LOS ANGELES: The films of Sergei Paradjanov aren't like most of the films made in the Soviet Union in the sixties and seventies, and not really much like anything else, either: floating, visually poetic works full of charged symbolic imagery. Their meanings may not always be readily clear, but that wasn't enough to keep the government authorities from deciding that whatever they were supposed to mean, it pissed them off; the director, who died at the age of 66 in 1990, just when it was becoming possible for artists such as himself to get some breathing room in their home country, was subjected to official harassment during the most creatively fertile years of his career and spent four years in a labor camp. From February 22 to the 29th, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is showing six of Paradjanov's films, including his breakthrough Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, the masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates, and the late works The Legend of Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib, made in the 1980s after the filmmaker was obliged to take a fifteen-year layoff.
BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to one of the most highly regarded and least mass-audience-friendly of living British directors with "Closely Watched Films: Terence Davies" (February 20 - February 27). This ambitious retrospective is built around screenings of Davies' autobiographical works, the feature films The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives and the three shorts that comprise "The Terence Davies Trilogy", as well as his adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible, with the director himself in attendance. On February 23, Davies will walk an audience through his breakthrough film in a discussion titled "Distant Voices, Still Lives: Shot-by-Shot." The theater will also screen his version of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth with Gillian Anderson. J. Hoberman captured what sets Davies apart, and what gives his work its fascintion, when he wrote of that one that “Davies’s sense of the material is closer to a Mizoguchi geisha drama than Masterpiece Theatre."
