Parajanov worked on Kyivs’ki freski throughout 1965. While it never made it into production, he did write the scenario and shooting script, and filmed a handful of camera tests in October of that year. Ostensibly a celebration of the Great Patriotic War, Kyivs’ki freski is set on 9 May 1965 – the anniversary of Kyiv’s liberation. Parajanov’s script described the film as made up of ten “cine-frescoes”. It was to be both mainstream and innovative. Kyivs’ki freski offers a glimpse of both the poetics and imagery of The Colour of Pomegranates (1969). With its ornate gold frames, falling mother of pearl and shots of lace on glass, the overall graphic organisation of shots repeatedly draws attention to the artifice of cinema – Parajanov’s script even stipulates that our hero lives on a soundstage. Many of the frescoes concern a shared dream, linked with the image of a fluttering curtain – another image that will reappear in Pomegranates. For Parajanov, Kyivs’ki freski marked a departure from naturalistic acting in favour of purely expressive movement. This recalls not just Eisenstein’s fascination with gesture but also Parajanov’s early studies in violin, voice and ballet. Inevitably, the Kyiv office of the Russian State Film Agency, Goskino, Ukraine noted that the tests exhibited “a distorted… pathological perception of reality” and while acknowledging the value of Parajanov’s experimentation they nevertheless deemed the tests as having little relation to the scenario submitted. Consequently, the film was cancelled. Cinematographer Oleksandr Antypenko subsequently repurposed the tests into a short film. Shortly afterwards, Parajanov received a request from Hayfilm Studio in Armenia to make a film about the life of their national poet, Sayat Nova.

Daniel Bird

Parajanov’s second solo feature, Ukrains’ka rapsodiia, was his most ambitious project yet: a wartime melodrama that employed location shooting in Lviv to stand in for the unnamed “Western European city”, and Kaliningrad (Königsberg) for the bombed-out ruins of Germany. Oleksand Levada’s script, about a gifted Ukrainian singer named Oksana who is separated from her lover Anton during the war, undoubtedly resonated with Parajanov. He studied singing and enrolled in a conservatory before enrolling in the VGIK. In the film, art uplifts morale during wartime, enriches people’s lives more broadly, and provides a common language for humanity. Like some other Soviet Thaw films about the war, most notably Destiny of a Man (Sudba Cheloveka, 1959) and Peace to Him Who Enters (Mir vkhodyashchemu, 1961), it offers a sympathetic depiction of Soviet prisoners of war and ordinary German people. It is telling that, in Parajanov’s film, Anton takes refuge in a German church and hears a young boy singing Schubert’s Ave Maria. Unlike the script, the film deploys an elaborate flashback structure that Parajanov likely developed in collaboration with the editor, Marfa Ponomarenko. She became Parajanov’s most trusted collaborator and worked on all his subsequent features. The film also shows Parajanov delving into the striking visual lyricism that he would master a few years later in Tini zabutykh predkiv. Like Parajanov’s first solo feature, Pershyi parubok, it succeeded as crowd-pleasing entertainment even if it did not receive critical acclaim. According to Joshua First, it earned some 20 million admissions in the Soviet Union, a respectable figure for the Dovzhenko Film Studio.

James Steffen