Strange Love: Parajanov and the Affects of Late Soviet (Inter)nationalisms

Drawing on the function of flatness, stasis, and simultaneity in Soviet Georgian-Armenian director Sergei Parajanov's films, this article focuses on Parajanov's reimagination of the revolutionary avant-garde cinematic language of sensuous thought as an anti-colonial aesthetic project that echoes non-aligned trajectories. Parajanov's films perform Soviet Orientalism in drag, upending the lyric dimensions of an ethno-nationalist cinema as he recasts formalist poetic cinematic aesthetics through the defamiliarization of a queer non-Russian subject. Drawing on affect theory from the early Soviet avant-garde to the work of Gilles Deleuze, I argue that the sensuous materiality of Parajanov's films, focalized around the animism of objects and the dynamism of the static tableau, resists the distinction between matter and spirit. In this way, I argue that he also rejects a vision of liberal agency as a defining critique of Soviet nationalist patriarchal hegemony by instead focusing on the ways in which the material sensuousness of the cinematic image can upend the teleological evolution and assimilation of national form into Soviet content. This article thus takes up his films, in particular Ashik Kerib (1988), to trace alternative forms of feeling international across the Soviet south.