Paradjanov (chapter 1); a consideration of the ‘historical context’ in which the film was produced (chapter 2); thoughtful analyses of the film’s ten chapters (chapter 3); and concludes with an assessment of the film’s reception in 1965-66 and its afterlife since then (chapter 4). Why the film became totemic in Ukrainian film history is rather as mysterious as the director who ushered it through the complex labyrinth that was Ukrainian/ Soviet filmmaking. Loosely based on Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi’s 1912 novella of the same name, Shadows of Forgotten...