• Sergei Parajanov: The Rebel


Free and open to the public. Tickets available at the admissions desk beginning at 1:30 PM.


Sergei Parajanov Symposium



Cosponsored by BAMPFA; the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES); the Berkeley Armenian Studies Program; and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

In Conversation

  • Myrna Douzjian

    Myrna Douzjian teaches Armenian language and literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley and is working on a study of interrelations between various storytelling forms and media in contemporary Armenia and Russia.

  • Olga Kim

    Olga Kim teaches Russian and Eurasian film and literature at Williams College and is currently working on her book manuscript Cinema on the Edge: Late Soviet Tableau Aesthetics.

  • Harsha Ram

    Harsha Ram teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley and is currently completing a book on Russian-Georgian cultural relations titled The Geopoetics of Sovereignty: Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter.

  • James Steffen

    James Steffen (PhD) is the Film and Media Studies Librarian and Head of the Humanities Team at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, and the author of The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov.

  • Patrick Cazals

    Patrick Cazals is a filmmaker and writer who made Sergei Parajanov: The Rebel (2003), a study of Sergei Parajanov as a filmmaker, designer, and collage artist. He also made The Muse and the Magician (2024), a portrait of Parajanov’s muse, Georgian actor Sofiko Chiaureli. Both films screen at BAMPFA on Sunday, November 3. 

Five experts join BAMPFA’s Sergei Parajanov Centennial Celebration to discuss the filmmaker’s multifaceted legacy. Their presentations explore the twofold uniqueness of Parajanov’s filmmaking. Formally, his cinema was in constant dialogue with other media, from painting and the plastic arts to literature. Thematically, his cinema returned insistently yet playfully to the rich cultural legacies of the Soviet republics—above all, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan—at a time when explorations of ethnicity and national identity were officially permitted but also fiercely contested. James Steffen analyzes Parajanov’s tableau aesthetic for its inherent cinematic possibilities and for its figurations of time and history from the perspective of the Soviet periphery. Olga Kim discusses the aesthetic principles Parajanov’s films have in common with the other plastic arts he practiced, from sketches to collages and assemblages. Harsha Ram traces the symbolic and ideological valencies of the legend of Surami in its transmedial journey from folklore to literature to Parajanov’s cinema.

Chair: Myrna Douzjian 

2:30 PM
James Steffen — Sergei Parajanov as a Transmedia Artist

3:15 PM    
Olga Kim — Parajanov’s Cinema on the Edge: Figures of History in Tableau Aesthetics

4:00 PM   
Break

4:10 PM    
Harsha Ram — Sovereignty and Sacrifice: The Legend of Surami Fortress between Folklore, Literature, and Cinema

4:45 PM    
Roundtable with Speakers