A generous insight into Parajanov’s motley world

The film director and artist Sergej Parajanov created contrary to the state-sanctioned social realism in the Soviet Union. Martin Grennberger sees a meritorious presentation of his versatile artistry in Södertälje.

In Sweden, Sergej Parajanov (1924–1990) is primarily known as the filmmaker of classics such as ”The Blood Red Horses” (1965), ”The Color of the Pomegranate” (1969) and ”The Legend of Suram Fortress” (1985), films that, with both quietly ecstatic tableaux and finely calibrated visual environments, have eluded my memory and created numerous afterimages since my first encounter with them. Now Södertälje Konsthall, in temporary premises in the Torekällbergets open-air museum, is showing a selection of his collages, assemblages, paintings and censored film clips.

Born to Armenian parents in Tbilisi, Georgia, working for periods in Ukraine, educated at the Moscow Film School, died in Yerevan, and with a strained relationship to social realism and state-sanctioned propaganda narratives, Parajanov’s works form a moving conglomerate of the region’s diverse cultural narratives. They have their roots in myth, folklore, art and religious history, and a symbolism with sometimes surreal undertones that draws nourishment from indigenous traditions. Parajanov is something of a rag collector, constantly on the lookout for trash, discarded material or objects to incorporate into his works. I was caught early in the exhibition by the collage “I sold my summer house” (1985) where postcard cutouts, glitter loops, buttons and a clock face set the tone with an intricate multitude of micro-stories.

In a sketch consisting of cardboard, paper and photography with reference to H. C. Andersen’s fairy tales, both a wavy and folded movement and an intensified play between foreground and background are established. By interweaving sketches and drafts, collage and assemblage and photographic archive material in this part of the exhibition, a picture of Parajanov’s heterogeneous activities and life history is drawn in a meritorious way, this by keeping the polyphonic and inherently conflict-filled lingering.

This is evident in the drawing “Stamps from Prison” (1974-77), produced during the years he was imprisoned, accused of, among other things, “homosexual relations” and “support for Ukrainian nationalism”. Several assemblages play with the tropes of anachronism by mixing folklore, art history and popular cultural signs, and in the paper collage “America in Lenin’s Eyes” (1988), made the same year he was first able to leave the Soviet Union, we see images of an inverted Statue of Liberty, skyscrapers and international cigarettes, in what must have been perceived as a controversial gesture. There is also an iconography here that alludes to the expressive register of the Renaissance, but when he returns to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in two works, it is through fragmentation, layering and denaturalization of the classical motif. He described his assemblages and collages as “compressed films”, and the temporal aspect seems to be prominent here. In his collages he repeatedly uses both soft and hard materials – beads, textiles, feathers, shells, glass, cutlery, etc. Sometimes I get the feeling that the collisions, changes of direction and fractions activated within the collages evoke low-intensity implosions of material poetic abundance. In an inner room the focus is on the films, and materials that have been censored. Here the short “Kiev Frescoes” (1966) is shown, in which the contours of his unmistakable later style can already be discerned: the tendencies towards films as tableaux vivants, where the emphasis is more on the movement within the images than on the rhythmisation via montage or through the dramatic juxtapositions of the images.

The remarkable does not occur primarily through expressive cutting, but can manifest itself in a gust of wind in a drapery, in shifts in rain and natural conditions, in the hieratic poses and gestures of the bodies. In Parajanov’s work, the camera is mainly static. The images have an emphasised frontality and the shots often have a tangible duration in time. ”The Color of the Pomegranate” is presented generously, with film fragments, outtakes and camera tests scattered on various screens of variable sizes, flanked by the Swedish and French posters from the film. In its broken, scattered form, the feeling of living tableaux becomes very tangible, and the images display both a slightly trembling and a remarkably calming quality. Excerpts from ”The Blood Red Horses” have not been presented in the same successful way, and I can, it strikes me, miss his magnificent puppets. But the exhibition provides, it must be said, a well-balanced and generous insight into the intense and variegated landscape that was Parajanov’s.

From: svd.se
Translated by Södertälje konsthall