Call for Papers: Sergei Parajanov Conference in 2024
A conference dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Sergei Parajanov’s birth will be held at the University of Southern California (USC) on February 22-24, 2024. In preparation for the conference, entitled “Sergei Parajanov at One Hundred: Chimeras of Nation, Form, and Being,” the organizing committee has issued a call for papers.
The committee includes Dr. Shushan Karapetian, director of USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies; Dr. Aniko Imre, professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts; Dr. Colleen McQuillen, associate professor in the USC Slavic Department; and Dr. Ellina Sattarova, assistant professor in the USC Slavic Department.
In his interview with Ron Holloway, Parajanov proclaimed that he was a chimera, a being inscrutable to others but also uniquely able to look ahead and beyond all constraints. The chimera, a mythological figure comprising parts of different bodies, emblematizes both the possibilities of imagination and the impossibility of categorization and control. It poses a challenge to homogeneity, fixity, swift legibility and intelligibility by re-constellating the known to produce aesthetic wonders that are always in excess of the sensible. A slap in the face of propriety and pure reason, a blow to scientific and epistemological certainty, the chimera boldly transcends limiting constructions and strictures. And for those very same reasons, the chimera is often subject to suspicion, fear and persecution.
Drawing inspiration from Parajanov’s description of himself as a chimera, this centennial conference organized by the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies and USC Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures aims to examine the myriad border crossings and hybridities that characterize his life and oeuvre. Born January 9, 1924 in Tbilisi, Georgia to Armenian parents, Parajanov worked at Dovzhenko Film Studio, Armenfilm and Georgia Film Studio, all while navigating the complexities of the Soviet film industry. While his early work can be said to fit the requirements of socialist realism, Parajanov’s later films mark a radical departure from the dominant culture. Mining a variety of folkloric, literary, artistic and cinematic traditions, the auteur’s filmic worlds resist spatial and temporal determinacy as well as national and imperial borders. While the painterly quality of his cinema stalls the sense of temporal progression in his films, it simultaneously proposes alternative sources of dynamism. A playful variation on the paradoxical coexistence of stillness and motion in cinema, Parajanov’s tableaux invite the spectator’s wandering gaze to explore the exuberance of each frame, treasure the movement within each shot and observe inanimate objects come to life with the help of editing and sound. Through the multiplicity of both spatial and temporal points of view offered by the inverted perspective, the filmmaker’s images not only challenge the distinction between passive and active spectatorship, immobile subjects and moving objects, but posit the impossibility of a coherent subject altogether as they reveal the fluidity of such constructs as ethnicity, gender and agency.
We are particularly interested in proposals that examine the multinational and transnational dimensions of his work, as well as his ambivalent relationship to the Soviet empire. As ethnographic imaginaries, the films and collages invite consideration of Parajanov’s appropriation and remediation of myths, folklore and poetry as well as textiles, paintings and sculpture. Additional topics include, but are not limited to, the following as they relate to the filmmaker’s oeuvre and lived experience:
- Empire, nation and the supranational
- Violence, trauma and death
- Socialist realism and Soviet ideology
- Unrealized screenplays and other written material
- Intermediality and multimediality (film, painting, collage)
- Visual storytelling and perspective
- Questions of animacy, agency and spectatorship
- Gender queerness
- Tension between sound and silence
- Split temporalities and anachronisms
- New languages and critical paradigms for discussing hybridity
- Parajanov’s artistic legacy
Please submit 250-word proposals and a brief bio/short CV by September 15, 2023 using the online form. Limited financial assistance may be available for scholars without institutional support. Please send any questions to Parajanov2024@gmail.com.
