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Paradjanov''s films on Soviet folklore.

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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 resum ed 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 Ukrainian dissidents, he was called a "Ukrainian 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...

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