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This month, the Gene Siskel Film Center presents the work of a renowned Russian director.

Wednesday Aug 06, 2008.     By Beatrice Smigasiewicz

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"In the temple of cinema there are images, light and reality. Sergei Paradjanov was the master of that temple. His unmistakable films are rarely watched, often admired, and usually regarded as some of the most important movies of the 20th century."–Godard

This month (through August 24), the Gene Siskel Film Center presents a retrospective of the work of Sergei Paradjanov, a Russian director renowned and persecuted for the singularity of his vision.

The Soviet Union in the 1960s was not typically an environment that encouraged cinematic creativity. Each one of the 120 or so films released every year was individually inspected from script to screen by Gosinko, a centralized government agency. This thorough inspection significantly slowed down the production process but ensured that Lenin's "most important art" followed the principles of revolutionary cinema, whose point was to educate the people of the Soviet Union about the communist revolution.

Not only was average production time increased from three to 14 months, the number of films made significantly dropped during this period. The heightened censorship supported only feature films with a formulaic content comparable to that of a typical Western or romance novel: a hero character discovers or is saved by the communist collective.

Of course there were exceptions to the content and censorship. The famous Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, managed to slip by censors regardless of the often-questionable content of his films. Considered "Gosinko's Darling," he had his work produced and recognized by the Soviet Union as a masterpiece of poetics. But most others were less fortunate, including Tarkovsky’s closest competition in poetic cinema, Sergei Paradjanov.

Like many of his contemporaries, Paradjanov graduated from Moscow's prestigious film school VGIK, where he studied under the masters Aleksander Dovzhenko and Igor Savchenko. He appeared on the scene in 1964 with the release of "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" (often known as "Wild Horses of Fire"), a film that immediately turned the young Paradjanov into both an international celebrity and a suspect. The film tells a tale of unrequited love and tragic fate not unlike the story of Romeo and Juliet. A man is haunted by the memory of his first love and driven through sorcery to join her in spirit. Rich in Ukrainian folklore and religious imagery, the film didn't conform to the standards of social realist cinema and was quickly banned, making Paradjanov's career as a Soviet filmmaker impossible.

Subsequent charges followed. He was accused of homosexuality, rape, pornography and finally bribery, for which he spent four years of a five-year sentence in labor camps—regardless of his friends' (Andrei Tarkovsky, Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Goddard, Francois Truffaut) efforts to free him.

Paradjanov's style is often compared to that of the early silent-film director, Sergei Eisenstein, creator of the famous "Battleship Potemkin." Like Eisenstein, Paradjanov refrains from dialogue, relying on the film's visual montage to carry the story. Both directors' films paint a world distant if not emotionally unreachable to the viewer, its meaning buried beneath layers of associations. Paradjanov, however, lacks the didactic approach of Eisenstein and other social-realist filmmakers, replacing it with rich symbolism, folklore and carefully composed sound to create a style which is entirely his own. His films were shelved for years and, of the roughly 20 films he directed, only three are feature-length and few have ever been screened in the United States, making the Siskel Center's event all the more exciting.

The series includes a new print of the director's groundbreaking "Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors," as well as the never-before-screened-in-Chicago "Ukrainian Rhapsody" (in addition to several other films).

For the full schedule and ticket information, visit the Gene Siskel Film Center website.