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DVD - Film - Ashik Kerib/The Legend of the Suram Fortress

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  • DVD - Film - Ashik Kerib/The Legend of the Suram Fortress

    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.
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