Sergey Parajanov would have turned 90

On Jan. 9, Sergey Parajanov, who is one of the greatest masters of 20th century cinematography, would have turned 90…However, the real master of Armenian cinematography has been living in our memories for a long time now, and he always makes us conduct an in-depth study of his career, appreciate and interpret all that he has created. Parajanov might not have created as much as his contemporaries created, especially since he was very often forced to spend most of his years behind bars and was deprived of the opportunity to create, but the great dissident managed to affirm his perceptions of arts and aesthetics through few films and introduce a new mindset in cinematography, reject the traditions of cinema in series and affirm the type  of cinema that is a symbol of allegory and poetry, combining the Eastern and the Western, the structure of art and the subtext of poetry.

The world is a theater-vivid and interesting with its remarkable “decorations” that are constantly moving, changing and leading to the movement of thought and emotions…This is the basis for Parajanov’s films, and he stayed true to that throughout his lifetime, moving toward fission of the situation like El Greco and affirming poetic allegory in everything. The life that was becoming a substance and inspiration for Parajanov, was a colorful structure, a unique collage in which everything moves and is interpreted “through the logic” of color and emotions.

So, Parajanov the extraordinary phenomenon can be explained with this particularity that was not exaggerated in cinema. Cinema records movements that progress. Parajanov’s films were a perfect revolution, making ideas and emotions primary, meaning he viewed cinema as a space for atypical actions and showing a series of stories. Theater and cinema are called for showing the different manifestations of human life, but Parajanov tried to show the Spiritual Life, turning cinema into the combination of nature and realty, the abstract and the concrete. It’s hard to portray the Spiritual Life in a feature film and present the “passivity” movement. Parajanov focused on this and achieved great heights, creating the philosophical cinema, the roots of which trace back to medieval mysteries, folk games and the “variations” of thought and image.

People had a hard time accepting and understanding the great film director’s works. The film “Shades of the Forgotten Ancestors”, which was entirely based on poetry, was a love story with allegory and poetry. There is no text, but one gets the impression that there is prose, with a flow of amazing and interesting images and an outburst of feelings. The viewers of the time also weren’t excited about the film “Color of Pomegranate”, which was a film through which Parajanov showed how he saw Sayat-Nova and presented medieval poetry through him, turning the penetrations of “the poetry of image” into cinema…

Only after Sergey Parajanov’s death did people start appreciating and perceiving his work correctly and only now has it become possible to study all that he introduced and affirmed in cinema…

Levon Mutafyan

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