When this was made, he had been dead for five years. His Chagallian spirit was still flying through the streets of Yerevan and Tbilisi, where the gorgeous black-and-white of this film was shot. It is in those alleys that Parajanov comes back to life. The film was made four years after the dismal fall of the Soviet system – a system that proved its utter stupidity, among countless other things, by imprisoning this woolly, rolling ball of life. Yet his voice lives on, speaking fluent French. And while it might take a few minutes to get used to it, the essence of the words – drawn from Parajanov’s own writings – strikes straight at the heart. Various dignitaries appear, and they all come across as more sincere than one expects in talking head interviews. Godard puffs a thick cloud of cigar smoke into Parajanov’s last solitary room and declares, “Man is not the creator of his language; he is a creation of it.” But he quickly anoints Parajanov with sainthood, pours holy water on his balding head, and declares him the creator of language through cinema. Other interviews include that other Armenian giant, Artavazd Peleshian, who breaks down while speaking about a letter he received five months after Parajanov’s death. Parajanov could see the soul of objects. While chickens and roosters might not have been particularly fond of how they ended up on his sets, stones, carpets, cotton and woodcuts weave together like an old Persian rug hanging from the balcony of his lonely Yerevan house. On the steps of that house, his final, unfinished film Confession – which we see fragments of – was shot. The subject of countless, impeccably framed photographs, Parajanov was also a comedian in his home movies, in which he didn’t shrink from flashing a vulgar, lively fuck-you gesture. For him, the unspoken rule seemed to be: “Anything but cinema” – which, paradoxically, made it all cinema. His films are naked hymns to beauty, with a violence of emotion in which pomegranates explode like grenades and stain Armenian fabrics with the blood of the poet. And this nearly flawless documentary captures that.

Ehsan Khoshbakht

Paradjanov, le dernier collage is a creative documentary devoted to the life and work of Sergei Parajanov, an Armenian filmmaker whose avant-garde style created astonishing cinema deeply symbolic and rich in cultural heritage, with vibrant use of colour, folkloric and poetic elements, and meticulous attention to sound. This moving film lifts the veil on his infancy, his memories, dreams and nightmares, Parajanov’s work being inextricably bound up with his life. Love, death, exile, his circle of friends, Tblisi, Kiev and Yerevan, where he lived, make up the seven tableaux in the story of Parajanov on his long journey in search of poetry and beauty. Throughout the film, personalities from the world of cinema add their testimonies: Jean-Luc Godard, Tonino Guerra, Marina Vlady, Robert Hossein, Artavazd Peleshyan… This documentary offers a total immersion into the creative world of Parajanov and invites the general public to make his acquaintance.

Ani Hamel