Time Out
January 1, 2009

DVD – Film – Ashik Kerib/The Legend of the Suram Fortress;
Certs: PG (£19.99 each)

by Wally Hammond

These are slightly lesser, later works from the dissident,
otherworldly Armenian-Georgian Sergei Paradjanov, director of the
exalted folk cine-poem ‘Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors’ (1964) and
the vibrant tableaux-vivant, ‘The Colour of Pomegranates’
(1968). Previous to these films, Paradjanov had been making more
conventional Soviet-era ‘socialist-realist’ works; the official
‘outrage’ that followed their camp radicalism and blazing iconography
led to a period of ‘priest-like’ solitary confinement on trumped-up
charges for the director, an experience that informs the two 1980s
titles on review. ‘Ashik Kerib’ takes a Lermontov story of the
1,000-day wanderings of the titular minstrel, whereas the slightly
wackier ‘The Legend of the Suram Fortress’ is based on a Georgian
nationalist folk song and a nineteenth-century novel by Daniel
Chongadze.

Both, in their colourful, dazzlingly eccentric way pay tribute to the
tribulations (and audacity) of the ‘solitary artist’ and the buried
cultural histories and peoples whom they ‘inspire’, here those of the
subsumed countries of Azerbaijan and Georgia, respectively. Both discs
provide ample, contextualising extras, including docs on the source
writers. In addition, each has a 30-minute, slightly overlapping, doc
on the great man himself, one featuring his wife Svetlana Shcherbatyuk,
which both sidestep his gayness but not his irrepressible energy,
gnomic hoaxing and the purity of his unique, eclectic, poetic
imagination.