This week, Owen asks about the meanings that lay behind the symbols, the ‘difficulty’, the ‘boredom’. What was Parajanov really trying to say - and does it matter, actually? Also, it’s ok to be bored by films. Go and eat a fig.
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1989. Germany. Here’s Parajanov — chest-tapping, gesticulating, comfortable. Fresh from Venice and its eponymous film festival, he’s here to share his testament with American filmmaker Ron Holloway. A rare documentary, and an even rarer insight into the fabula of his films — the seething significance behind the symbology.
I don’t know how much footage Holloway kept or cut. Everything Parajanov says seems freighted with consideration. After spending the waistline of his career in a Siberian labour camp, it’s possible that he had had many long, arduous days over which to crystalize his thoughts. During this time he heard the ‘confessions’ of his fellow inmates. These he turned — in his head — into screenplays.
When I hear him talk, I wonder if there’s a tendency to dismiss Parajanov as a mere symbolist — a weaver of an impossible and inscrutable grammatology of signs whose meaning remains forever unknown to us. ‘I liked it’, people say, ‘it was beautiful’. A pause. ‘But I didn’t get it.’
What is there ever to ‘get’ in a film? An emotional tenor, like being punched in the clavicle reminds us we have a body, that it is fragile. Parajanov made his films look like paintings - paintings that move. This might be enough to make us think that we’re watching him ventriloquise his past, animating it as a kind of show-offy trick, with nothing much behind it. In the New York Times, J. Hoberman calls 1969’s The Colour of Pomegranates “hermetic”. Like “reading a novel written in hieroglyphics.” Huh. Ouch.
I remember taking a group of friends to see this tight juice of a film back in 2016 or 2017. The Barbican, the ‘before times’. At least two fell asleep. Does it engender hypnosis, this avalanche of signification? I felt it — then and now — as the feeling of dunking my head into a basin of cold mountain water. Or syrup. But I felt far from sleepy.
Confronted with a language we do not understand, the brain makes the sound that computers make when we hit a button we shouldn’t. A mechanical bell. A thud of keys. No. We slouch back, try it again. What’s going on here?
Still from Parajanov’s Arabesques on a Pirosmani Theme (1985) - an expressive, interpretive documentary on the ‘naive’ Georgian painter
That interview, back to it. When he talks, he talks with the oratorical largesse of a high priest, standing before the congregation, gathered. “I owe Armenia a cinematographic confession”. Behind him, a softly billowing curtain, a tender wall, light. Sharing his “vision of dreams”, the “tragedy of a cemetery being torn up”. “The cemetery”, he laments, “must give way . . . the ghosts are cast out”. But it is Parajanov who must serve as their vehicle, their host. “They seek shelter with me, their living heir - but I can’t take them in”. This impasse was the denial of the Soviets to allow Parajanov, and filmmakers and artists like him, to bear the legacy of their collective past. Cast adrift in the modern world, alone, pallid, shrieking, these ghosts — he smiles — “know neither electricity nor insurance agents”. He smiles again, gesturing from his throat. “I have to prove I love them”.
If Parajanov is a ventriloquist, then he is also a spirit medium. If he is a symbolist, then these symbols are attempts to speak — frankly, lovingly — with those who are dead. If they’re ‘inscrutable’ and hard to read, then it’s only because the act of “loving” our ghosts is difficult - especially in the sump days of 1969, the prison sentence that followed. What seems at first confusing, hieratic, obscure, becomes the messy and emotional ‘labour’ (oh yes indeed) of trying to equivocate and reassure the spirits of the past. We dress up like them and, pouring wine upon our chests, try to speak (books drying in the wind, a group of monks biting, synchronized, into fruit, a horse’s yoke locked over the shoulders of a blindfolded man and wife, a circle of horses raging around a slowly dancing swordsman who looks, glazed, behind our mouths). Stopped at a country’s dismal border, the guards find what looks like smoke and mirrors in Parajanov’s trunk, but really — I think — they have found love letters. And just as we can never really understand another’s love letter, as we would our own, we can feel the grace and the lightness of it. We can begin to read, however uncertainly. But we’d never say, I ‘can’t get’ it. We get it. Oh how we get it.
The slowness of Sátántangó (1994)
Both on the podcast and off, Ralph and I spend a lot of time talking about film and cinema and boredom. About what it means to sometimes subject yourself to a film that might be — for want of a better word — dull. The dullness can be enervating, assuming you can climb carefully into its rhythm. Béla Tarr and his Sátántangó. A fistful of barely moving shots, soaked in the brine of blackness. Cows, sheds, pathways, roads. We hear of its “slowness”, the “long-take”, the ‘ecstasy’ and aesthetics of patience and even of boredom. Slow cinema. Paint drying. Raking a garden of stones. Tarkovsky’s Solaris, too, can bore us, crawling without obstruction toward its slow and rarified third hour. You dip in and out, poised on the edge of something. It can feel comfortable. It can feel uncomfortable. You won’t always give it the fullness of your attention. But the same can be said of history. It’s there — a stone, a fact, a reality. We’re just not always tuned in to it.
I always say to myself, if you’re not feeling it, if it’s dull, then whatever. Turn it off. Play a stupid game. Listen to the radio. Eat a fig. That’s fine. It’s ok. Live your life. The stone won’t disappear. It can’t.
And maybe the same can be said of Parajanov - and of his deliberate choreography of communing with that excavated past. We’re not always going to be there for it, vibing on the same level. We might have time only for those soft-baked Sainsbury’s cookies. A bike ride. Scrolling Twitter. But when we do lock horns with them, his films — like a ouija board — open up to us a thorned and momentary contact with the dead. And when we close the board and look away, the ghosts don’t depart. Like us, they just look away. For a moment. Film is looking-at. Being seen by. A held stare. And when we break it.
Don’t forget to check out the latest episode, where Owen and Ralph discuss Thomas Vinterberg’s flat and a little frustrating 2016 effort ‘The Commune’.