Early Films of Parajanov

 

Before becoming the auteur he is best known as, Sergei Parajanov had a career in the more conformist side of filmmaking. His first three films, directed in the Ukrainan SSR, are mostly overlooked, as they have little in common with the free and challenging filmmaker most are familiar with.  

THE FIRST LAD (1959)

Parajanov's solo directorial debut is entirely different from the auteurship he constructed, and very much framed in a typically social-realist context of soviet cinema, as was the most common case for Soviet Cinema in the '50s. What makes this film even more unique is the sports background to its subject: the "first lad" of the title references the first boy who becomes a football player at the newly built stadium in a village in Ukraine.

UKRAINAN RHAPSODY (1961)

Ukrainan Rhapsody is the most special of Parajanov's early works, as it presents the seeds of the  poetic sense that will pervade his filmography later on. Through the evocative power of music the film describes the resilience of the ukrainan people, personified in Oksana and Anton, a singer and a farmer from Sibirsk, divided by the second world war.  
It is nonetheless a film with a layer of propaganda, that is filmed in the Russian language, that depicts a very soviet-centered Ukraine, but also an anti-war ode with a mature distinction between culture and ideology in the depiction of the enemy, and a lyrical romantic work.

FLOWER ON A STONE (1962)

A film that Parajanov took over from director Anatoly Slesarenko after the horrible death of coprotagonist Inna Burduchenko, apprently forced by Slesarenko to shoot a dangerous scene. The film takes place in the Donbass region, which has been often represented in cinema starting from Vertov, has seen an intense industrialisation (and russification), and currently is the main theater of the frontline in Ukraine. The film follows a group of soviet settlers as they collaborate in estabilishing a new mine, as a sect-cult preys on the superstition of locals. It is a very propagandistic film that has almost no glimpse of Parajanov's auteurship.