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The Tribulations of Filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov
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12297 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1987 |
1,453 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
The Soviet Union under its new leadership is making valiant efforts to show Americans that things have really changed, culturally at least, with Mikhail Gorbachev in the saddle. The poet Andrei Voznesensky was suddenly permitted to publish poems tacitly criticizing anti-Semitism in the USSR, and even more, allowed to give a lengthy interview to a New York Times correspondent, discussing the matter in considerable detail.
Last fall the Soviets sent a collection of films shown in the 1986 Tashkent Film Festival that were drawn from nineteen studios outside Moscow - from Armenia, Byelorussia, Georgia, Estonia, and Kirghiz. The delegation of filmmakers was headed by Elem Klimov, recently appointed president of the Soviet Filmmakers Union.
In the past Klimov has had problems getting his own films shown in the Soviet Union. His Agonia, released last winter in America under the title Rasputin, a highly expressionistic treatment of the mad monk and the last czar of all the Russian states, had been held up for more than ten years before finally having a limited run in Moscow.
In a move designed to win friends in the West, Klimov was named to head the Filmmakers Union and allowed to make speeches promising greater artistic freedom than before. Soviet filmmakers started talking of their problems as being like those of talented directors in Hollywood. The Soviet state authorities were equated with America's studio executives and producers - the problem always being the difficulty of getting a really original idea accepted by souls unattuned to the needs of the creative artist. A kind of show-business moral equivalence as it
... (1975 of 8881 Characters)
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