A talk illustrated with slides and film University of Brighton Media Lab on 26 January 2001

"I am an Armenian, born in Tiflis, incarcerated in a Russian prison for being a Ukrainian nationalist".

Sergei Paradjanov was a Georgian-Armenian film-maker who changed the course of cinema with a single low-budget film, The Colour of Pomegranates. His first film Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors previously won 15 prizes in 1964, yet his films had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He became a hero of Tarkovsky, Fellini, Scorsese. With other leaders of the film world they campaigned for his release from Soviet prison. Paradjanov was an artist who smashed all boundaries: politics, nationalism, art, genre, gender. He wrote over 39 film scenarios which were systematically rejected by the Soviet authorities. He designed and made his own costumes and sets, drew, painted and assembled fantastic collages, dolls and sculptures, in prison and during long years when he was not permitted to film. He called these his 'kino-laboratory.'

Paradjanov's own life was a movie-script. He studied ballet and singing, during film studies in Moscow he eloped with his Tartar sweetheart who was murdered by her brothers for marrying him. Posted to the Ukraine to make official films, he married again and had a son. He was arrested for homosexuality and was imprisoned a total of three times. An outspoken activist for freedom, he campaigned, made speeches and constantly came under attack. This winner of the Cannes Film Festival was sentenced for homosexuality, nationalism, subversion and other trumped up charges serving a total of 8 years in jail.

Sergei Paradajanov is undoubtedly a superlative innovator of the 20th century with an approach to films of the greatest influence both inside the Soviet block and world wide. His best known movies are The Legend of Our Forgotten Ancestors, The Colour of Pomegranates, The Legend of the Fortress of Suram, Ashik Kerib.


The Paradjanov Museum in Yerevan, Armenia has the largest collection of his art works, documents and films where Nouritza Matossian has done research.


We will explore the life and work of this great neglected director with slides of his designs, collages and excerpts from his films:
'I am fascinated by the paradox of Paradjanov. His freedom burst out of the highly repressive Soviet system which standardized or crushed so many other artists and intellectuals. Was it Paradjanov's multi-cultural background, his Armenian survivor instinct or just plain genius which made him ignore the divisions of cinema and art, politics and religion, gender and social institutions, in such a flamboyant and exhilarating body of work? We will look at how he reworked and re-ordered every thing that came into his orbit as if to re-arrange a fragmented world and reinvest it with new meaning.'