Back to archives | Back to FOFA Gallery
Allegory, Folktales & Poetics of Soviet
Cinema in the Work of Sergei Parajanov
Curator: Marcin Wisniewski
January 19 - February 16, 2013
Screenings on January 19, January 26, February 2, February 9, February 16
Each screening is preceded by a lecture introduction and a film short.
Sergei Parajanov, The Colour of Pomegranates, 1968, 35mm film still
Curatorial Statement
"The task of beauty is to enfranchise the audience and acknowledge its power - to designate a territory of shared values between the image and its beholder and then in this territory, to advance the argument by valorizing the picture’s problematic content. Without the urgent intention of reconstructing the beholder’s view of things, the image has no reason to exist, much less to be beautiful.” – D. Hickey
In 1964 Sergei Parajanov released The Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors baffling the Soviet censors and critics but establishing himself a place among the masters of cinema. The film is a boldly conceived and astonishingly photographed blend of enchanting mythology, hypnotic religious iconography, and pagan magic. At the centre of the story is an image of life-loving people enduring the cruelty of their historical conditions. Eschewing ideas of class struggle, the film bypasses the regime dictated requirements of Socialist Realism and effectively marks the beginning of a new school in Soviet cinema, the Poetic School. The directors of this new wave relied on ethnographic and exotic material as well as a particular understanding of history to present their vision of the human condition.
Yet, it isn’t until 1968 and The Color of Pomegranates that Parajanov fully dedicates himself to the potential of beauty in an image. Characterized by an almost completely still camera the narrative unfolds in a series of remarkable tableaus devoted to the life and death of the Armenian poet, Sayat Nova. The film is marked by an extreme pictorial expressiveness and what ultimately faces the spectator is a work where every shot represents a self-contained part of the total composition, where every shot is a painting in itself; speech and commentary disappear almost completely, the onscreen texts are not illustrative and in effect,“[O]nto the screen emerges a poetic self-contained structure”. (G. Manevich)
Parajanov’s next film project was The Legend of Suram Fortress released in 1984, after years of incarceration due to ideological subversion. True to the established technique of vivid, surreal visuals the film is an ode to Georgian warriors, told through the story of a crumbling fortress. Here themes of impossible love, prophecy and martyrdom come together as images of white horses swathed in pale blue fabrics and tight-rope walkers performing in the desert fill the screen.
In 1988 Parajanov released his last film Ashik Kerib. Based on an Islamic legend the film was visually inspired by Persian miniatures. It is the most static and yet, optimistic of his films. Working with the sound editor Parajanov applies his characteristic collage to create a soundscape based on the ballet “Gisèle” and traditional Azerbaidjani music and allows the music to dazzle the spectator; but of course, here too the image reigns and so the heroes gaze at each other more than they speak and the eclectic frontal compositions hint at the world’s original state.
Working with ancient folktales and legends Parajanov liberated himself of the regime imposed elements of Socialist Realism; but if his preference for nationalist tales freed him from the necessity of dealing with issues of class struggle and the Communist party (all appropriate themes for regime supported films) it also highly problematised his work by focusing on the very humanist themes of good versus evil, life and death, the underlying injustice suffered by the innocent at the hands of forces beyond them, love and our relationship to God. Parajanov’s treatment of these relied on allegory where abstract concepts are represented by concrete images. Criticized by Soviet censors for being hermetic, for using a language only a few could understand Parajanov’s work calls on the spectator. It asks to reflect on the image, its contents and meanings. The opening shot of Color of Pomegranates presents us with a shot of a white cloth on which lies a dagger and a pomegranate oozing red juice. The image and its form are strikingly simple and full of meaning: red liquid > blood > life, dagger > death. In one shot without any action or speech we are presented with the film’s themes. Refusing to present any concrete historical moments, cloaking the action onscreen with (re)imagined rituals with no recorded history, weaving together visual elements of different pictorial traditions allowed Parajanov to present an extratemporal and extranational world where there was room for everyone. As Giorgi Gvakharia writes in “Sergei Parajanov’s Ecumenical Vision”, Parajanov’s work, like that of the Georgian painter Niko Pirosmanishvili, is characterized by “a sense of historical status, a disturbing immobility of the canvas, the coexistence within the human figure of the tragic alongside the grotesque and the humorous, and the capacity of the frontal composition (always rising sharply at the horizon) to seemingly contain the entire universe.”
“I am a nightingale trapped in a foreign land, and you are my golden cage.” (The Color of Pomegranates)
The work of Sergei Parajanov confronts the viewer with the overwhelming potency of pictorial beauty. Dressed in the splendid costumes and imagined customs of southern Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan and influenced by the visual legacy of European Renaissance, Christian Byzantium and Islamic beauty asserts itself as the sole force in Parajanov’s films. Whether in highly mobile, as in Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, or almost completely static images beauty forces itself to the forefront of Parajanov’s work. More than just a mere presence, the beauty in Parajanov’s striking images arrests the viewer, demanding to be acknowledged. It is here that lies its strength and it begins to take on life as outlined for it by Hickey. Powerful and expressive Parajanov’s images demand a viewer open to what they are saying. It is at this point of the encounter between the spectator and the work that beauty gives back by allowing the audience to reflect and reconstruct their view of the human condition.
The short film screening series has been programmed to reflect and fit the parameters of the exhibition as dictated by the concerns arising from Parajanov’s work. While Alexander Carson’s We Refuse to Be Cold is a beautifully told story of love and courtship in Montreal in winter, Eugénie Cliché’s The Jewelleries and Unai Miquelajáuregui’s Un Marriage Chimique are experimental and sensual odes to human sexuality and sensuality. Marion Delaronde Konwennenhon’s Skatne Ronatehiarontie (They Grow Together) and Han Han Li’s Prayer Beads exploit the power the animated image. The artists draw on their native traditions and present the viewers with a Mohawk fable and a reflection on the Chinese Buddhist tradition, respectively. Drawing on photography and animation Nadia Mytnik-Frantova’s Čiurlionis, a mixed-media homage to the Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, is a short indebted to Parajanov’s collage technique.
The supporting lecture series will address the Poetic School itself, the politics of beauty in art, the aesthetics and dissemination of Middle Eastern art as well as narrative structures of folktales. Working with the ideas of the encounter and beauty, of allegory and storytelling this exhibition aims to unpack them and provide a series of frameworks, thus inviting the spectator into a larger discussion.
Works Cited:
Gvakharia, Giorgi. “Sergei Parajanov’s Ecumenical Vision”, Armenian Review (ed. James Steffen), Vols. 47/48, Nos. 3-4/1-2, (2001/2): p.93- 104, Print.
Hickey, Dave. The Invisible Dragon, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Marshall, Herbert. “The New Wave in Soviet Cinema”, in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, Anna Lawton (ed.), London: Routledge: p.175- 192.
Biographies
Marcin Wisniewski, curator
Marcin Wisniewski is a writer and curator inspired by national cinemas as well as issues of identity, beauty and the aesthetics of excess. Through his curatorial, programming, and pedagogical practice, Wisniewski attempts to engage publics to reflect upon questions of the validity of the supposed coherence of narratives.
Masha Salazkina
Masha Salazkina’s work incorporates transnational approaches to film theory and cultural history with a focus on early Soviet Union, Latin America, and Italy. She has published in Cinema Journal, Screen, KinoKultura, in several edited collections, and has won fellowships at the American Council of Learned Societies and Stanford University Humanities Center. Salazkina is the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico and is currently co-editing a collection on Sound in Soviet and Russian Cinema. Before joining Concordia, Masha taught at Colgate and Yale Universities.
jake moore
jake moore is a Canadian artist, curator and cultural worker who has exhibited widely in Québec and Canada. moore believes beauty is deeply political, for it identifies its perceiver and very specific moments in time. She considers these multiple concepts when addressing her primary medium: space, and that writing is an occupation of space. Within a conceptual practice, she uses language and its outcomes not as supplementary to or an extension of her studio work, but as a component of it.
Tatiana Levesque
Tatiana Levesque is currently pursuing a doctorate at McGill University in the department of Russian and Slavic Studies. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in Film Studies from Concordia University. Levesque’s area of expertise includes literature and cinema from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Her doctoral dissertation examines the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtin and his idea of carnival laughter in relation to Russian cultural history.
Monia Abdallah
Monia Abdallah a obtenu sa doctorat en histoire de l’art à l’école des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) à Paris en 2009. Sous le titre Construire le progrès continu du passé : enquête sur la notion d’art islamique contemporain (1970-2009), sa thèse de doctorat porte sur l’origine, l’évolution ainsi que les ambiguïtés de cette notion d’art islamique contemporain. Monia Abdallah est une professore en histoire de l’art à l’Université du Québec à Montréal.
Marion Delaronde Konwennenhon
Marion Delaronde Konwennenhon has always been interested in storytelling and committed to creating a place in her community where others can grow as artists, storytellers and filmmakers. Marion has used her work to raise awareness of language preservation through the arts, namely making puppets for Ojibwe, Maliseet and Coast Salish language initiatives.
For Han Han Li
For Han Han Li, animation provides the most effective tool to spark our collective imagination. She is interested in how history, art, belief systems and social realities offer vast topics to be treated both scientifically and artistically in Pan Asian cultural bodies. Han Li’s work explores animation as a tool for sharing beauty and knowledge, revealing social problems and proposing solutions.
Alexander Carson
Alexander Carson is a Canadian filmmaker and media artist based in Toronto. His short format work is largely characterized by its combination of experimental structures with traditional narrative modes of address. Carson’s films have been screened widely at major festivals across Canada, the United States, and Europe. Alexander holds a BFA and an MA from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. He is also a founding member of the North Country Cinema collective. Alexander is the recipient of the Achievement in Direction Award for We Refuse to Be Cold by the Air Canada En Route Film Festival.
Unai Miquelajáuregui
Unai Miquelajáuregui is a Mexican visual artist and filmmaker currently living in Montreal. Miquelajáuregui’s practice addresses the spectator as a crucial aspect in the aesthetic creation process. He is part of the multidisciplinary, collaborative installation project Conscientia with Mexican artist Laura Hernandez. Integrating sculpture, painting, music, video, 3D mapping projection, holographic projection and dance, Conscientia explores different stages of human consciousness.
Nadia Mytnik-Frantova
Nadia Mytnik-Frantova is a filmmaker, painter, graphic and video artist. She studied at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts in Graphic Design and Illustration. After graduation she worked as a book illustrator, graphic designer, painter, and puppet maker, participating in several domestic and international exhibitions. Recently Mytnik-Frantova completed a degree in Cinema and Film Animation at Concordia University.
Links
© Concordia University