Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967)
Sergei Parajanov
Hakob Hovnatanyan Sergei Parajanov Armenia35mm > digital10 min1967
With a playful associative montage, Parajanov offers an overview of portrait paintings by Hakob Hovnatanyan, the “Raphael of Tiflis.” Combining sights and sounds from both Hovnatanyan’s paintings and 19th century Tbilisi, Parajanov’s short documentary can be seen as a direct precursor to The Color of Pomegranates (1969). – IFFR
Like Parajanov a product of Tbilisi’s Armenian community, Hovnatanyan made his name in the nineteenth century as one of the best portraitists in the Russian empire (also like Parajanov, he would later become transfixed on Persian miniatures, an important influence on his later work). Parajanov uses Hovnatanyan’s work to stage an exercise in sound, rhythm, and visual patterning, fragmenting the painter’s portraits to isolate certain body parts, and later cutting between subtly different framings of the same image, suggesting the surprising effects that even a slight change in viewpoint can bring. – Daniel Witkin
Hakob Hovnatanyan was scanned and restored by Fixafilm within the framework of the Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project. Ⓒ National Cinema Centre of Armenia. Financial support courtesy of Kino Klassika.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with the National Cinema Center of Armenia and The Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project.
Image credits: all artworks, stills, and portraits courtesy of the artist © Estate Sergei Parajanov, and the National Cinema Center of Armenia. Special thanks to Shushanik Mirzakhanyan, Naira Gevorgyan and Daniel Bird.
about the artist
Sergei Parajanov (Armenia), affectionately known as the “magician of cinema” was a visual artist and filmmaker born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1924. After briefly studying at the Institute for Railway Transport and the Conservatory of Music, he enrolled in the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, under the tutelage of Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko. His studies were briefly interrupted after a wrongful conviction by the Soviet state security apparatus. His sentence was later commuted and he graduated from VGIK, completing the now lost film Moldavian Fairy Tale (1951). Between 1954 and 1962 he made eight films in the socialist realist style including, Ukrainian Rhapsody (1961) and Flower on the Stone (1962). Parajanov’s career culminated in the creation of brilliant cinematic productions replete with visual poetries and folk legend. Crediting Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Ivan’s Childhood (1962), he went on to develop a radically new method of filmmaking, completing the landmark films Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and Sayat Nova (1969). He would later disown his films made before 1963, and paid a heavy price for his outspoken criticism of Soviet authorities. Soviet film studios rejected his projects after Sayat Nova, censoring and renaming the film as The Color of Pomegranates. In 1973 he was incarcerated for five years in a Ukrainian prison. During this exile, he created assemblages, collages, and drawings with renewed vigour. Following his release, exhibitions of this body of work were held throughout Armenia. Parajanov was widely celebrated during his lifetime, winning many awards at festivals in Venice, New York, Rotterdam, London, São Paulo, and Istanbul. He has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, including at The Museum of Modern Art, Harvard Film Archive, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Tbilisi History Museum, Odessa International Film Festival, and Arsenal Berlin. Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation restored The Color of Pomegranates in 2014. The restoration premiered at the 67th Cannes Film Festival. Parajanov’s final film, The Confession, was never completed. It survives in the original negative as Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992), assembled by his friend and colleague Mikhail Vartanov. He died of cancer in Yerevan, Armenia in 1990. The Sergei Parajanov Museum opened one year after his death in 1991.