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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Free as a Bird 

19 January, 1999 - 00:00

Since last week the Kyiv House of Cinema has been hosting festivities in
memory of film director Serhiy Paradzhanov.

He would have been 75 on January 9. Paradzhanov died eight years ago
and was buried in Armenia, his ancestral home, but Ukraine does and will
cherish his name with special reverence and tenderness, perhaps not only
because he made The Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors, by far Ukraine's
most award-winning and symbolic film with a deep insight into the essence
of our land, but also because he showed his colleagues the example of an
unthinkable, absolutely boundless freedom much to the envy of modern artists
who are now working in far more sterile conditions than Paradzhanov did.

Paradzhanov is now very much spoken and written about in a passionate,
heart-breaking, and ponderous pitch. He is referred to as a genius, which
is true, even though this downgraded epithet is now being applicable to
all sorts of poseurs. He must have been a genius indeed, which is testified
not only by his unique mature films such as Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,
Sayat-Nova, and The Legend of the Suram Fortress but also by his
over-generous nature which always felt hemmed in among banal moral truths,
preset artistic patterns, and the conventional wisdom. In fact, the very
emergence and presence of such people in the world challenges the inextinguishable
diktat that all be commonplace.

With this in view, let us discreetly hold back our pen before it spits
out panegyric clichОs, at least because history teaches: there is no more
reliable a method to destroy a unique genius than a blind posthumous glory
- all this obtusely delightful eulogy, lines in pre-filtered memoirs, unbridled
sweet mush, and deep sighs. God grant that the great Serhiy Paradzhanov,
a dreamer and maximalist, a taboo-breaker and priest of beauty, should
not be diminished in death. For he happened to know a thing or two about
divine disdain and the precious cost of artistic freedom.

 

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