Sergei Parajanov’s first feature film was co-directed by Yakiv Bazelian, but it was primarily Parajanov’s project. His lost 1952 diploma film for the VGIK (the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography), entitled Moldavskaya skazka [A Moldovan Fairy Tale], was based on the same material: Andriesh, the 1946 narrative poem by the Moldovan author Emilian Bucov. According to the critic Rostislav Yurenev, for his diploma film Parajanov constructed a “large puppet” for the character of Andriesh and integrated it with location shooting, “achieving a remarkable naturalness of movement and a combination of live nature with theatrical illusion”. This more conventional feature-film remake produced at the Dovzhenko Film Studio adheres to the popular Soviet fairytale film genre as exemplified by directors such as Alexander Ptushko and Alexander Rou. The film’s visual design is clearly inspired by the illustrations for Bucov’s poem and Bucov is listed as a co-author of the script. The film version, however, significantly changes the narrative and tames some of the strangeness of the original. In the poem, Andriesh’s closest companion is a talking ewe named Miora, and a seven-headed dragon serves as the main villain instead of the film’s evil wizard, Black Storm. The film was not a box-office success and was criticised in the Soviet press for its underdeveloped script, but the aspects that critics did admire then still retain their charm: the performance of the child actor Konstantin (Kostya) Rusu, the musical score, and Suren Shakhbazian’s cinematography.

James Steffen