SERGEI PARAJANOV AS A TEXT: MAN, HABITUS, AND INTERIOR (on the material of visual texts)
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2019-3-197-215
The article is devoted to the great film director Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990), his Habitus (sociocultural behavior), and unique personality. Special attention is paid to the semiosis of privacy and of social space. Parajanov’s photographs, as well as textual and visual artifacts (collages, movies, letters, and scripts) are comprised the main empirical material for the present paper. The methodological basis for the description was theory of Pierre Bourdieu and semiotic metalanguage. In the course of describing the Habitus of S. Parajanov, the author presents him as a representative of cultural border, a hybrid human, since Parajanov was a carrier of different cultures (Armenian, Georgian, Russian, and Ukrainian). A special place in the article is given to the interior of his Tbilisi apartment, the “real” component, as well as to the syntagmatic series of cultural artifacts. Special attention is also paid to the semiotic space of the toilet, its ironic, humorous and political context. The visual material provided an opportunity to analyze the structure of the Italian courtyard in Tbilisi, as well as the performances, the photo session of the great director in his own social space. S. Parajanov turned his vivid space into a holiday, aestheticized food, invented performances for guests. An important point for describing Parajanov’s Habitus was also prisoner “atavism”, a subculture of the Soviet camp, as well as a description of its hierarchical status in the zone. The reasons of the “aggression” of the Soviet establishment against. S. Parajanov are outlined and described as being connected with his playful-political performance (greetings of the demonstrators through L. Brezhnev’s eye) and a speech in front of cultural figures which “prepared” the ground for the fabricated criminal case, culminating in an eventual five-year term in a strict regime colony. An analysis of the empirical material showed that the great director worked not only while making masterpiece films, but also in the utilitarian space. His Tbilisi apartment was not only a living space, but also a creative laboratory, a workshop, a wardrobe room, and finally, a theater. Parajanov’s habitus and biography are a brilliant example for describing the repressive Soviet power of not only the Stalinist, but also the Brezhnev era, which was intolerant in relation to creative individuals. The «volcanic» nature of S. Parajanov became a prerequisite for the destruction of genre and value traditions. His outrageous, humorous, ironic thinking created performances, breaking the boundaries of the real and virtual. It was in this context that his apartment turned into a theater, a museum and a studio. With his way of thinking he destroyed the generally accepted functions of the private space; the toilet was turned into a museum, a gallery for the presentation of his diplomas, a space of outrageous, ironic and humorous texts (some sort of a “luggage room”). Parajanov’s self-irony, irony, sarcasm, extraordinary outrageous thinking became prerequisites for playing with the Soviet “sacred” values, for creating an anti-text of his era, and it was also a generator of his unique cultural habitus, performances and poetics.
Keywords: Sergei Parajanov, semiotics of behavior, semiotics of interior, private space, semiotics of toilets, hierarchy of thieves, microhistory, Old Tiflis
References:
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Issue: 3, 2019
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 197 — 215
Downloads: 978