Minority view: The Legend of Suram Fortress by Sergei Paradjanov blog
There have been few filmmakers more celebrated but less comprehended than Sergei Paradjanov who, along with Tarkovsky, is acknowledged as one of the two greatest filmmakers to emerged from the former USSR - at least after the early period of the pioneers (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko etc). The late Paradjanov spent 15 years in Soviet prisons and therefore made only four feature films in his entire career. The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) is not as well known as The Colour of Pomegranates (1968) but having a linear story line it provides an easier path to the filmmaker's methods and concerns.
The Legend of Suram Fortress is a film from Georgia and when one says it hasn't been understood it is not so much that it has been misunderstood as that no attempt has even been made to get beneath its dazzling surface. In fact, when it appeared (it was made just after Paradjanov's release), the British film journal Sight and Sound issued an open challenge to the reader to say what the film be might about. Seen today, Suram Fortress seems as magnificent as ever but it also does not seem as inaccessible as it is regarded as being.
Two aspects seem crucial to our understanding of Parajanov's films and while the first is that he works in the folk idiom, the second is that he relies on devices that are primarily from the theatre. Suram Fortress in based on a folk legend about crumbling fortress walls that require a young man to be walled in before they stand up to the elements. This legend is placed within a love story about Gulivardi (or Vardo) and Durmishkhan. Both are slaves of a prince but Durmishkhan is granted his freedom. Durmishkan sets off to seek his fortune and meets Osman Agha in a caravanserai. Osman Agha is a prosperous merchant who abandoned his Christian faith when he fled from Georgia after killing a tyrannical prince. Osman Agha adopts Durmishkhan who marries another woman. The two have a handsome, golden-haired son named Zurab. Vardo, meanwhile, has become a fortune teller and when her advice is sought on the crumbling of the walls, the solution she envisions is for a handsome, golden-haired young man to be interred alive within the fortress' walls. Needless to add, Zurab volunteers and is walled in while Vardo (as his ‘˜mother') weeps for him.
To examine Parajanov's methods, the film begins with a prologue in which a young man blows a horn and two elderly women in black hasten towards him and load his cart with eggs. We then see the young man grinding the eggs into a heap of cement to mix a building mortar with some strength. Paradjanov is evidently using this to suggest how construction of walls could be such a community activity in times when they built fortresses that mothers and their children were actively involved in the techniques of construction (as is also suggested by the legends connected with the Wall in Kafka's story The Great Wall of China). Paradjanov captures the two women and the young man in long shot to prevent us from catching their individual characteristics, denoting them simply as ‘˜mothers and sons'. The title sequence, which is suddenly in black and white, then shows a fortress, and its crumbling is suggested by the shattering of the mirror in which it is reflected.
The folk aspect of Paradjanov's film lies largely in the way the individuality of the characters is erased. If we were to characterize folk performance through a key aspect, we could say that it sets about transforming person to archetype through stylistic devices - like substituting costumes and masks for clothes and faces. In Suram Fortress Vardo visits an aged fortune teller and after her death assumes her role, eventually growing old in it. Later, she is visited by people who seek to know the remedy for the crumbling walls. Paradjanov (apparently) wishes to communicate that traces of Vardo still remain in the fortune-teller. What he does is to have the fortune-teller veiled in the sequence while the face of the young Vardo swings from right to left and back from behind her veiled head like a pendulum, the amplitude of the swing diminishing with each oscillation until the young Vardo disappears behind the fortune-teller. The film is largely shot on location and if people expect the narration to be ‘˜realistic', devices like this one contribute to the difficulties in understanding the film.
Once we understand that devices such as the one described above are from theatre, we begin to make more sense of Paradjanov. One key difference between cinema and theatre is that while cinematic space has the same qualities as real space, the stage is a mythical space in which a battlefield can occupy a few square yards and be contiguous with the inside of someone's home. Paradjanov appears to set his film in real space because he shoots on location and the sequences are replete with panoramic shots of the mountains. But a closer look reveals that there are only a handful of spaces in which the action is actually shot. One of them is a partly enclosed field that could be a caravanserai, another is a cave on a cliff with steps leading down, a third is a rocky spot on an actual mountain and a fourth is a slope on which horses and camels are moving about. The first spot is used variously as the place where princes entertain their guests, a field in which peasants are harassed, the spot in which the Czar reviews the security of the region and as part of the fortress wall in which Zurab is buried alive to keep the fortress standing. What the enclosed field represents is indicated by the ‘˜stage props' that Paradjanov uses in the sequence. When princes entertain their guests, we have pomegranates in a bowl and/ or two Great Danes to be given away as gifts and when Zurab is being walled in we have eggs, cement and bricks. It is difficult to make obvious symbolic connections here because Paradjanov works too close to his subconscious self for that and his devices are far from schematic.
Since there have been other filmmakers who have worked with the folk idiom (our own Ketan Mehta in Bhavni Bhavai) the question the needs answering is what makes Paradjanov so singular. Apart from the visual quality of his films, which are never less than stunning, Paradjanov works against tendencies that are generally regarded as intrinsic to cinema. Cinema, because it is an imprint of the real world, has no means of dealing with abstractions and therefore no way of turning individual to archetype in an artistically convincing way. In Bhavni Bhavai, for instance, the individuality of the stars is always peeping out from behind the roles they are playing. Paradjanov hardly ever uses the close-up; he films from such a distance that the individuality of the actors is erased. More significant is the way he turns real space into a stage even while using actual locations. Paradjanov manages to impart the qualities of the stage to real locations but where theatrical space is normally removed from the actual soil, he conveys the sense of the soil as a theatrical space, as an abstraction. Zhang Yimou has sometimes tried to do the same thing (as in his martial arts films) but one rarely gets a sense of an inhabited space in his films. Their spaces are inhabited by actors rather than by real people. Paradjanov's films, although they may appear exotic like Zhang's films, are inhabited by people rooted in the actual soil.
Paradjanov is difficult to write about and what I have just said only points to his methods. But once these methods have been approached, the question that remains is whether The Legend of Suram Fortress contains any aspects that may be described as profound or ineffable. I will argue that the film - dealing as it does with the sacrifice of a young man - could easily have been fashioned as tragic - as the story of Abhimanyu in the Mahabharata is. ‘˜Tragedy', it would seem, is difficult without the valorization of the individual identity in one form or another. We weep for Abhimanyu because we are touched by his courage in the face of death. When Paradjanov erases Zurab's identity, he is perhaps making a statement about the illusory nature of the individual identity. Whatever happens to one man, he seems to suggest, happens to all men and when Vardo weeps for Zurab it is as if all bereaved mothers weep for sons who may or may not be their own.
Comments( 12 )
Very simply, wouldn't a religious
Very simply, wouldn't a religious reformer have to posit an alternate morality to be a reformer? Would he/she be immoral by doing so? He/ she would gradually win converts who begin to follow the new creed but even before he/she wins converts, he/she would still be 'moral', wouldn't he/she? An ethic is implicit in any text but it may be a personal ethic not commonly accepted. Our shock at a certain kind of film perhaps comes out of the extremity of its moral position.
Didn't I already? Perhaps morality is a
Didn't I already? Perhaps morality is a code of behaviour based on one sacred ideal which it cannot violate (from religious/political texts/propaganda), that a mass of people accept to govern their lives and actions. But my definition makes it differentiable whereas you say an inviolate morality is implicit in any text, which piqued my curiosity as to how you would define it. Doesn't an inviolate morality simplify the perception of reality?
Looking at the Surrealists, for
Looking at the Surrealists, for instance, they were against bourgeoise morality but had their own politics based on anarchism. This means that they disagreed with conventional morality but posited another. All radical political thought proposes an alternate morality. I leave it to you to answer the last question!!!
Wow..... I hadn't thought of it that
Wow..... I hadn't thought of it that way. But then, what is the difference between violating morality and proposing a new one? Perhaps that any morality would have to have some sacred basis that it cannot violate - for Cronenberg it's to heighten the physical experience beyond the imposed borders on the body while for the surrealists maybe it's a heightened perception of the subconscious? How would you define morality and ethics?
I haven't seen Crash but is not
I haven't seen Crash but is not Cronenberg, with his emphasis on the body, simply positing an alternate morality? I think we must make a distinction here between not accepting what is conventionally accepted as 'moral' and denying the existence of morality and ethics.
Cronenberg's Crash. True horror
Cronenberg's Crash. True horror sometimes has to defy moral conventions.
There is the implicit acceptance of a
There is the implicit acceptance of a moral order in virtually every kind of narrative.(If you differ, please name a film that does not take a moral standpoint of some kind or invoke moral issues) What is perhaps significant is that while Paradjanov has a highly individualistic cinematic method, his storytelling owes to a tradition that is very old. The method he uses - epic storytelling, devices from the theatre - are novel to cinema but hardly new to narration itself. What he does not do is subordinate the world or the form he uses from to his 'personal vision' of the world. You could say that he respects the folk tradition of storytelling too much to use it for 'personal expression'.
But aren't folklores or myths normally
But aren't folklores or myths normally used to perpetuate a moral order? Paradjanov deals with the form in a different manner though.
Of course it is not true that Bresson
Of course it is not true that Bresson refuses to make moral judgments. Gerard in Au hasard Balthasar is perhaps the most evil character I have seen in cinema. But I see what you mean. Bresson does not allow his moral vision to overpower his observation of the world as Tarkovsky does. American noir is also too preoccupied with asserting a moral order to engage in dispassionate observation. But where Bresson is realistic, Paradjanov's films can perhaps be called 'epic'. The epic is too inclusive a form to allow narrative to be subordinated to a vision. Duryodana, Karna, Ravana although wicked in their deeds are not denied their nobility. The difference between Bresson and Paradjanov is perhaps that while Bresson is attentive to the real world in the manner of a great modern novelist and observes scrupulously, Paradjanov is attentive to a narrative tradition, which he follows scrupulously. But this is a huge difference.
The differences in their appearences
The differences in their appearences are too great to be denied and I was expecting to be refuted. I'm not an avid film student, so I can only try.
There seems to be a difference between the response elicited by films with a philosophical import who balance their message on a the non-fulfillment of a moral order (like perhaps Tarkovsky or some noir films) and Bresson who simply refuses to make moral 'judgments' about the actions or the fate of his characters. Bresson's characters act - we do not know of their motives or justifications behind their actions, which is closer to our experience of reality and hence the response elicited by them feels more genuine. Through bypassing moral judgments, perhaps only due to the requirement of the technique he adopts, Paradjanov manages to elicit a similar response.
Brilliant response to my contentious
Brilliant response to my contentious proposition. But can you explain the following more clearly: "Philosophical statements conveyed through films/texts often feels like an ornamentation and quite fake because of the accompanying moral stances they are delivered through. However, it isn’t so in this case or Bresson’s films for example, who manage to remain genuine." I am intrigued by this and would like to rethink about it if it is restated differently because someone else also compared Bresson with Paradjanov who, to all appearances, are poles apart.
I think a face shot in extreme close-up is bound to have features. If you look at Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, for instance, the blemishes on a person's skin become 'features' pointing to his/her character/ psychology.
"When Paradjanov erases Zurab’s
"When Paradjanov erases Zurab’s identity, he is perhaps making a statement about the illusory nature of the individual identity. Whatever happens to one man, he seems to suggest, happens to all men and when Vardo weeps for Zurab it is as if all bereaved mothers weep for sons who may or may not be their own."
Really interesting proposition. I was inclined to think that Vardo's grief was fake or it was her subconscious design to kill Zurab. But then, mythical/folkloric characters can't have psychology, can they? So I took it for granted that Paradjanov was simply narrating the legend and didn't try to get beyond the surface of the character. But now, it seems that by erasing out the drama of motives and individuality and simply providing the bare 'facts' of the story, he seems to be able to make the statement about individual identity that you propose.
Philosophical statements conveyed through films/texts often feels like an ornamentation and quite fake because of the accompanying moral stances they are delivered through. However, it isn't so in this case or Bresson's films for example, who manage to remain genuine. Ironically, it seems while Bresson chose to eliminate acting and theatrics, Paradjanov uses theatrical techniques for the same purpose.
Also, while I agree that Paradjanov's refusal to use close-ups aid in his attempt to erase individuality, do you think extreme frontal/side close-ups of a featureless face, (perhaps like the later Vardo's), can be used to achieve the same effect?