Written by Sona Karapoghosyan
The Academy Museum in Los Angeles hosted a sold-out screening of two Armenian films on April 19, 2024— Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates (1969) and Mikhail Vartanov's Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992), with community partnership support provided by the Armenian Film Society. This marked the first time Armenian films were screened at the Academy Museum. Armenian Film Society spoke with Martiros Vartanov, co-founder of the Parajanov-Vartanov Institute in Los Angeles and one of the co-organizers of the event, about the program curation, the importance of the restoration and presentation of the Armenian classics, and the everlasting power of art.
Both Sergei Parajanov and Mikhail Vartanov, and their respective films, have had a long and complicated journey of repression, blacklisting, being banned, and being lost and found. The revival journey for the masterwork of both artists started at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea when a joint retrospective of their films was held in 2012. “This is where I met with Martin Scorsese's colleagues from the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, totally by accident," remembers Martiros Vartanov. "Then, we started working on the restoration of The Color of Pomegranates”. The process was challenging because the negative of the film was located in Russia, while the internegative was in Armenia. The final goal was to reconstruct the Armenian version using most of the censored negative bits in Russia and some of the elements that were missing from the internegative in Armenia. The restoration premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, and traveled to Toronto and New York, before it had its Los Angeles screening at LACMA.
Mikhail Vartanov’s The Color of Armenian Land (1969) was another film included in the Busan retrospective. The short poetic documentary featuring Sergei Parajanov, painter Minas Avetisyan, along with other non-conformist modernist masters from Armenia, caused fury among the HayFilm Studio leadership at the time, and because Mikhail Vartanov refused to cut the artists from his film, he ended up being blacklisted and was not allowed to work as a director anymore.
Mikhail Vartanov continued working as a cinematographer and filmed several important pieces of Armenian cinema, such as Artavazd Peleshian's Seasons of the Year (1972) and Gennadi Melkonyan's Mulberry (1979). “It was not until 1989 when Mikhail Vartanov was able to film the second instalment of this trilogy, Minas: Requiem, where he was saying farewell to Minas, his friend who was assassinated a few years ago,” explains Martiros Vartanov. "Then, a couple of weeks later, he was able to create a project over Parajanov: The Last Spring. That was his farewell to Parajanov.” The Last Spring was produced independently, unlike Requiem, which was a HayFilm production. And while the negative for Minas: Requiem is currently considered lost, the negative for Parajanov: The Last Spring was always with the Vartanov family, which made this restoration possible.
So, what did Mikhail Vartanov do with his film, Parajanov: The Last Spring? The director has always said that Sergei Parajanov had invented a revolutionary film language. This language is not difficult; on the contrary, it is exceedingly simple and that’s why it starts to appear complex to people. In Parajanov: The Last Spring, Mikhail Vartanov tries to demystify Sergei Parajanov’s film language and does this just through a few very brief sentences. “The film is about an hour long, but it has only about 10 minutes of voiceover. So, most of the information my father shows, he does not tell." In the film, Mikhail Vartanov takes an approach where he puts focus on showing and letting the audience actively participate in what he is trying to say because nobody is telling them what they are supposed to do there, what they are supposed to understand and follow. Information comes visually, instead of through voiceover."
The possession of the negative does not necessarily make the restoration process easier. The team needed substantial funding and a group of supports to get through this costly and long journey. UCLA was one of the most important partners that joined the project, and later, System of a Down announced their willingness to support the restoration. “When we were honoring System of a Down with the Parajanov-Vartanov Institute’s award, Francis Ford Coppola wrote a beautiful letter congratulating them and said that he was pleased to hear of their gesture to help the restoration, writing: 'Parjajanov: The Last Spring is a film that “exemplifies the power of art over any limitations.'" Naturally, more funders came on board in the following years, but the work was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. "I decided to delay it a little bit more for the centennial of Sergei Parajanov. So, finally, it is done and we are having this amazing premiere at the Academy Museum," says Martiros Vartanov.
The Parajanov- Vartanov Institute has several projects that they are working on. Founded in Los Angeles in 2010 in collaboration with the Parajanov family, the Institute has presented several Parajanov-Vartanov retrospectives, was involved in the restorations of The Color of Pomegranates and Parajanov: The Last Spring, and worked with the Criterion Collection on the release of The Color of Pomegranates. In addition to these initiatives, the Institute is trying to prevent the sale of fake Parajanov collages in many different countries. “The proliferation of the forgeries by Sergei Parajanov is a huge issue. We were the first to ring the alarm about this and we've been doing this for 20 years now. Sometimes, it happens that prestigious organizations want to release alternative soundtracks for The Color of Pomegranates and we are trying to prevent such activities as well because it will be a precedent, it will discredit Sergei Parajanov’s work. It is not a silent film and it is very important to see it the way he intended it, with its original soundtrack.”
Staying loyal to “Parajanov’s ways” is one of the main visions of the Institute that also applies to the repetitive attempts to politicize the master. “I have a lot of recordings of Sergei Parajanov in private conversations when he is aware that he is being recorded. And every time somebody asks him a political question, he transforms it into something fantastical. You could see that he doesn’t particularly like it and just transformed it into entertainment. All I want to say is that this is a new restoration, and I want people to come and see it and pay attention to the poetry, to the art instead of politicizing it."
