Paradjanov was Georgian-Armenian by birth, cursed by fate to make films within a Soviet system that outlawed ancient culture and condemned him as a decadent (he was an uncloseted gay man) and a "surrealist." He spent time in the gulag (released thanks to international outcry, in 1978), but the Politburo wasn't entirely wrong; Paradjanov was nothing if not a catapulting folklorist, recreating the primitive pre-Soviet world as it might've been dreamt of in the opium-befogged skull of Omar Khayyam. There could hardly have been a more thorough, more defiant reply to Socialist Realism, and to proscribed Communist culture in general. Indeed, because Soviet culture was as much at war with the multi-ethnic past as it was with the capitalist future, Paradjanov made other rebels within the system even metaphysicist Andrei Tarkovsky look positively socialist, or at least compliant, by comparison.
The films Shadows, The Color of Pomegranates (1969), The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988) are all based on folk tales and ancient history (Ukrainian, Armenian, and Georgian), but only "Shadows" is centered on a progressive narrative. It's also the most visually dynamic; unfolding a tribal tale of star-crossed love and familial vengeance in the Carpathian mountains, the movie is one of the most restless and explosive pieces of camerawork from the so-called Art Film era, shot in authentic outlands with distorting lenses and superhuman capacity, and imbued with a grainy, primal grit. (A seemingly handheld P.O.V. shot from the top of a falling tree in a crowded, snowy forest is just the first of many breath-catchers.) Watching it is less like experiencing a form of entertainment-art than time travel, and afterwards you feel you know something about Ukranian tribal existence its primitiveness, its music, its relationship with the terrain, its fear of magic you couldn't learn from a book.
Utterly convincing as a manifestation of precivilized will and superstition, Shadows was still only a suggestion of the netherworlds Paradjanov would then call home. The next three films, separated by years of censorship battling and imprisonment, are barely narratives at all, but rather Middle Ages art and life conjured up as a lurid, iconic, wax-museum image parade, bursting with native craft, Byzantine design, brasswork, hookahs, doves, peacocks, ancient ritual, cathedral filigree, symbolic surrealities, ghosts, ad infinitum. Paradjanov's signature image became the frieze-like icon-tableau, often encompassing entire villages and landscapes, but arranged as if on an altar for a greedy god's pleasure. This is not a universe where quantities like acting and pace are concerns; Paradjanov's vision can be read as the plundering of an entire cultural store closet of *things*, disinterred and remembered for our materialistic modern eyes. Pomegranates traipses through the life of 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova, Fortress revives an age-old Georgian war legend, and Ashik Kerib adapts an Arabian Nights-style tale retold by Mikhail Lermontov. They represent together one of the most unique usages cinema has ever been put to, employing the full range of native textures (scrambling Russian traditionalism with Turkish, Arabic, Indian, Chinese and Rom) and ending up, for all of their stasis and ornate compositions, with a party-hearty-Marty celebration of traditional culture and life in the unruly wilderness of Asian societies rarely if ever visible to American filmgoers. To imagine the modern cinematic technology Paradjanov naturally employed to attain these ancestral images is to taste cognitive dissonance how could these currents of forgotten humanness have been filmed at any time in the last few centuries?
The four DVDs come with an array of background/profile docs, some new interviews (including of Paradjanov's wife!), an impressionistic portrait comparing/contrasting Paradjanov with buddy Tarkovsky, in terms of their radically different films and of their intensely antithetical personas, and, best of all, several rare Paradjanov anthro-shorts, from Hagop Hovnatanian (1965) and the Azerbaijanian landscape portrait The Minstrel's Song (date apparently unknown), to 1985's Songs.
For more information about The Films of Sergei Paradjanov, visit Kino International. To order The Films of Sergei Paradjanov, go to TCM Shopping.
by Michael Atkinson
