Sergei Parajanov: Religious functions of his image (using the example of collages and photographs)

Abstract

In the light of Christian values, the article examines Parajanov’s tendency to undermine creative canons. The article’s empirical material consists of his assemblages, collages, and photographs. The article describes the picture director’s inner world and various psychological states based on visual materials. His work serves as an indication of his playful nature and the artifacts of his deliberate and unintentional disruption of traditions, genre canons, and cinematic language. Like his predecessors, the Armenian “troubadour” Sayat-Nova (18^th century) and the French poet Francois Villon (15^th century), who lived on the cultural boundary of critical epochs, Parajanov, as a “man of the frontier”, eliminates all cultural boundaries. The article’s central argument is that Christian symbols and artifacts serve different purposes and are seen differently depending on the author’s mood on the following oppositions: game versus non-game, jail versus civil life, and death versus life. As demonstrated by the examination of the empirical data, Parajanov plays the roles of Parajanov-Christ, Parajanov-God, and Parajanov as the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church (Catholicos). Since his mind is unable to distinguish between reality and mise-en-scène, spectator and stage, his images are the result of carnivalesque thinking. He destroys all conventional behavioral frames. The analysis shows that there is no contact with demonism in his playful behavior. His Christian hypotheses serve as metaphors for cultural domination. The intertextual nature of Parajanov’s play involved the recoding and replaying of primary texts (Armenian miniature, Michelangelo’s work). Since the codes to meanings are outside of the text rather than inside it, the game becomes an intellectual one, adding complexity and uniqueness to his work.