DVD of the Week: The Legend of Suram Fortress

It says a lot, but far from everything, about Sergei Paradjanov that he studied, at Moscow’s VGIK film school, with Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Paradjanov, born in 1924 in Tbilisi, Georgia, to an Armenian family, had the benefit of the Ukrainian master’s lessons in technique and, perhaps more important, in his spirit of ecstatic naturalism. For Dovzhenko, transcendent and rhapsodic emotion were not in contradiction to a documentary-like devotion to the material specifics of his locations, but, rather, emerged directly from it. His approach hardly endeared him to Soviet authorities, whose notion of realism had little to do with kaleidoscopic inner experience. Paradjanov, who directed his first feature (“Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”) in 1964, had the same problem, which was only amplified by two additional issues: his homosexuality, and his passion for the cultures of nations (such as Armenia and Georgia) that were held in the Soviet grip.

Paradjanov spent years in Soviet prisons, first in the late forties. In 1973, after his second film, “Sayat Nova” (named for the Armenian poet who is its principal character), was forcibly re-edited and retitled “The Color of Pomegranates” (about which I posted a couple of years ago), he was sentenced to five years in jail, was released in 1977 (but not allowed to work), and was re-arrested in 1982. It wasn’t until 1984 that, at the age of sixty, he was able to make his third feature, “The Legend of Suram Fortress” (which I discuss in the clip above). His last, “Ashik Kerib,” was from 1988; he died in 1990.

Paradzhanov is one of the greatest inventors of personal forms in the history of cinema. His style is inseparable from the myths and legends that he explored, and from the visionary archaeology of his deeply personal sense of cultural history. His images are simultaneously straightforward and shamanistic, direct and mystical, sophisticated and primeval; he blends the Lumière brothers’ painterly wonder at the artistic possibilities of mere recording with Georges Méliès’s revelry in the medium’s power to depict the imaginary, the invisible, the impossible. By leapfrogging back, over the methods of the classical cinema, to the ancient, he leapt ahead into an audacious modernism.

Kino has issued a wonderful boxed set that includes all four features and a documentary about Paradjanov.

P.S. This 2005 profile of Paradjanov by Arevhat Grigoryan captures some of the dark and strange strains of history and personal agony that converge in the artist’s experience and that his films reflect. His part of the world is a distinctive one; its deformation by the Soviet experience has left open wounds; and Paradjanov’s work gets at the practical contradictions and inner conflicts that remain unresolved to this day.

P.P.S. The Russian voiceover in the concluding sequence above is included in the DVD due to the loss of a few minutes of the original Georgian soundtrack.