Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
SERGEI PARAJANOV CENTENNIAL
November 8 – November 17
November 8-17, 2024
This fall, on the occasion of the centennial of his birth, Anthology is honored to host a retrospective – the most comprehensive ever presented in the U.S. – devoted to Sergei Parajanov. A filmmaker who was famously a man of three “motherlands,” Parajanov was born and raised in (then-Soviet) Georgia to ethnic Armenian parents, established his career in Ukraine, and lived towards the end of his life in Armenia (where he made perhaps his most renowned film, SAYAT NOVA). An artist who suffered from political persecution throughout his career, due ostensibly to his bisexuality but in reality to his political and artistic convictions, Parajanov was censored, prevented from making films following the release of SAYAT NOVA, and ultimately imprisoned for four years in the mid-1970s (he was released a year early thanks to the protests and intervention of figures including Louis Aragon, John Updike, Godard, Tarkovsky, Coppola, Scorsese, and many others).
Parajanov is (rightly) celebrated for his last four feature films: SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (1965) and SAYAT NOVA (THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES) (1969), and the two films he managed to complete following his release from prison, THE LEGEND OF SURAM FORTRESS (1985), and ASHIK KERIB (1988). But Parajanov began his filmmaking career a decade before completing his masterpiece of Ukrainian cinema, SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS. Between 1954-65, he directed four features and several shorts, all in Ukraine, all of which have hardly been seen or written about in recent decades. That has all changed this past year, thanks to the efforts of the Dovzhenko Centre and Fixafilm, who have unearthed and made 4K scans of the films from this first, hitherto neglected period of Parajanov’s career. While Parajanov’s early films are the work of an artist who has not yet developed the sublime and inimitable cinematic style that he would eventually attain, they nevertheless shed a fascinating light on his roots and development as an artist.
“While in later life, Parajanov was prone to [dismissing] his filmography up to SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS, the four features and three documentaries that preceded it present a very different but no less fascinating director. Not only does this program provide an opportunity to trace Parajanov’s creative evolution as a filmmaker, but it also reflects the diverse output of Ukraine’s largest studio in the immediate post-Stalin era. It was here, over the course of ten years, that artistic stipulations would give way to the emergence of an informal school of filmmakers…who looked back to Ukrainian cinema of the 1920s, while exemplifying a defiantly poetic, even national sensibility, which influenced the cinemas of non-Russian Soviet republics and beyond. […] The program acquires even greater value during this Russian war, when human, territorial, and cultural losses are happening beyond reason. Ukraine cannot afford to lose its heritage again. This program goes beyond its scope, it aims at preserving Parajanov’s art as well as his national and cultural roots. It’s thanks to him that Ukrainian cinema regained international recognition after almost 30 years.” –Daniel Bird & Olena Honcharuk
The Sergei Parajanov Centennial is made possible with the support of RIBBON, a platform supporting historic and contemporary Ukrainian arts and culture. The Parajanov Centennial brings together Kyiv’s Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre (Dovzhenko Center) together with Anthology in an effort to foster a cross-archival dialog. The Dovzhenko center is the largest Ukrainian film archive, with an extensive collection that includes 7,000 feature films, documentaries, Ukrainian and foreign animated films and thousands of archival records from the history of Ukrainian cinema.
Special thanks to Olena Honcharuk (Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre); Chloe Hodge; Sam Lewitt; Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Daniel Bird; Cecilia Cenciarelli (Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna); Łukasz Ceranka (Fixafilm); Naira Gevorgyan (Cinema Foundation of Armenia); Susan Oxtoby & Jon Y Shibata (Pacific Film Archive); Nino Ungiadze (Georgian Film); Anri Vartanov (Metrograph); and Martiros M. Vartanov (Parajanov-Vartanov Institute).
The opening night screening on Fri, Nov 8 will be followed by a panel discussion with Olena Honcharuk, Director of the Dovzhenko Center; Oleksandr Teliuk, artist, scholar, and filmmaker; and preservationist Daniel Bird, who has worked with the World Cinema Project on numerous restorations, including THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES, and was the co-programmer (with Honcharuk) of Il Cinema Ritrovato’s 2024 Parajanov retrospective. Olena Honcharuk will also introduce the screenings on Sat, Nov 9 and Mon, Nov 11.
