The new header image is a production still from the filming of Sergei Paradzhanov‘s Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors/ Тіні забутих предків), 1965. This is one of my ten — or maybe even five — all-time favorite films. It’s a half Romeo and Juliet, half Wuthering Heights, full of eternal love, and cool stuff like frustrated desire, obsession and death.
The other pleasures this film offers is entirely ethnographic; Paradzhanov, a Soviet Armenian filmmaker from Tbilisi, Georgia, was completely enthralled with the material culture, music, languages, and human (especially male) beauty of the Caucasus and Anatolia. Elsewhere — probably when I’ve used pictures from his films as header images before — I’ve referred to him as an “our parts” pornographer. He really had a fetish for his cinematic object, and though we use “fetish”, usually, to describe something unhealthy, it might be better to just accept it as a point on the broader spectrum of object relations.
In Shadows… Paradzhanov moves from his home territory to the Ukrainian sub-ethnic group of the Hutsuls (Гуцулы/Гуцули), that live on the Ukrainian side of the Carpathian mountains in the far west of the country. (I’m sure his appreciation of male beauty was sated there as swell.) The Hutsuls have one of the most richest High Folk Civilizations of Europe: clothes, dance, music, handicrafts — they’re also the people that make those famous Ukrainian Easter eggs you might have heard tell of. In fact, Paradzhanov was kind of a prick when the film was being filmed: he would borrow heirloom items for the shoot from the local inhabitants and then never return them.
Shadows… may be my favorite Paradzhanov film. It’s his most cinematic film, meaning it has the most conventional visual and cinematic narrative — cinema comes from Greek kinema (κίνημα), which means movement. After Shadows…, which put him on the map cinematically, he turned to extreme long shots and extreme long takes of static tableaux; they’re beautiful, but sometimes they try even my patience.
Color of Pomegranates in 1969 and The Legend of Suram Fortress in 1985… What was he doing for twenty plus years? you ask. Well, he was arrested several times between 1973 and 1982, a period during which his previous films were prohibited, for “sexual crimes”, i.e. homosexuality, along with “rape and bribery” — probably trumped up charges. Only when censorship in the Soviet Union started to ease up during the Gorbachev years was Paradzhanov allowed to make films again.
The header photo is not a scene from Shadows… though. It’s a production still, a lovely photo of two Hutsul children watching the filming.
1. Never clean your room. Your mom will do it. Unless you are a mom then you are to refuse any help if offered and complain how nobody in the house helps you.
2. When asked how you are doing answer as if your collocutor really wanted to know.
3. When asked how you are doing the correct answer is: terrible. Then move on to the details of your misery.
4. Be a slacker and be proud of it.
5. If you cannot be a slacker then indulge in work but never admit it. Even if you get all the highest grades or Nobel prize you are to deny that you ever in your life studied or worked hard.
6. Be late! Always and for everything.
7. Everyday spend at least two hours in the coffeeshop. You are not to work but smoke there.
8. Eat meat and lots of it. Treat vegies as decoration.
9. Be proud of rakija, but in the case of lockdown go and empty all the shelves of coca cola in the local store.
10. When a problem arises the most important thing is not to solve it but to show that you are not guilty. So, you are to argue who is to blame and why it is not you.
11. Be sloppy but creative: from grammar to domestic electrical installations. As long as it works somehow you are fine.
Finally, if the going gets tough you are to forget all previous 11 rules and go into death across Albania to win the impossible war.
Provenance and location unkown. Thought it might be the Certosa di San Martino in Vomero, but that’s not a functioning monastery. Who knows? Naples is a strangely middle-eastern city in some ways; there are always secret interiors that there are no exterior clues to. On the other hand, the claustrophobia of the tightly packed and built city often leads to a great deal of domestic life taking place in the street.
“I DEMAND EITHER CITY-STATES OR A UNIVERSAL IMPERIUM OF HUMANITY”
-- Murtaza Muhammad Hussein (quoted above) is a journalist I respect immensely whose work focuses on national security, foreign policy, and human rights. His work has previously been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera English.
(See more of M.M. Hussein @theintercept)
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FROM BOSNIA TO BENGAL -- The purpose of this blog
Me, I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but when I say that in English some five people in the world today understand what I'm talking about, so I use "Greek" for shorthand). I'm from New York. I live all over the place these days. The rest should become obvious from the blog.
"What I hope this blog accomplishes is to create even the tiniest amount of common consciousness among readers from the parts of the world in question."
Please contact me with comments, questions, complaints or -- please -- corrections at: nikobakos@gmail.com
