100 Years of Parajanov

The centenary has also occasioned commemorative stamps in Armenia, a conference at USC, special screenings in Los Angeles and Berlin, and now, from Saturday through July 26, 100 Years of Parajanov, a series of four features and a documentary presented by the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. The doc, newly restored, is Mikhail Vartanov’s Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992), an homage that includes behind-the-scenes footage of Parajanov working on Pomegranates as well as sequences from The Confession, the never-completed film Parajanov was working on when he died of cancer in 1990. He was only sixty-six.

The Confession was “his most cherished project,” Martiros M. Vartanov, the son of Mikhail Vartanov and founder of the Parajanov-Vartanov Institute, tells actor and A.Frame contributor Adam J. Yeend. “It was about his childhood, and he wrote the script in the 1960s but was only allowed to start filming twenty years later when his health was already deteriorating. It’s kind of like Tarkovsky’s Mirror or Fellini’s Amarcord but also very different—it’s unmistakably Parajanov’s film language.”

That language only took shape, as Parajanov often said, after he saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962). “It was not that Parajanov learned from Tarkovsky how to make movies,” filmmaker Aleksander Atanesian tells Haykaram Nahapetyan in the Armenian Mirror-Spectator. “Rather, he saw that the existing norms of Soviet cinematography could be disregarded or could be modified profoundly. He understood that change was possible. And he did it, but did it his way.”

This new, revitalized phase of Parajanov’s filmmaking began with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a Romeo-and-Juliet story set in the Carpathian Mountains in the nineteenth century. “With its vision of nature in Dionysian riot, its chorus lines of extravagantly costumed peasants, and its shifting point of view, it is hard to tell where ethnography ends in this extraordinary film, and where fantasy begins,” wrote Dave Kehr in the New York Times in 2008. A year earlier in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman called Ancestors “a folk ballad—a tale of blood feuds, sorcery, and star-crossed love—that’s not so much lyric as lysergic.”

In a marvelous overview of Parajanov’s life and work for New Lines Magazine, William Gourlay notes that the “wider Caucasus region is one of extremely rich folklore and vibrant storytelling, traditions that have been informed by pre-Christian Armenian and Georgian epics, myriad indigenous as well as Greek and Persian mythologies, and Zoroastrian, Scythian and, later, Turkish and Russian influences.” Parajanov was “steeped in the lore of the Caucasus and alert to its diverse cultures and traditions, creating a storytelling style that was generous, animated, and ecumenical.”

In Pomegranates, Sofiko Chiaureli plays eighteenth-century Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat-Nova as well as his lover and muse. “What Parajanov did was to stylize the poet’s world, literally visualizing his imagery, radically simplifying the story of his life, and totally dispensing with any framing or narration,” writes Ian Christie, adding that “of all the comparisons that [Parajanov] has attracted—with Dovzhenko, Eisenstein, Fellini, Anger, and Jarman, to name the most frequent—that with the Pasolini of Medea (1969), built around Maria Callas, and the early seventies’ Trilogy of Life seems to get closest to his spirit: sensual and sensuous, chic and deadpan, with a playful disregard for all propriety.”

In 1973, Soviet authorities charged Parajanov with the “rape of a Communist party member”—a swipe at his bisexuality—and the “propagation of pornography.” He was sentenced to five years of hard labor, and despite protests from Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese, Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, and dozens of other high-profile directors and stars, including Robert De Niro and Marcello Mastroianni, Parajanov was forced to serve four years of the sentence. During those years, he carried on making art—drawings, sculptures, and collages, many of them now on view at the Sergei Parajanov Museum in the Armenian capital, Yerevan.

Hounded by authorities in Tbilisi after his release and then arrested again in 1982—the charge this time was bribery—Parajanov was unable to work again until restrictions on artistic expression loosened as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his policies of glasnost and perestroika. Drawing on Daniel Chonkadze’s rendering of a Georgian folktale in his 1860 novella about mountain villagers repeatedly trying—and failing—to build a fortress, Parajanov made The Legend of Suram Fortress (1985) with Georgian actor and filmmaker Dodo Abashidze. Suram Fortress is “a richly textured, inimitably iconoclastic, startlingly vibrant, and elliptical yet poetic and intrinsically cohesive tale of sacrifice, captivity, and the fickle mutability of fate,” wrote Acquarello in 2004.

Parajanov and Abashidze teamed up again on Ashik Kerib (1988), a loose adaptation of an 1837 short story by Mikhail Lermontov, who was inspired by an Azeri-Turkish folktale about a wandering minstrel—an ashik—who seeks the hand of a wealthy man’s daughter. The rich merchant spurns him, and off he goes. “Alone among Parajanov movies,” writes William Gourlay, Ashik Kerib “has a happy ending, with the titular ashik returning home after a thousand days of wandering to win the bride he had previously been denied. In an interview with the art magazine Film Comment, Parajanov joked, ‘It ends like an American movie!’”