Interview: Kirill Serebrennikov

In conversation with Kirill Serebrennikov – the director of the play LEGENDE. Interview conducted by Teresa Bernauer – theatre dramaturge of the Ruhrtriennale 2024-26.  

What made you want to create a piece about Sergey Paradjanov's work?  

Paradjanov's world serves as an opportunity to talk to the audience about art: These are eternal stories about freedom and the struggle for it, about beauty, about the victory of life over death, but - seen through Paradjanov's eyes. His gaze is as naive as a child's, he seeks only beauty in the reality that surrounds him. What is beauty for Sergey Paradjanov? It consists of the most amazing things: Eastern European embroidery, Persian miniatures, Pompeiian mosaics, black-and-white silent films, memories of childhood in Tbilisi, colourful dreams, antiques, the secrets of rugs, the music of Verdi, Puccini and Massenet, the songs of the Hutsuls or Georgian folk songs. All these different elements form an explosive cocktail, a collage, and are transformed into Paradjanov's unique universe.  

Sometimes beauty requires passion, even cruelty and often a sacrifice. One could go so far as to say that Sergey Paradjanov's entire life was a sacrifice he made to make the world as beautiful as possible. He fought for beauty like a noble knight and found it where no one but he recognised it. Paradjanov was sent to prison, he was banned from making films, but even under the most unbearable conditions he found fragments of beauty - in landfills, rubbish bins, flea markets - and used them to create unique works of art, his collages. Today, they can be found in a museum in Yerevan that is dedicated to his work.  

What inspires you about his visual language?  

Paradjanov was born in Tbilisi, lived in Georgia for decades, creating a masterpiece of national cinema from Ukraine and Armenia while remaining a Soviet filmmaker and prisoner of the Soviet gulag. Such was his life. As an artist of the Soviet Union, he was only allowed to work according to the guidelines of the national authorities, so his films were based on folk legends, fairy tales, myths... At first glance, they might give the impression of ethnographic sketches, but this is not the case at all. Paradjanov shot Armenian, Georgian or Ukrainian epics based on his unbridled imagination, and he reinvented all these worlds so convincingly that viewers were often convinced of the documentary value, of the truthfulness of these free creations.

Paradjanov is an artist, a poet, who communicates with the audience less through a traditional narrative, favouring the visual instead. His images are always lively, emotional, meaningful and paradoxical, free of dogmas and clichés. Paradjanov's main conflict with the Soviet government lay precisely in this unrestricted freedom of his artistic genius. He was free where there was no freedom. He allowed himself to do what others did not even dream of. Faced with the complete impossibility of living and working, he created amazing masterpieces of cinema, and I am sure that if Paradjanov had been able to shoot outside the Soviet Union without restrictions, he would have become as famous as his contemporaries Pasolini, Fassbinder and Fellini.  

There are many visually striking motifs in LEGENDE: the unfunny court jester, divas in fur coats, an abundance of young Werthers - all interwoven in dream-like and surreal sequences. Can you describe how you brought them together?  

That's something I can't ttell you, you have to see it for yourself!  

LEGENDE is not a biopic in the strictest sense. Rather, I wrote a piece that consists of ten parts - ten legends - that deal with the questions of the coexistence of artist and world, of man and universe. Each of the ten legends deals with a theme that preoccupied Paradjanov; the main character of the play is simultaneously an allegory of man, artist, poet, wanderer, fighter, rebel...  

We are not reproducing the images from his films, but adopting his method - this total collage, this Gesamtkunstwerk - to tell the ten legends and bring them to the stage. If we succeed, we will end up with a mystery of life and death. This also includes beautiful songs composed by Daniil Orlov, our composer, based on poems by Walt Whitman.  

Death, grief and the unbearable state of the world also play a role. Though there is also a sense of hope: what does it mean to you to bring this to the stage?  

The scene in the cemetery is the funniest! The point is that in the end everything isn't so terrible after all. Because if we look for beauty and love in our lives, then everything is actually not as bad as we thought. And that gives us hope. 

It's also a lot about multilingualism. Travelling between different languages, cultures, spaces and temporalities is also a situation that fwatures prominently in your life. What possibilities does thhis perspectuve create in your own work?  

I think that's the most interesting state, this being in-between. For example, as someone who is half Portuguese and half German, you have the opportunity to look at both German and Portuguese culture from a distance. You have the privilege of being in between, and not having tunnel vision. There is a Russian poem that says "the largest things can only be viewed from a distance". The opportunity to have a distance is very good for the work. That's why I like the fact that we are working in a variety of different languages. If we pick these languages apart, then we can also understand a lot of interesting things from the cultures behind them. We have written a play in Russian and it has been translated into German. We're performing in German. That is something completely different from what I wrote in Russian. So once again - Paradjanov translated into German becomes Heiner Müller! ... Not him directly that, but in a metaphorical sense, they carry a similar DNA.  

The motto of this edition of the Ruhrtriennale is Longing for Tomorrow. Is there a tomorrow you're longing for?  

People might expect me to say something optimistic now, but whenever I read the news, I would rather watch Paradjanov's films so that I can forget those news stories more quickly. Going to the theatre is a form of escapism from the dangers we face. There is no good news - about the climate crisis or war, there's nothing good. The world is fucked, it's gone mad.  

You play with our expectations: images are subverted, positions of power are questioned.  

Paradjanov was widely known for his eccentric performances, fantastic improvisations, paradoxical statements and veritable scandals. Although there is no political dimension in his films, Paradjanov can be considered the anti-Soviet artist par excellence. His aesthetics, freedom and audacity invalidated the entire Soviet system, which was built on all-encompassing fear. All those Soviet bureaucrats with their grey, expressionless faces simply didn't know what to do with him, how to silence him. Unlike Tarkovsky, Paradjanov didn't even try to come to terms with the regime. He behaved - in the eyes of the authorities - like a " town fool", the most dangerous type of artist for any political system. This had serious consequences for him: Years in Soviet prisons, fabricated charges of dealing in antiquities and of homosexuality, which was forbidden under Soviet law. Thanks to the intervention of international public opinion, from François Truffaut to Louis Aragon, Paradjanov was released, but only shortly before his death.