How to write about a film which refutes every conventional notion of what a narrative film should be and at the same time reinvents the possibilities of what a narrative film might be. Storytelling through the amalgamation of images. Post-post-modernism, a generation or two before digital. You can discern an axis in Parajanov’s masterpiece. A moment where the word would be supplanted by the image, setting fire to 500 years of conventional thinking, after Gutenberg, that the word should hold priority. Parajanov destroys that theory. Every image contains the semiotic power of a word, with a seductive power the humble word and its cousin alphabet could never aspire to. The pictures ravish, charm, provoke. The camera lingers on them just long enough for the questions to arise. Who is the boy? The woman? The man? Why is he holding a peacock feather? What is the silver ball? And so on, an endless parade of information bathed in all the colours of the rainbow. Yet, at the heart of the film, a story is still being narrated. The story of a poet, but also the story of a culture, a culture that feels at once eternal and transient. Armenia, a land that time forgot.
Nb I note I saw the film previously in 2008. The print of this version was far superior to the one I saw back in the Cine Lumiere, a cinema in South Kensington I can scarcely recall.
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