Don Askarian - Avetik (1992)

"Avetik" is very much in tradition of the cinema of dreams. A gorgeous and mesmerizing film, "Avetik" both thrills the eye and boggles the mind. It takes you on a journey of the mind that leads to heaven or hell - a succulent garden full of bare-breasted goddesses or a frozen step of devastation and death". "Askarian is capable of producing images that are unlike anything ever seen before, yet hit you with a primal immediacy".Hovering between the realms of poetry and history, this stunningly photographed, elegiac work-hot mostly in long takes-mixes cryptic metaphor and fantastic symbolism to tell the story of Avetik, an Armenian filmmaker exiled in Berlin. Director Askarian employs dreamlike images-a crumbling, ancient stone chapel gradually reduced to nothing by the rumbling vibrations of passing military vehicles; a ghostly cemetery of carved tombstones in which a woman takes a starving sheep in her arm and breast-feeds it back to life-to reflect the history of his homeland and shades of his own exile in Germany. In sensuous, lyric tableaux, Askarian explores German racism, the 1915 Armenian genocide, the disastrous earthquake of 1989, tranquil childhood memories, and images inspired by erotic medieval poetry.

Sergei Parajanov - Ukrainskaya rapsodiya aka Ukrainian Rhapsody (1961)

Quote:
"Ukrainskaya Rapsodiya" (the USSR, 1961) of Sergueï Paradjanov is a film saga of oceanic proportion with many rivers flowing into it. The characters are the affluents which mix in and distinguish themselves within the furrows of the storyline. An ocean of images but of musics too. Cause the film evolves more by its musical quality, then by its narration.

Orksana, talented student at the Ukrainian Academy likes Antonin whom she met in her youth. Here the love is less tumultuous in retrospect to "Pervyy Paren" (USSR, 1958) of the same Paradjanov, even if a certain formal expression of it remain. In this third feature of the Armenian filmmaker; the Second World war, one of the rare History adaptations of Paradjanov, come to disturb the peaceful flow. "Ukrainskaya Rapsodiya" thus enter in a powerful melody, the railroads, industrial symbols of the river, cross in several plans, as if to illustrate the opulence of the livings.

Sergei Parajanov - Tsvetok na kamne AKA A Little Flower on a Stone (1962)

Description: Full of arresting chiaroscuro images, Paradjanov's only monochrome film plays like a noir thriller. Set in a mining town in the Donets Basin, it centres on a clash (allegorical?) between the political establishment and a religious cult which infiltrates the community. With critic Ron Holloway's Paradjanov: A Requiem (Germany 1994, 59min): a lengthy 1988 interview with Paradjanov frames clips from all the films and samples of his drawings and designs.

(http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/node/14484)