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