The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov

The cinema of sergei parajanov is the first career-length, English-language study of one of the most important directors of art cinema from the Soviet Union. The director has gradually amassed a reputation second only to Andrei Tarkovsky for providing a rich and intoxicating poetic vision. Yet while a quick Worldcat search lists over two hundred English-language books about Tarkovsky’s life and films, the only serious examinations of Parajanov’s career appear in Russian or other foreign languages. His films are mesmerizing, but they are also difficult, as they draw on an eclectic and idiosyncratic mix of local cultural traditions shaped by a Soviet political context that, in many ways, remains opaque to historians.

James Steffen’s book starts with a central, uncontroversial characterization of Parajanov’s films as “a unique brand of poetic cinema.” Taking as his central question why these films provoked a political backlash that left many of them altered, banned, or unproduced and their creator imprisoned from 1973 to 1977, Steffen uses approaches familiar to auteurism: close readings of films, formal analysis, considerations of adapted source material, examination of production documents, and biography. That the book succeeds testifies to how much was unknown about this director, as well as to Steffen’s thoroughness as a researcher and critic. Parajanov is also an ideal subject for addressing the timely issue of cinema’s transnational flows. An Armenian in Georgia from an educated, Russian-speaking class who made films in each of those countries and in Ukraine, who embraced a queer vision of sexuality in his personal life, and who first garnered a reputation as a major artist due to screenings at Western film festivals, Parajanov perfectly embodies the global exchange of culture.

The vagaries of his career—as an unremarkable state filmmaker, as the first auteur of any note from the Caucasus, as a prisoner held on politically motivated charges of homosexuality—lend Steffen’s book something of a patchwork structure, as different issues come to the fore at different moments. The chapters in which Steffen analyzes Parajanov’s most famous films—Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965), The Color of Pomegranates (1969), The Legend of the Suram Fortress (1985), and Ashik Kerib (1988)—are essential for anyone interested in these films and are excellent for anyone looking to incorporate one into a class on world cinema. Steffen succeeds at delineating the films’ literary sources and dense references to cultural traditions from the more idiosyncratic interpretations they receive from their director. These works are sufficiently mysterious on their own that Steffen’s investigation of the source materials used for adaptation and the films’ production documents provides many insights into how the director worked, although some readers may wish the author had used an explicit reading strategy to arrive at a novel interpretation.

Parajanov’s career is particularly helpful for illuminating the immediate production and reception context of these films because the notable controversies many caused can shift the discussion from aesthetics to politics along the reader’s journey. In this respect, Steffen’s most important argument challenges and complicates common notions of what it was to be a dissident in the Soviet Union at this time, telling a story that is different from the “crippled creative biographies” (Herbert Marshall) so common in Soviet cinema without downplaying the very real consequences of persecution by the state. Parajanov’s long periods without work naturally give way to discussion of the delicate dance required to successfully make a film in a mismanaged and capricious bureaucracy. Examining the local and global reception of Parajanov’s films, made in different national studios, also allows the author to test the most common critical chestnut that inevitably appears in screening notes: that the films use an Aesopian language to critique power and/or express national culture in a way that is oppositional to the central ideology of the Soviet Union. Steffen’s periodic examination of these readings benefits greatly from the energetic research on Soviet nationality policy conducted since 1989 and is...