1988 USSR 78 mins 35mm
Source: FA Prod Co: Georgia Film Studio Pro: Dir: Sergei Paradjanov, Dodo
Abahidze Scr: Giya Badridze based on the story by Mikhail Lermontov Phot: Albert
Yavuryan Art Dir: Shota Gogolashvili, Nikolai Zandukeli Music: Djavashir Kuliev
performed by Alim Gasimov
Cast: Yuri Mgoyan, Veronika Metonidze, Levan Natroshvili
To the virgin eye, watching a film by the unrivalled Armenian genius Sergei
Paradjanov is like peeping into an exotic precious jewel box with strangely
perfumed narcotic powers. Mystical, trance-like and ecstatic in their ability to
transcend time and earthbound logic, his films were cast out into the Western
world in the mid-sixties to be lauded as other worldly cinematic masterpieces of
Modernism, as Eastern European poetic allegory, perfect examples of the
avant-garde tableaux vivant. They are of course, all of these things and more.
It's difficult to imagine what Peter Greenaway or Derek Jarman or even Pasolini,
in his North African period would have come up with had they not seen
Paradjanov's first major international success Shadows of our
Forgotten Ancestors (1964), a film whose Ovid-like story is
repeated in Ashik Kerib. In
Shadows, a man denied his true love and passion, is
banished from his native land. In his wandering he encounters his country's past
through the legends and oracles presented to him by hermits, poets and other
survivors of tyranny and oppression. A pure eroticism of continual surprise and
sensation is created in episodic fragments where things, people, clothes and
facial gestures are meticulously arranged inside an imaginary window frame with
the only rule of sequence or narrative effect being a bold jump cut (or leap)
from one unexpected great moment to the next.
Where Shadows was shot in the Ukranian language his
next film, The Colour of Pomegranates (1974) was in
Armenian. Like all his films it is unashamedly precise in its use of ancient
folklore in authentic settings (in Ashik Kerib there are
several long takes of wooden mosques which may now have been bombed, one
suspects) and often uses music to stand in for dialogue or any element of plot.
So aesthetically beautiful, unhostile and poignant in their depiction of an
autonomous, rich cultural identity the Soviet state quickly shelved all prints
at home but perversely allowed its export to film festivals abroad as an example
of local genius, sending the director to languish away for a decade in a
Siberian labour camp for homosexuality and related crimes. During that time he
was determined to remain a living artist in order to survive and combat the
assault on his talent, founding an art movement in the camp he called Fleurism,
using dead flowers as his materials. Tarkovsky, to whom Paradjanov dedicated
Ashik Kerib as a kind of religious sacrament, once asked
him how he could improve his film making: "You lack one year of Soviet maximum
security prison" he replied.
Not surprisingly, Ashik Kerib is a film that could
only have been made from the promises of clear skies which fell upon the Soviet
republics during Gorbachev's Glasnost period. The Romanian writer Andrei
Codrescu, in writing about all art before this time, said that the difference
between the poetic and the political is only three letters, and those letters
belonged to the State. For an artist like Paradjanov who got to make only four
films in twenty five years, the poetic became a vocation of refining the art of
metaphor, association an entire grammar of meaning outside of power and
institutions of culture.
Ashik Kerib
is essentially a heterosexual love story in the
context of an imposed tyranny which brings about emotional loss, enforced
economy, the destruction of beauty ancient artefacts, holy places, nature itself
and creates all kinds of physical handicaps. The story transpires in a place
where people become deaf, blind, spiritually dead souls wandering in the
wilderness. Ashik himself is an amalgam of characters both real and mythic: the
subject of a story by the great Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov who himself had
been exiled to the Caucusus and the ashug of sixth century Islamic, Turkic and
Persian Azerbaijani culture who with his saz toured the countryside attending
peasant social events, telling stories and blessing harvests and weddings. In
the tradition of eastern fairytale, Ashik is also a hero in the tradition of a
Sheherezade, who, for a thousand days endures near death at the hands of
philistines and traitors, in the name of love and the very idea of the ideal.
What is so powerful about Ashik Kerib's direct tale
of oppression, echoing Paradjanov's own ordeal as an artist cruelly punished for
his love of pure art, harmony and peace, is that it is amazingly naive and
childlike, to be read to some degree as a child would see and hear, with
visceral pleasures and sad moments which inevitably resolve themselves as happy
endings. The film is a symphony of faces, eyes, composed emotions which stare
back out of the screen like the icons and paintings which are inter-cut into the
main action. Everybody looks like a living doll immortal vestiges of pain,
desire, longing and hope icons of humanity held in long excruciating takes as if
one could out-stare an image on the screen; the heartstrings viewer commune with
tragedy and elation. This is where Paradjanov's cinema departs from any
similarity with other gay directors, his faces are not sexualised, he just
believes, as all children do, that dolls are people and vice versa.
Where critics sometimes refer cryptically to the poetic symbols at work in
his films, and those of other former Soviet directors, as allegorical codes or
political messages, Ashik Kerib naturally smashes this
very Western notion about surrealism as some kind of predestined magic tool. If
Ashik Kerib has an antecedent then it would be
Dovshenko's Earth (1930),(1) itself savagely edited by
Moscow and criticised for its Ukranian nationalism.
Earth, like Ashik Kerib is full
of shots of faces from the fields dappled with sunlight, soft cheeks next to
rosy skinned fruit, leaves shot for the sake of beauty and tenderness, a
socialist humanism that advocated utopian love and freedom for the peasant and
his or her folkloric past as glorious. In Ashik Kerib
ancient myths and Christian legends abound: a lamb is slaughtered, a lion
threatens, Ashik's mother goes blind with despair, fruit turns black in the
hands of evil, white doves accompany Ashik through his darkest hours, a flying
horse returns him home. It is a vaguely animist universe where everything takes
on mystical meaning, particularly animals, a pantomime world of the blessed
where Ashik and his love, Magul "have rare beauty and crystal hearts", where
instead of a money, rose petals make do as a dowry. The wicked sport long knives
to cut up women and in one truly bizarre scene, an evil Sultan keeps a harem who
fire kalishnikovs as Ashik enters. Suddenly the film yells out the time, 1988,
and it comes as a shock.
This mix of crushingly contemporary chronicle and eternal fable is unlikely
to be repeated now that those nations whose own destinies entranced somebody
like Paradjanov are themselves falling to those who persecute bards and
painters. As for the imagery, it has already been snipped by the censors. The
West would never have allowed a film maker like Paradjanov to succeed but on our
TV screens in the becostumed elegant other-land of multicultural poses, SBS
regularly steals more than a few scenes from Paradjanov for their station
promos.
From Cteq
Vikki Riley is a freelance writer and critic now based in Darwin,
Australia.
E-mail:
riley.vikki@gmail.com
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