The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov

Introduction

3 Introduction Introduction Few film directors ever manage to create a single image that is truly unlike anything you have seen before. In that respect, Sergei Parajanov’s films seem almost reckless in their generosity. We watch a tree falling on the man who has felled it—from the point of view of the tree. An androgynous robed figure pours a vat of wine over the chest of a dying poet. Wives in a fairy-tale sultan’s harem fire toy automatic rifles into the air. Meticulously composed tableaux resembling medieval miniature paintings hide obscene visual puns that would make Luis Buñuel envious. We are treated to pageants of richly decorated folk art and an imaginary Orient where llamas and ostriches are as likely to appear as a camel, but we also hear the laments of peoples who have suffered for centuries under one empire after another. Today one can spot the influence of Parajanov among directors from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in Iranian cinema, and even in music videos. After seeing The Color of Pomegranates (Tsvet granata, Armenfilm 1969), Jean-Luc Godard stated in an interview: “I think you have to live at least fifteen miles away and feel the need to walk there on foot to see it. If you feel that need and give it that faith, the film can give you everything you could wish. It is a film, by the way, which has given me a lot of faith in myself, since it confirmed some ideas I had about film technique.”1 Godard’s comments speak not only to the admitted effort required to approach that film, but also to its underlying spiritual dimension and the often difficult circumstances that both the director and his films faced during much of his lifetime under the Soviet system. As the first English-language book about Parajanov’s films, this study seeks to make 4  Introduction the fifteen-mile journey a little less arduous by providing a basic framework to understand the films themselves, their creator, and the context in which he made them. Born in 1924 to an Armenian family in Tbilisi, Georgia, Parajanov was profoundly shaped by the city’s cosmopolitan atmosphere and more generally by the rich intersection of cultures in Transcaucasia, a region inhabited since the dawn of civilization. Watching his films, one is struck by the material presence of ancient peoples, of entire histories contained in the very objects depicted onscreen , but also by a style of acting that seems to come from a long-vanished era. His sources of visual inspiration include primitive and folk art, Armenian and Persian miniature painting, and early filmmakers such as Georges Méliès. In an interview with the French journalist and filmmaker Patrick Cazals, Parajanov stated, “I may have received this love for authentic texture in films thanks to Pasolini or Fellini, but through that truth which has it that when you film an old subject, the film acquires an archaic character and demands another style. You can’t put on an old costume and walk around in a contemporary manner, unless you wish to produce an effect that way. My love for old things is not a hobby, it’s my aesthetic conviction.”2 But Parajanov did something far more interesting than simply to tell old stories and show old things in an old way. Under the guise of this consciously archaic style, he cultivated a sophisticated form of poetic cinema that extended the experiments in editing, sound, and color initiated by earlier Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Alexander Dovzhenko. At the same time, he was very much conversant in contemporary European cinema and movements in modern art such as Surrealism. Ultimately, his great accomplishment was to bring the cultures of non-Russian republics such as Ukraine, Armenia, and Georgia onto the global cinematic stage through a lively synthesis of regional folk culture and literary traditions with avant-garde filmmaking techniques and sly personal touches. His bigger-than-life personality and his tumultuous biography loom as large as the films themselves. A talented musician and a conservatory student, in 1945 he switched to filmmaking and enrolled at the VGIK (Vsesoiuznyi Gosudarstvennyi Institut Kinematografii or All-Union State Institute of Cinematography ) in Moscow. In 1948 he was arrested in Tbilisi on charges of homosexuality, the first of three times he would face prison. In 1951 he married a young Tatar woman...