Edgar Baghdasaryan’s Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev
A critical essay on an Armenian Masterpiece: Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev, a movie banned in Russia by Putin's orders
The Critical Corner
November 20, 2024
By Bedros Afeyan
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
Bedros Afeyan, on 11-16-2024
Pacific Heights, San Francisco, CA
Vogue Theater, Golden Gate Armenian Film Festival
It is remarkable when a director from a tiny country in great peril of physical extinction takes on the big ideas of the world and contributes substantially to the simultaneous chewing of the cud of Soviet and post-Soviet absurdity and tragicomedy with inventiveness, indomitable spirit, artistic audacity, and folkloric musical omnipresence through genres and timbres that help render the movie scintillating. I salute maestro Baghdasaryan who convincingly stops time in this movie and invents his narrative in that stopped-time space. Here there is no past or present except as partial echoes of distant and constantly distorted signals. And the future can learn from nothing since knowledge of the past is substantially wiped out by design and additionally by the rushed mad dash to oblivion we have all bought tickets to with our portable screens, dark room isolation which just feeds us porn of a million varieties. Historical porn, philosophical porn, political, junk music, junk aerial photography, drone porn, corny, sappy, drippy pornucopia. As Bob Dylan might have muttered: Everybody must get porned!
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