Craft and brilliance

The memorable opening of the exhibit of artworks by the noted Ukrainian filmmaker Serhii Paradzhanov took place at the National Art Museum of Ukraine. The show features 55 works on loan from the Serhii Paradzhanov Museum in Yerevan. There are artists whose world is revealed only through their creations in the form of words, colors, and sounds. There are others whose popularity is rooted in public interest in their private lives, and still others, like Paradzhanov, the magic of whose texts is an inseparable part of the magic of their names or their myth. In this case, absolutely everything is interesting, and the smallest detail is examined as though through a microscope because creative texts require a number of master keys.

VYING WITH A DEITY

Paradzhanov is the main creator of myths about himself. Yet a myth is not fiction because it is a concentration of meanings that seemingly underpin the text.

Here is an example. On numerous occasions the film director explained that he ended up in Kyiv because he was persuaded to come by the great Alexander Dovzhenko, who was then the chairman of the commission at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). After viewing Paradzhanov’s diploma film Andriiesh, Dovzhenko allegedly told the young filmmaker to go and work for the Kyiv Film Studios, the best place for his filmmaking style. By this he meant the similarity of creative ideologies, that which later became known as “poetic cinema.”

Not surprisingly, Paradzhanov presented himself as the heir of Dovzhenko. Where Dovzhenko stopped, Ihor Savchenko’s pupil began. In a documentary film Paradzhanov said this about the Dovzhenko Studios: “They are competing to see who is best. Dovzhenko is first and I am second.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “No, Savchenko is second...” Savchenko was Paradzhanov’s teacher, but the young film director was adapting himself to Dovzhenko, who stood on a higher rung of the ladder of geniuses. People believed Paradzhanov’s stories, so much so that the compilers of Paradzhanov’s “Chronicle of Life and Death” in the book Kollazh na fone avtoportreta (Collage against the Backdrop of a Self-portrait, Moscow, 2005) state without the shadow of a doubt that Dovzhenko took over film directing at the VGIK after Savchenko’s death.

In fact, Dovzhenko only chaired the commission. Did he really say those words that Paradzhanov so often quoted? There are great doubts about this, and these doubts became even stronger after I read the noted Russian film critic Rostislav Yurenev’s book of memoirs V opravdanie etoi zhizni (In Justification of That Life, Moscow, 2007) about how Paradzhanov’s diploma project was actually defended. It happened in 1952. According to the author, Dovzhenko was impatiently listening to the critics and then took the floor. He spoke at length and depth, often deviating from the topic of the submitted student films. He frequently drifted into descriptions of the peaceful beauty of the Ukrainian countryside and of the potter’s craft: “He described the rotation of the potter’s wheel and the masterful movements of hands shaping clay as an image relating to any kind of creativity. He said tenderly, ‘These clay pots are actually amphoras, vases!’ Sometimes during a single session of the committee he would mention potters’ wheels, clay pots, and potters several times. This sometimes embarrassed the students whose diploma films were being defended. They wanted to hear the noted film director’s opinion of their first productions...”

Be that as it may, Dovzhenko was a genius not only in terms of the artistic level of his works. A genius means a separate galaxy that does not depend on anything or anyone. He has clay pots on his mind, so he will talk about them, no matter what...In general, Dovzhenko spoke mostly in monologues, and it was hard to get across to him. Even Comrade Stalin listened to him, although not for long.

It is also true, however, that a genius is a professional who can instantly grasp the essence of a matter. For example, he immediately saw the future film conductor Vladimir Basov as an actor and told him so. His guess proved right, and how! But he didn’t like Andriiesh. Yurenev writes in his memoirs: “Paradzhanov submitted a short film entitled Andriiesh, based on a Moldovan tale. Shot on location, the film features a child-sized puppet. He made the puppet himself and moved its arms, feet, lips, and eyes for every frame. He did the stills himself and made the artificial flowers that he stuck in the grass of the small hill on which the action unfolded. This was a titanic effort, especially in the conditions at the VKIK, with its lack of modern equipment, celluloid, lighting, and money.”

This is all true, but “Dovzhenko was outraged by Andriiesh. I was sitting behind him in the screening hall and saw him bristle, squirm, even jump from his seat. He started speaking even as we were going up the stairs to the conference room:

“It’s a nightmare! Like a zombie walking on grass...Doesn’t the filmmaker realize that a puppet made to look like a living being is like a cadaver? And the artificial flowers! Next to them the living grass is dying...And what exactly is the plot, the idea of this tale all about? No, no, this is anticreative; it’s dreadful... This project cannot be accepted!”

That is what actually happened. Forget about being told to go to Kyiv. Paradzhanov’s diploma film was on the verge of being rejected, with unforeseeable consequences (like getting a job on an auxiliary crew on a set somewhere in the boondocks). You can imagine how the young film director felt, seeing one of the gods of cinematography about to trample his work, thereby blocking the road to a shining future. “The small, chubby, dark-haired Paradzhanov kept his large gorgeous shining eyes on him, and kept smiling shyly, like a mischievous kid caught red-handed. It was perhaps the kind of look one would expect from a lamb being led to the slaughterhouse...Of course, Dovzhenko did not look like a butcher or hangman — rather like an enraged deity, a priest whose sincere beliefs had just been offended and who was prepared to make a bloody sacrifice. Paradzhanov continued listening, with a tender smile on his lips, with an expression of appealing kindness and obedience in his eyes that also shone with genuine talent.”

Yurenev tried to defend Paradzhanov: so much work had been done and the mastery was apparent. This elicited even greater wrath: “This is not skill but craft! Craft that’s not illuminated by an idea!” After that he seemed to make a concession: “All right, we’ll accept this weird production, but we’ll give it a C.” This mark also spelled disaster because he would never get a job, especially during that period of recession in the Soviet filmmaking industry.

The situation was rescued by another noted film director, Sergei Gerasimov. He spoke with Dovzhenko, who agreed to give Paradzhanov a B. That was when Paradzhanov crashed down in Kyiv, where he worked first as an assistant director. In 1954 he made Andriiesh, with Yakiv Bazelian, a live actor this time, not a puppet. Ten years — and several popular motion pictures — later, he embarked on the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. This is the historical truth. I apologize for what is probably too detailed an account, but I think it is interesting. As we can see, Paradzhanov’s interpretation is divorced from reality. The only truthful fact is that Dovzhenko headed the State Film Studio (DEK). Assuming that the above account is true, Dovzhenko nearly blocked the potential genius’s road to art. He saw him only as an individual with poor taste and theatrical thinking. A lifelike puppet in a natural setting? Ugh, how awful!

When did the genius give his blessings to someone else to succeed him before his death? The procedure is well-known and highly effective, with one condition: your creative result must be acknowledged at least once.

Then you are a genius. Otherwise, you have to play by the generally accepted carnival rules, with costumes and dramatic identifications. It was when that student faced the outraged filmmaking deity that he could have produced within himself the energy of progress, telling himself: In spite of you all, I will prove that I have my own galaxy, my own creative world.

Here the keyword is “genius.” Dovzhenko was a genius while Savchenko was not, you could say. Many people have claimed that Paradzhanov presented himself as a genius, inserting his head in a painting of great artistic value created by someone else. Well, people are funny. My favorite theory was formulated in the 1920s by Yuri Tynianov and Boris Eichenbaum, and it has to do with the literary creative process. Big ideas must ferment on the lowest level, in daily usage, before they can be translated into the language of art. Not everyone can succeed here. Paradzhanov did, thank God.

“SHADOWS OF SHADOWS ”

Note that in this production Paradzhanov uses the same techniques that infuriated Dovzhenko when he was watching Andriiesh: life ritualized to the utmost, masks, and puppets amidst living nature. You are a member of a patriarchal group and have to follow long-established rules, play a role in a script sent down from the “Secretariat.” You are actually a puppet whose strings are pulled by those standing behind the screen of life, the very things that Paradzhanov hated and never accepted, while clothing his attitude in humor. His film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was a manifestation of this protest. Here the individual plunges into a battle with deities and the living carriers of generally accepted rules. This representation became possible owing to a special style in which rituals, made almost automatic due to countless repetitions, are seen as very much alive and real.

Paradzhanov seldom reveals his skill at bringing to the surface traces of archaic consciousness and visualizing them in his early films. In The First Lad (1959), for example, he offers a plot characteristic of socialist realism: a team (“collective”) unites for the sake of a lofty goal, while straightening out a ne’er- do-well fellow (starring an actor remarkably like Petr Aleinikov, which enhances the resemblance — somewhat ironically — of this film to those made by Ivan Pyriev and Leonid Lukov). At the time such plots were not regarded as archaic; they were only being updated by greater topicality and verisimilitude.

As for Shadows..., it was originally assumed that this film would be a screen version of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s short story, something like a Ukrainian Romeo and Juliet, with the right kind of class emphasis: the property status dividing the two families, which doomed the love between the two young people.

Paradzhanov’s later statements lead one to assume that a plot like this was actually planned. But then he met the Hutsuls and his experience led to a lot of changes, primarily in regard to the calloused, age-old rigidity of the collective subconscious. The son of a dealer in antiquarian goods, himself a sporadic collector of antiquarian objects, collector and donor of objects preserving the aura of antiquity, Paradzhanov valued such things for their perfect museum beauty. Suddenly, when the shooting was in progress, it turned out that this world is alive and filled with “vitally meaningful” values. That was how the inner strategy of the creative quest, which was already alive in Paradzhanov’s consciousness, started realizing itself. In some respects, it coincided with strategies that are germane to surrealists — suffice it to recall their obsession with the folk cultures of Oceania or the American Indians. What brought this Ukrainian film director to surrealism is the fact that, starting with Shadows..., he became interested not so much in the “structure of form” as in the actual meaning of rituals and functional objects.

When he was shooting Shadows..., he wanted everything to be real, no make-believe stuff. The rituals were not performed for the camera but were done as part of Hutsul life — rather, as their usual means of communicating with the surrounding world. They exhorted the spirits not because it was a spectacular ritual, something to be done on a certain holiday, but simply because they were afraid of them, so they appeased the spirits lest they harm them, spoil their crops, damage their health, and so on. Therefore, people’s language and habits conform to nature (it does not pay to be foxy); everything must be adequately reflected. A sign is a mark of the real world; it works only when combined with actions aimed at a certain object. And so existence here is a language, the kind man uses with a clear mind, free of empty, futile ideologemes (here again surrealist philosophy in many respects proceeds from the same prerequisite: language as such is nothing when it lacks vitally practical notions).

The early 1960s in the USSR was a period when Soviet rituals started losing their force. Ideological verbiage, calling for dedicated work in the name of a shining future, thereby justifying the miserable current realities, was also decaying. Things that were meant to survive and replace the old means of realizing subconscious aspirations were obviously becoming dislodged. All this made the revelation of this living reality, tagged as an archaic layer of consciousness, in Shadows... even more dramatic.

Yurii Ilienko’s camerawork proved capable of penetrating an individual’s consciousness. In his scenes we find a resemblance to surrealistic poetry. Most often this is the subconscious at a crucial moment, on the verge between life and death. Ivan’s father Petro dies after being hit in the head, and his dying eyes see silhouettes of red horses slowly flying past. When hit in the head the same way, his son suffers an agony, a deadly nightmare in which he is slowly sinking in the world of the dead, where he encounters his sweetheart Marichka.

In fact, Ivan sinks into a kind of nirvana after Marichka’s death. The entire patriarchal community tries to pull him out of it, but he remains in a sleepwalking state. A man with a collectivistic soul and flesh, Ivan finds himself in an individual space, at the very bottom of it. Off-screen you hear a polyphonic choir of his fellow Hutsuls, who are trying to find a remedy for his solitude. Marriage is the simplest solution to the problem — to bring him back to a daily rural routine. Yet time and again Ivan’s consciousness finds breaches, gaps through which his soul pours out. His soul resists, it can no longer exist in this collectivistic healthy body.

And his body is healthy and really beautiful in a tangible way. The man, however, has become aware of another reality where his beloved exists, so he goes there. Unfortunately, this reality is deadly. It means nonexistence, but his soul chooses death — and freedom without any restrictions. It is a suprareality that undermines conventional concepts of human life.

The Paradzhanov exhibit will undoubtedly prove once again that he knew how to reveal the soul and secret meaning of surrounding objects, those that are placed in them by the gods. Who but a genius can see and read this? In our prosaic times, when the very notion of “genius” has somehow evaporated without anyone noticing, when crafts are in demand, when anything above it is considered a product of the devil (“Craft not illuminated by an idea” is now regarded as praise), communicating with Paradzhanov and his world may infect one with a desire to put on the garb of creative giants and set off on a campaign to explore new repositories of world outlooks and concepts. Of course, not all the campaigners will make it, but the goal is truly worth the effort.