Watching a Sergei Parajanov film is a cinematic experience you are unlikely to forget. His work is akin to a tone-poem, a prism of evocative images that combines magic, folk-mythology, and alchemy. It offers the aesthetic dislocation of surrealism and conjoins it with the pageantry of poetry. Parajanov forces you to to enter a child’s lexicon of imagination, a sage’s vision of time and memory, and a painter’s feel for the composition of color.
Devotees of Alejandro Jodorowsky will be quite pleased in Parajanov’s whimsical and imaginative sets that deploy an endless kaleidoscope of chromatic movements and ballet-like dream sequences rich in detail and depth. From a compositional-thematic perspective his films are recombinant; they care little for the exactness of historical detail and proudly critique the dialectics of past/present, myth/truth, reality/dream.
Parajanov was of Armenian,Ukrainian, and Georgian descent and was something of an international celebrity as his films were banned for their critique on the authoritarian Soviet government of his time along with charges of homosexuality, which sent him to prison on various occasions. In visual/historical terms his closest ally would be Andrey Tarkovsky as they both initiated a rupture with the cinematic Soviet realism that plagued many directors in the wake of Communism and did so at a great personal cost.
His personal persecution at the hand of the Soviet government is well documented and has provided much fodder to Soviet film scholars looking to gain new insights into the work of this filmic master. Sight and Sound has published a new article that looks at Parajanov from this sociological and political angle and has uncovered some interesting details that had been hitherto unexplored. Along with this article there is an excellent documentary on the man and his work that draws out the larger connections and themes that run through his films.
Parajanov Documentary courtesy of Kino Films
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