Sergei Paradjanov

Sergei Paradjanov

Sergei Paradjanov
1) Paradjanov was an Armenian filmmaker who made most of his films in the Ukraine.
2) He became internationally known with the Ukrainian film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964),
3) a film about a man who falls in love with the daughter of the man who killed his father.
4) Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors employs religious and folkloric symbolism,
5) and is heavily reliant on innovative formal techniques.

Mast and Kawin point out its use of swish pans and slow motion. The film was accused of promoting Ukrainian nationalism and clashing with the socialist realism style that had government approval.

In 1969 Paradjanov
1) began to make the film that would become known as The Color Of Pomegranates.
2) The film is a biography about Sayat-Nova, an 18th century Armenian poet.
3) However, despite the film’s initial production in the late 1960s,
4) it was not released outside the Soviet Union until years later.
5) Paradjanov was sent to prison in 1973 because the Soviet authorizes saw him as subversive
   because he was bisexual.
6) He finished editing The Color of Pomegranates when he got out of Siberia in 1977.

Scholar Ian Christie explains,
 "When (The Color of Pomegranates) first appeared in the West,
 few outside the Soviet Union had heard of its subject,
so we had to take on trust that the vivid visuals bore some relation to the verse.

But now that translations of some of Sayat-Nova’s lyrics are readily available,
it has become clear that daggers, silks and brocades, and wandering in sackcloth and ashes are indeed the stuff of his love poetry.

 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.

In some ways, this approach could be compared with that of Ken Russell’s astonishing television arts documentaries of the sixties, The Debussy Film and Dante’s Inferno among them.

But in Parajanov’s hands, the effect was as rich and strange as any film by Kenneth Anger or Derek Jarman.

And indeed, the filmmaker’s use of actress Sofiko Chiaureli to play multiple androgynous roles—including the poet as a youth, the princess whom the poet loves, an angel, a nun, and white-faced mimes

—somewhat anticipated Jarman’s use in the late eighties of Tilda Swinton’s statuesque beauty in films like The Last of England and War Requiem....

Made for Armenfilm in Armenia and shot primarily in Armenia and Georgia,
The Color of Pomegranates reflected Parajanov’s increasing interest in returning to his
Transcaucasian roots (after his arrest in Kiev in 1973 and subsequent imprisonment for charges connected to homosexuality, he would move permanently back to Tbilisi).

His family was part of Georgia’s sizable and old Armenian community.
In his youth, he had studied music and dance at the state conservatory in the Georgian capital,
but perhaps more relevant to his future cinematic output were the city’s antique shops and markets, where his father worked as a valuer, and the influence of his mother’s taste for traditional Caucasian culture.

However, especially amid today’s strong currents of nationalism, disentangling the strands of Parajanov’s identity is inescapably difficult—as it was for the filmmaker himself. 

“My biography is very confused,” he admitted on a visit to the Rotterdam film festival in 1988, joking that since his friends didn’t even know when he was born, he could celebrate as many birthdays as he wanted—“any excuse for a feast in Georgia!”

The following clip from The Color of Pomegranates shows how Paradjanov illustrates the biography of Sayat-Nova poetically rather than literally.

Full Film Click Here

Video - The Colour Of Pomegranates - Appreciating Abstract Imagery....explains the film Click Here

Note from Time Out (London)
 “Originally refused an export licence, Parajanov’s extraordinary film traces the life of 18th century Armenian poet Sayat Nova (‘The King of Song’), but with a series of painterly images strung together to form tableaux corresponding to moments of his life rather than any conventional biographic techniques. Pomegranates bleed their juice into the shape of a map of the old region of Armenia, the poet changes sex at least once in the course of his career, angels descend: the result is a stream of religious, poetic and local iconography which has an arcane and astonishing beauty. Much of its meaning must remain essentially specific to the culture from which the film springs, and no one could pretend that it’s all readily accessible, but audiences accustomed to the work of Tarkovsky should have little problem.” – Time Out (London)