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 were.
What is interesting is that among the seven Soviet films presented by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and by the Smithsonian Resident Associate Program in Washington, D.C., was a film by Sergei Paradjanov - a director not authorized by the Soviets to come to the United States to present his film to the American public.
Unusual Treatment
As a filmmaker, Sergei Paradjanov had some rather unusual problems - problems that creative artists outside totalitarian countries rarely experience. Widely judged the greatest filmmaker the Soviet Union has produced since the death of Sergei Eisenstein, Paradjanov is not, nor ever was, a political dissident. He is a Georgian of Armenian descent and his sin in Soviet eyes is being an artistic visionary.
Recklessly bohemian by temperament, generous, expansive, ebullient, fearless, described by some as "a little crazy," he is of a type not often found in the Soviet Union and has a deep poetic vision of the cinema on which he will not compromise. Paradjanov was fortunate to have been able to make films during the 1960s, a time when his country was in a state of marked social ferment. Solzhenitsyn was riding high, publishing a Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Yeutushenko brought out Babi Yar. Dostoyevsky's works were published for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution. The Picassos and Matisses were taken out of museum vaults and put on display. And Sergei Paradjanov made his great masterpiece, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors. Awed, Mark Donskoi, the dean of Soviet film directors, confided joyously to a visitor, "A genius is
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