Rangel Valchnov (12.10.1928 – 30.09.2013).
Journalist Mila Kudrina with a recollection
for her father Rangel Valchanov
on his 95th birth anniversary
12/10/2023 Facebook
Journalist Mila Kudrina, who lives in Moscow with her
husband and son, published on Facebook her recollection for the great film
director Rangel Valchanov, who is her father, although she and her mother, the
singer Greta Gancheva, were not married. The commemoration is on the occasion
of the 95th birth anniversary of Rangel Valchanov, who passed away in 2013,
shortly before his 85th birthday.
This is what Mila Kudrina wrote on her Facebook
profile:
"Am I stupid, what am I, but I keep running as if
life will never end. It seems best not to stop.” Rangel Valchanov (wrote) would
have turned 95 today (October 12, 1928 – September 30, 2013). With him,
Bulgarian cinema has its own unique Artistry. No one like Rangel can charm so
powerfully with tradition and nihilism, with Shopian [shoppi] devilry and
fantasy shrapnels.
Today, Bulgaria has no particular reasons whatever to
be proud, but the mere mention of Rangel Valchanov is a signal to raise one’s
head. A carnival entertainer and frivolous sage, since the 1950s he has been
the embodiment of the Game as overtrumping between air and earth, spirit and
matter, intuition and thought. Few in Bulgarian culture are his equal.
He is our film colossus without a "Golden
Rose" [award], but with a popular conviction that he stands alone.
Rangel was the unique one of Bulgarian cinema, without whose volcanic fantasy
it would have been much more fragile. Between "On the Small Island"
(1958) and "And Where To Today" (2007), he created 17 feature films
and several documentaries, each conceived and completed [in full] as a
"restless bird", and most of them were volleys of freedom in a
society of ideological obedience.
Regardless of whether it was for the colorful and
vital stream of consciousness in his long-suffering masterpiece for the
Bulgarian doom "The Patent Shoes of the Unknown Warrior" (1979),
whether it was the headlong wandering through the absurd in "The Sun and
the Shadow" (1962), "The She-Wolf" (1965), "Last
Wishes" (1982), "Where Are You Traveling To" (1986), "And
Now Where To" (1988), "The Restless Love Bird" (1990) or
"And Where To Today", was it the experimentation with genres and
aesthetics in "The Inspector and the Night" (1963), "Escape to
Ropotamo" (1973), "With Love and Tenderness" (1978) or
"Fatal Tenderness" (1993), Rangel Valchanov breaks down barriers with
unforgiving ease and winged nihilism. Emerging in the motley tumult of images,
paradoxes, reminiscences, references, reflections and suggestions, is his
impressive universe of an Artist. Hundreds of pages have been written about it.
But now that everything is in the past, the great recapitulation of his work is
yet to come.
The legacy left to us by Rangel Valchanov is priceless
- not only as films, roles, productions and books, but also as a position, (and)
communication. His living charm is unique. To him, neither age nor illness were
a cause for despondency.
In 2019, Kosta Bykov created "Rangel
Forever" - his second documentary about Rangel Valchanov after
"Journey Between Two Films" (1998)...
