THE FILMS OF SERGEI PARADJANOV
Fortunately, Facets has fixed all that, and for the next week, all three of Sergei Paradjanov’s visionary masterpieces will be screened there nightly, in two separate auditoriums. While it won’t be possible to see all three in a single session, as I did recently–a singular if exhausting experience lasting a little over four hours–one can still see them, ideally in order, over two or three evenings, and to do so is to experience a certain revelation and clarification. The greatest art always creates its own context (“We impoverish ourselves by thinking only in film categories,” Paradjanov has said), and part of what has made his work seem more difficult, esoteric, and rarefied than it actually is has been the necessity of encountering it piecemeal. (Try to imagine what our perception of van Gogh might be like if we saw only one of his paintings once every ten years.)
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Finally returning to Tbilisi after 19 years in Kiev, Paradjanov found all his subsequent film projects blocked until The Color of Pomegranates–his film about the celebrated 18th-century Armenian poet, musician, troubadour, folk philosopher, and archbishop Sayat Nova–came together in 1968. Shot in Yerevan, Armenia, the film benefited from a lot of local help from museums and the Armenian church, and though it was warmly received in Yerevan when it premiered there, it was termed “hermetic and obscure” in Moscow. When Paradjanov refused to re-edit it, it was shelved for two years, then given a limited run, but only after director Sergei Yutkevich recut it, eliminating about 20 minutes and adding explanatory intertitles. (This version, alas, is the only one visible in the U.S.–although Paradjanov’s cut is reportedly in distribution in England–and because it was exported surreptitiously, only poor, duped 16-millimeter prints have been available.)
Meanwhile, Paradjanov had moved back to Kiev and had several more film projects rejected. (Apparently the one that came closest to getting made was an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales for Soviet TV, scripted by the father of Russian Formalism, Viktor Shklovsky.) Then in December 1973, he was arrested on multiple charges, including homosexuality, homosexual coercion, anti-Soviet activities, illegal dealings in foreign currency and art objects, spreading venereal disease, selling pornography, and “incitement to suicide.” (Reportedly, the suicide of a young male friend in Paradjanov’s circle who had contracted a venereal disease accounted for more than half of these charges.) Accounts of the trial’s outcome vary considerably: According to Sight and Sound, Paradjanov’s outspoken self-defense, which included an admission that he was bisexual, led to his sentence of six years’ hard labor in a Ukrainian prison camp for homosexuality (“a criminal offense in the Soviet Union”), while all the other charges were dropped. According to Film Comment, homosexuality “in itself doesn’t constitute a criminal offense according to Soviet law,” and traffic in art objects was the only charge retained. According to Cinema-TV Digest, the three-day trial concentrated on the charges of homosexuality and pornography, and he was sentenced to eight years. (As indicated above, it’s remarkable how little we still know about this subject 14 years later–one indication of why much of the information here remains tentative.)
A related economy and simplicity underlies the three features showing at Facets, but significantly the means for achieving this quality shift radically from film to film. Unlike the four other filmmaking geniuses cited by Tarkovsky at the head of this article, as well as Tarkovsky himself, Paradjanov does not display a consistent style matching his persistent vision as he moves from film to film, but a new style to match the requirements of each work. Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors largely achieves stylistic self-definition through dazzling, lyrical, and mainly hand-held camera movements, while The Color of Pomegranates does without camera movement entirely; The Legend of Suram Fortress reintroduces camera movement, but in a completely different manner, restricted to functional pans that are neither hand-held nor rhetorical.
As if to convey the monotone of Ivan’s grief, the film turns from color to sepia while the villagers discuss his depressed state in elliptical snatches offscreen–a mode of narration that recalls the town’s perception of the Minafer family in Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons. Then color reappears; Ivan meets another woman, Palagna, and before long they are married. When they prove unable to have children, Palagna seeks out a sorcerer and has an adulterous affair with him, which leads to Ivan’s death at the sorcerer’s hands. The last shot shows us eight children looking in through a window at Ivan’s funeral, each one framed by a separate pane.
In other respects, we don’t have to decode the images in any systematic way in order to experience their haunting power. The opening shots show three pomegranates oozing red juice on a white tablecloth, a bloodstained dagger, bare feet crushing grapes, a fish (which promptly becomes three fish) flopping between two pieces of driftwood, and water falling on books, before the poet as a little boy is introduced among these books. (One sequence shortly afterward shows him surrounded by a sea of open books on the roof of an ancient building, their pages riffled by the wind as he looks at pictures in one of them.)
