The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov

Notes

261 Notes Notes Introduction 1. Jean-Luc Godard, quoted in Gideon Bachmann, “In the Cinema, It Is Never Monday,” Sight and Sound 52, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 120. 2. Sergei Parajanov quoted in Patrick Cazals, Serguei Paradjanov (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1993), 130. 3. This book uses the British distribution title of The Legend of the Surami Fortress, which is a more accurate translation than the US distribution title, The Legend of Suram Fortress. Surami is an existing town in Georgia. 4. Sergei Paradjanov, Seven Visions, ed. Galia Ackerman, trans. Guy Bennett (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1998); Garo Keheyan, ed., Parajanov Himself (Nicosia: Pharos, 2005); Sergei Paradzhanov and Zaven Sarkisian, Kaleidoskop Paradzhanova: Risunok, kollazh , assambliazh (Yerevan: Muzei Sergeia Paradzhanova, 2008), published simultaneously in English as Parajanov Kaleidoscope: Drawings, Collages, Assemblages; special issue on Sergei Parajanov, ed. James Steffen, Armenian Review 47/48, nos. 3–4/1–2 (2001/2002). 5. Sergei Paradzhanov, Ispoved’, ed. Kora Tsereteli (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2001); Kora Tsereteli, ed., Kollazh na fone avtoportreta: Zhizn’—igra (Nizhnii Novgorod: Dekom, 2008); Vasilii Vasil’evich Katanian, Paradzhanov: Tsena vechnogo prazdnika (Nizhnii Novgorod: Dekom, 2001); R. M. Korohods’kii and S. I. Shcherbatiuk, eds., Serhii Paradzhanov: Zlet, trahediia, vichnist’ (Kyiv: Spalakh, 1994); Karen Kalantar, Ocherki o Paradzhanove (Yerevan: Gitutiun NAN RA, 1998); Levon Grigorian, Tri tsveta odnoi strasti: Triptikh Sergeia Paradzhanova (Moscow: Kinotsentr, 1991); Levon Grigorian, Paradzhanov (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2011). Only a very small amount of scholarship has been published about Parajanov in other languages such as Armenian and Georgian. 6. The best-known instance of Parajanov’s usage of the term “cardiogram” is found in his comments at an October 1981 Artistic Council meeting on Yuri Liubimov’s suppressed production of the play Vladimir Vysotsky, during which he called the Taganka Theatre a “cardiogram of Moscow.” Parajanov also used the precise phrase “cardiogram of the time” in the interview shot by journalist Ron Holloway at the 1988 Munich Film Festival and subsequently used in his documentary Parajanov: A Requiem (1994). 262  Notes 7. Ron Holloway, “Sayat Nova,” Variety, June 21, 1978. 8. Frank Williams, “A Martyrdom Concealed,” Times Literary Supplement, August 27, 1982, 922. 9. Ibid. 10. Jeanne Vronskaya, “The Paradzhanov Affair,” The Times (London), June 20, 1974. 11. Leonid Alekseychuk, “A Warrior in the Field,” Sight and Sound 60, no. 1 (Winter 1990/1991): 22. 12. Ibid., 24. 13. Ibid. 14. George Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers: The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy and the Fall the of the Soviet Film Industry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 52. 15. The following account is synthesized from: Valery S. Golovskoy with John Rimberg , Behind the Soviet Screen: The Motion-Picture Industry in the USSR, 1972–1982 (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1986), 8–45; B. N. Konoplev, Osnovy fil’moproizvodstva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969), 3–24 and 38–87; and my own observations based on Goskino documents at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). 16. Golovskoy and Rimberg, Behind the Soviet Screen, 17. 17. Ibid., 13. 18. The term kinofikatsiia (“cinefication”) referred to the expansion and improvement of film exhibition facilities. 19. Konoplev, Osnovy fil’moproizvodstva, 90. 20. Golovskoy and Rimberg, Behind the Soviet Screen, 24. 21. Konoplev, Osnovy fil’moproizvodstva, 20. 22. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 87. 23. Ibid., 102. 24. Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 415 25. Ibid. 26. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 27. Ibid., 13. 28. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (hereafter RGANI), f. 5, op. 61, d. 77. 29. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 452–53. 30. Peter Kenez, “Films of the Second World War,” in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (New York: Routledge, 1992), 164–66. 31. Alexander Karaganov, “The Soviet Multinational Cinema,” in The Soviet Multinational State: Readings and Documents, ed. Martha B. Olcott, Lubomyr Hajda, and Anthony Notes  263 Olcott (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe: 1990), 293. Originally published as “Skhodstva i razlichiia” in Pravda, October 10, 1982. 32. Karaganov, “The Soviet Multinational Cinema,” 293. 33. Ibid., 294. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 295. 36. Ibid., 296. 37. Ibid., 296–97. 38. See, for instance, Larysa Briukhovets...