Sergei Parajanov 100!: Triptych

Parajanov Triptych

text: Daniel Bird
Born a hundred years ago, Sergei Parajanov used to describe himself as an Armenian born in Georgia, who was educated in Russia and imprisoned for Ukrainian nationalism. It is a statement that betrays Parajanov’s sense of irony, but also intimates his unique contribution to not just the legacy of Soviet cinema, but the individual identities of multiple post-Soviet republics, not least Georgia, Armenia, and Ukraine. Parajanov’s influence extends beyond what was the iron curtain, but cinema itself, inspiring everyone from fashion designers like Yves Saint Laurent to contemporary queer divas, including Lady Gaga.
Parajanov’s fame hinges on a tableaux aesthetic best exemplified by his film based on the life and work of the Armenian national poet Sayat Nova, The Colour of Pomegranates (1969). However, this poetic first appears in Kyiv Frescoes, a remarkable short from 1966. Ostensibly a bricolage of film tests, assembled by the Ukrainian cinematographer Aleksandr Antipenko as his diploma film for VGIK, Kyiv Frescoes is the shadow of film that was cancelled before it went into production. Nevertheless, many of the hallmarks that made Parajanov famous – embracing artificiality, a preoccupation with framing, colour games – appear here in an embryonic form. Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967) was commissioned as a short documentary featuring the work of the so-called Raphael of Tiflis, the nineteenth-century Armenian portrait painter who gives the film its name. It also doubled as the diploma work for the sound engineer, Yuri Sayadian. In this work, made during the pre-production period of The Colour of Pomegranates, Parajanov experimented with sound, specifically musique concrète, ideas that he and Sayadian would subsequently develop with the Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian. In some ways, Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani (1985) acts as a companion piece to Hakob Hovnatanyan, this time focusing on the work of the celebrated Georgian painter, Niko Pirosmani. It was made during the period of Perestroika and Glasnost and hinted at new artistic avenues for Parajanov to explore in this period of relative freedom. Like Hakob Hovnatanyan, it is infused with nostalgia, situating painting as a medium being supplanted by photography. With these three films, Parajanov stakes a space between the two.

These restorations are the result of a project dating back to 2017. As both a film historian and programmer, I felt the narratives of Soviet cinema had been disproportionately skewed towards Russian films and filmmakers. Together with Fixafilm, a post-production company based in Warsaw, Poland, I set about working with film agencies in Central Asia, the South Caucasus, Belarus, and Ukraine to both remaster and make available works that would map out a different story of Soviet cinema. Parajanov Triptych involved the collaborations of partners in Armenia, Ukraine, and Georgia, with support from the United Kingdom and (before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) the co-operation of Gosfilmofond, the Russian State Film Archive. On the one hand, this unique programme highlights the individuality of three distinctive national cinemas. On the other hand, it traces the journey of a remarkable artist through three different cultures. It also highlights Parajanov’s work in genres that are not readily associated with him, the documentary and the short. Central to Parajanov’s aesthetic are two related ideas, associated with visual and time-based arts: collage and montage. There is no ‘voice of God’ commentary in Hakob Hovnatanyan. Parajanov’s voice is his approach to framing, cutting, rhythm, and rhyming. Raw sound, naturally, plays an integral part. If Kyiv Frescoes was not assembled by Parajanov, then Antipenko’s concept reflects a deep feeling for the filmmaker’s ethos. It is, after all, a film collage in the profound sense, fashioned out of discarded scraps, destined to gather dust on the shelves of archives, or worse still, disappear into oblivion. Whether it was frescoes or miniatures, Parajanov’s aesthetic hinged on equating genres in painting with cinematic equivalents. In programming these three shorts, why should it be any different? Here, three short films are panels in a cinematic triptych. They appear in non-chronological order, with Kyiv Frescoes here acting as the centrepiece. The works that open and close the programme are variations on a theme, with their own visual permutations, echoes, and rhymes. Running just over forty-five minutes, it is a highly concentrated tour of three cultures and histories. Above all else, it reveals a remarkable artist unfettered by convention, whether it be style, genre or ideology.

Short films by Sergei Parajanov

Natalija Majsova Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), a director without whom the Russian New Wave of the 1960s would be unimaginable, claimed he was “an Armenian, born in Tbilisi, incarcerated in a Russian prison for being a Ukrainian nationalist” and that he had three homelands: Georgia, the place of his birth; Ukraine, the place of his residence; and Armenia, the place of his death. This remark reflects the characteristic Parajanov’s fascination with the intertwinement of the local, intimate, and universal in one’s perception of the world while also summarising his opposition to the Russian cultural and political agenda, which marked his work and life.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), Parajanov’s ninth film, is deemed his most fundamental artistic expression. It belongs to the artworks of the political and socio-cultural thaw and aesthetic liberty of the Soviet Union at the end of the 50s and beginning of the 60s. Based on Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s novel, this visually stunning and lyrical film announced the start of Parajanov’s distinctive film poetics, founded on colours, rhythms, patterns, and metaphors. With Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, he articulated the profound respect towards the local and national stories, cultural patterns, aesthetic solutions, and the Ukrainian language, and thus also pointed towards a clear stylistic and contextual divergence from the long-prescribed socialist realism of the Soviet cinema—a narrative style generated out of necessity to show and praise the Soviet values.

Following Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, the Soviet authorities consistently interpreted Parajanov’s films as an expression of his undesirable political views and character. As a result, Parajanov was imprisoned several times and accused of homosexuality, possession of pornography, and corruption. In the 1970s and the 1980s, he spent nearly five years in Gulags, which severely damaged his health. Thus, the film that shot him into the internationally acclaimed arena can be understood as the start of a turbulent and existentially extremely insecure phase of his life and career in the Soviet Union. The three short films selected for this year’s FeKK also belong to the same Parajanov’s oeuvre. Though each of them is dedicated to one of director’s homelands, they are more than token acts of patriotism. Their motivation, after all, is to present universality and cultural placement of different sides of human experience. This desire also drives the narrative, visual, as well as technical elements of the film.

In addition, the earliest of them, Kyiv Frescoes (1965), is a phantom film. It is a short insight into an unfinished feature film, created in honour of the twentieth anniversary of the end of WW2. In it, Parajanov endeavoured to deconstruct the complex experience of war into basic components, such as anxiety, waiting, melancholy, mourning, expectation, and even passion. To do this, he developed a narrative based on a sequence of emotions, depicted by a set of unexpected audio-visual scenes that lead to an infinitely deep reservoir of references, where religion, popular culture, and history all organically coexist. The project was soon stopped on demand of Soviet censors. It is only thanks to the expertise of the cameraman Aleksandr Antipenko, who asserted the film tests as his diploma, that 15 minutes of the footage, or “three frescoes”, had been preserved.

If Kyiv Frescoes, with their scenes of concrete emotions, speak of an abstract Human, the cores of Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967) and Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani (1985) are historical figures: Armenian Hakob Hovnatanyan (1806–1881) and Georgian Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918). However, this does not make them biographical. In Hakob Hovnatanyan, where he tried out several touchstones for the feature Sayat-Nova: The Colour of Pomgrenates (1969), the director pensively dissects the painter’s portraits in oil on canvas. He rhythmically weaves their details into the audio and visual texture of the 19th-century Tbilisi–a vibrant, multi-layered city in which the technicistical impulse of modernisation coexists along diverse cultures and traditions.

In his penultimate completed film, Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani, the director adopted a similar approach, using the camera to give Pirosmani’s colourful canvases new dimensions. Wrapped in a multi-media dance of cinema, photography, theatre, and music, they transform into shots and sequences that reveal the labyrinth of past, present, and eternal motifs and ideas that span across Georgian culture. As a result, Parajanov’s shorts provide a colourful glimpse into media, aesthetic, psychological, and political aspects of his directorial process, allowing us to better grasp how—and in what ratio to other arts—Parajanov envisioned the cinematic experience.