LOS ANGELES: The films of Sergei Paradjanov aren't like most of the films made in the Soviet Union in the sixties and seventies, and not really much like anything else, either: floating, visually poetic works full of charged symbolic imagery. Their meanings may not always be readily clear, but that wasn't enough to keep the government authorities from deciding that whatever they were supposed to mean, it pissed them off; the director, who died at the age of 66 in 1990, just when it was becoming possible for artists such as himself to get some breathing room in their home country, was subjected to official harassment during the most creatively fertile years of his career and spent four years in a labor camp. From February 22 to the 29th, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is showing six of Paradjanov's films, including his breakthrough Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, the masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates, and the late works The Legend of Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib, made in the 1980s after the filmmaker was obliged to take a fifteen-year layoff.
Read More...