Mikhail Vartanov

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Mikhail Vartanov (Russian: Михаил Вартанов, b. February 21, 1937, RSFSR, Soviet Union, now Russian Federation) is a Russian film director and writer.

Vartanov graduated from the Russian state film school VGIK in 1966. He began his documentary oeuvre with the wordless The Color of Armenian Land (1969), featuring the world famous behind-the-scenes episodes of Sergei Parajanov's landmark The Color of Pomegranates (originally released under the title Sayat Nova in 1968). Vartanov's correspondence with the imprisoned Parajanov and his outspoken criticism of Armenia's corrupt film industry resulted in his being blacklisted shortly thereafter. Vartanov's films and screenplays were suppressed, unmentioned by the press, and blocked from submission to foreign film festivals. In those years, Vartanov exquisitely lensed Artavazd Peleshian's classic Seasons of the Year (1975) and Gennadi Melkonian's hit The Mulberry Tree (1979).

In the 1980s, Vartanov's writings were translated into several languages and published worldwide including the prestigous Cahiers du Cinéma in Paris. During the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vartanov directed the trilogy Erased Faces (1987), Minas: A Requiem (1989) and his masterpiece Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992). In the following decade, Vartanov conducted film and photo experiments in his Hollywood apartment, which can be seen in Erased Faces II by Martin Vartanov (Vardanov), with whom he is producing Evrika, a film based on the method they call "direction of undirected action." Vartanov's films produced from 1960s to 1989 have not been shown to the general public and still remain in an archive in Armenia.