The Bard and Armenian Legends and Truth

In the screening section of this year's Shanghai International Film Festival, "Legends and Realities of Asia" deserves attention, and a few films fold Asia's little-known history into the audiovisual language. One of them is "The Bard", which was released at the festival four years ago and "The Color of the Pomegranate" is from the same director, The Armenian Parajanov.

The picture shows the poster of "The Bard" (left) and the stills of "The Color of the Pomegranate"

He has experienced a lot in his life, living for 66 years but only completing four feature films, "The Bard" and "The Color of the Pomegranate" contrast, can already make people see the director's spiritual trajectory, "legend" and "reality" have become subtle footnotes to all his creations - he introduced the legend of the Caucasian nation into the film, but his flesh endured the storm of reality. Parajanov worked tirelessly to create ethnic collages in the Caucasus, and finally in 1945 he waited for the turning point in his life, when he became a student and assistant to the Russian titan director Dudurenko. He admired his mentor because of the poetic language of his films, the aesthetics of divinity, and the fervent love of traditional culture. He also loved Pasolini, almost admiring it, because "the beauty in his films is majestic". The roots of tradition, the rhetoric of poetry, and the majestic aesthetics, these will be the key words in Parajanov's creations.

Parajanov completed his first feature film, The Figure of the Dead Ancestors, in Kiev, Ukraine. This is a love film based on Georgian folklore, and the story can be summed up in one sentence as "a man cannot forget his dead lover". Parajanov boldly opened a personal interpretation of "tradition" and "legend" to present the passion and pain of a man. He made extensive reference to Orthodox iconography in his photography, using highly ritualized static framing to express the subjective perspective of the figure. The techniques of modernism are almost frantic, the images of animals and forests appear repeatedly, and the passages of the heroine's dreams have a psychedelic beauty that is detached from the will of reason.

During his brief stint at the Armenian studio, Parajanov made The Color of the Pomegranate. From "The Color of the Pomegranate" to "The Legend of Sulam Castle", there is a gap of 15 years. By the time he was able to make The Bard, he was already an old man plagued by illness, which became his movie elegy.

Parajanov's four films, The Ancestors, are based on folk tales, Pomegranate is a fragment of the life of the Armenian poet Sayat Nova, The Castle is based on a novel by an ethnic minority writer whose origins are still legends from the Caucasus region, and Bard is a combination of the writer Lermontov's experiences and his narrative poems.

Intuitively, Parajanov's films are a series of nearly static "living paintings", in fact, he abandons the popular narrative while giving the image a "legendary" character. Folk literature, folk art and folklore, these elements support the framework of the film, and what gives the film the soul is the spirit of poets and poets. With an independent personal vision, the director traces the ancient epic tradition - Sayat Nova and Lermontov are regarded as "national poets", their creation and folk oral literature have a deep origin, Parajanov pursues their fate, the "poetry" he pursues is not a literal rhetoric in the modern literary sense, but an "epic" passed down orally in human childhood, so the fate of the individual expands into a national metaphor, becoming a remembrance and reflection on national culture.

A large number of "epic films" reflect only the volume of production, investing huge sums of money to complete luxurious but conventional drama films. Parajanov's films are among the few who really communicate the spirit of the "epic" with audiovisual expressions, and again and again, he recreates the myth of the poet. Whether it is Sayat Nova of Pomegranate or Ashug Klib of The Bard, they wander until they are destroyed, exhausted to become mediums between the human and the divine, and their existence is considered a miracle, but this "miracle" can only be established among the many sentient beings of the people - the soul of the "poem" is the place where legend and reality meet. (Liu Qing)