When I saw this film a while ago at TCU the presentor mentioned that it had been cut by 20 minutes for its original release. The version I saw ran around 90 minutes. Does anybody know if this is the original (which would've been cut to 70 minutes on release) or the censored (down from 110 minutes) version?
shareHmm.. The version I saw was 77 minutes...
errm, I just checked Amazon and the DVD there has a Running time of 155 minutes.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005A05I/qid=1110773192/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/002-1491548-0696850?v=glance&s=dvd&n=507846
EDIT: Nevermind. the DVD includes the Requiem documentary, which is 55 minutes... So i guess it was around 90 minutes, cut to about 77, which is the version i saw..
The one I just saw was about 113 minutes (?!). I am confused--what version is THAT one??
shareI was watching a documentary about Paradjanov on Kino's "Ashik Kerib" DVD and he said that the first version was the version he accepted and that all other versions were not to his liking. I don't know if the original is available...just thought that was interesting.
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There are only two versions of the film that were released theatrically. The "director's cut", a.k.a. the Armenian version, which is 78 minutes long (though there may be variations due to PAL/NTSC conversion). The Soviet censored "Yutkevitch cut", a.k.a. the Soviet version, is 73 minutes long.
Until 1988 the director's cut was only allowed to be shown inside Armenia, while the Soviet version was released elsewhere in the Soviet Union, but withdrawn after 2 months.
The Soviet version is 5 minutes shorter than the director's cut due to (mostly religious) censorship. It also replaced the Armenian titles with Russian translations in cyrillic.
Sergei Yutkevitch cut directly into the negative. This means, that although shorter, the image and sound is much better than the director's cut, of which no negative exists.
The director's cut, before being censored by Goskino in Moscow, was already censored by Armenfilm in Armenia. There exists a version in the Armenfilm archives which is longer than the director's cut, but which has never been shown theatrically. This may be the 20 minutes cut that the TCU presentor referred to.
Roughly four hours of outtakes were shown on Italian television and have been subsequently circulating online.
i've heard from a few people that there's a four hour version? who knows. haven't seen it, haven't found it.
sharethere's a 4-hour version, yes. it was broadcasted on RAI tv. but it has no audio.
however, since this is a symbolic, visual-driven film; i preffered the 4-hour version despite it has no audio. there's no "legal" way of getting it anyway. it's not released on vhs or dvd. there are just tv rips of it on some forums.