Backward, Primitive, Opaque: Displaying Peripheries in Sergei Parajanov’s Films

Sergei Parajanov, Sayat Nova, 1969 (still). Courtesy of National Cinema Centre of Armenia (NCCA). Restored by World Cinema Project in 2014, this film is the director’s cut of broadly known The Color of Pomegranate (renamed in the censorship).

 

Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990) provokes a remarkable variety of threads of the identity discourses, thus questioning their very reliance on “authenticity” and “originality.”1 His most famous films, The Color of Pomegranates (1969) and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), garnered Parajanov a prominent position in the histories of the national cinemas of Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine, and of national culture narratives of these regions more broadly. As an artist incarcerated by Soviet authorities for five years because of his homosexuality, he is regarded as a manifest case of international support for gay prisoners in the USSR.2 As a Thaw-time filmmaker and a representative of “poetic cinema”, Parajanov would speak of himself, following the patriarchal genius myth, solely in terms of an auteur, whose unique creative personality avoids any labels. Finally, the recent trend of commodifying identities of the oppressed in contemporary art and cinema tend to pitch his works as “decolonial” and “queer,” often at the expense of his practice’s contextual nuances. What is common for all such discussions is the perception of Parajanov as a representative of a periphery: the periphery of Soviet culture, democracy, and human rights: a “talented genius” besides the grey majority, the “other” of the intertwined colonial and heterosexual regimes.

These identifications are left without consideration in my essay, but I suggest paying attention to Parajanov’s own contributions to displaying the peripheries—in his practice, he engaged with images of the Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Moldovan, and Ukrainian fringes. Hence, the director managed to develop a cinematic approach that neither merely devalued the peripheries nor was naively seeking to integrate their “authentic” voices (an impossible mission under the Soviet rule). This approach began with an utter adherence to the Soviet cinema’s colonial function but culminated in a considerable digression from that protocol. Here, I suggest revisiting the trajectory of this deviation through three modes of displaying the Soviet peripheries in Parajanov’s films: as “backward,” “primitive,” and “opaque.

Colonial Temporality and “Backward” Peripheries in Socialist-Realist Film

Apparently, one of the most challenging circumstances for the Soviet socialist experiment was the excessive geographical and cultural diversity of the territory inherited by the USSR from the Russian empire. Official Soviet Marxism carried the presumption that this whole region had shifted at once to a new monolithic historical state, brought about by the October Revolution in 1917. Historian of Marxism Susan Buck-Morss associates such a temporalization of spatial relations with the formation of what she calls “revolutionary time”.3 “The party submitted the historical cosmology,” within which the official cultural policies were meant “to mobilize [the masses] for movement ‘forward’ in time.” The wide heterogeneity of societies and communities inhabiting the Soviet territories, with their respective worldings, was not considered to be significant factor undermining the linearity of such a historical timeline. Quite the opposite: according to Buck-Morss, the latter easily absorbed the contradictions across the enormous Soviet Union on the scale that, no matter where, “all peasant resistance was defined as a class struggle that slowed down the history.”4 What’s more, the social relations and cultural forms of the indigenous peoples and nomadic populations in North and Central Asia were identified as “backward” due to the clear mismatch with the vectors of Soviet modernization that were considered ‘progressive’ by the party.5 This means that progress was gauged according to standardized metrics derived from a teleological historical timeline. Therefore, state-commissioned cultural production was designed to manufacture the sensorium and perception of “historical time.” Meanwhile, anything that could “disrupt the continuum of history as defined and led by the party” was marginalized or actively repressed, including the avant-garde, which was all-too-experimental about the time-space nexus, not to mention the non-modern cosmologies of the empire’s peripheries.6 In more schematic terms, linear revolutionary time ought to be produced and reproduced as an aesthetic effect of Soviet socialist culture and media. To achieve this, it required the use of expressive forms approved by the authorities and everything that was not approved had to be censored.

Soviet screens played a paramount role in the projection of historical time, while Socialist-realist films served as the ground for the construction of this reality. Joshua First, a film historian particularly interested in the figuration of national identities who investigates the filmic images of backwardness in Stalinist cinema, brings forth the concept of a ‘folkloric mode of representation” of non-Russian Soviet societies that was typical in Socialist-realist filmmaking. One of the mode’s constitutive techniques is contrasting the figure of a universal “Soviet man” with personages representing a national color. While entertaining spectators with their peculiarity, these “locals” often feature cliched characteristics: “The Georgian is the one dancing the lezghinka; the Kazakh is the one singing about an apple grove; and the Ukrainian is the one relishing his salo,” as one attendee of the 1967 Union of Cinematographers’ plenum ironically commented on the strict template for Stalinist films.7 Importantly, First notices that the production of images of such national colors relied on a particular “ethnoscape”: a cinematically constructed habitat, usually predetermined by the production sites of local film studios.8

The telling case is Tractor Drivers (1939) by Ivan Pyryev. The plot finds three tractor drivers from different Soviet republics on the same train. At some point, they start a conversation— the Georgian dives into memories of wine and Caucasian women, the Ukrainian extols the beautiful views of the Ukrainian steppe. It is only the Russian character who discusses the article about factory work in the capital and the respective economic progress. The images of the three men on the train are interspersed with picturesque views of Georgia and Ukraine. In First’s reading, such an organization of the diegetic (filmic) space reveals a crucial ambiguity of Stalinist cinema. While the presence of “exotic” characters and the respective wide shots are meant to offer viewers visual pleasure, the Russian character serves as a constitutive element for establishing the ideologically “correct” narrative line of the film. Therefore, First concludes: “With its folkloric imagery, Stalinist cinema domesticated national difference, while maintaining the spectacle of particular spaces and the peoples that inhabited them.”9

The folkloric mode of representation involved a set of typical cinematic means, no matter whether it dealt with Ukrainian, Armenian, or Moldavian “color.” Parajanov’s early career seems to be influenced by these cinematic conventions. Between 1954 and 1962, he produced four feature films in the Socialist-realist canon, all shot at the Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv, although depicting various localities across the USSR. For instance, in his debut Andriesh (1954), with a narrative based on a Moldavian fairy tale, the depiction of the locals is characterized by “the rejection of psychological motivations as far as to make the characters use not ordinary colloquial language, but versified yet rather very prosaic speech,” as the visual culture scholar Olha Briukhovetska notes.10

Talking about his 1958 film The First Lad, a musical comedy about a collective farm (kolhoz) in Ukraine, Parajanov himself acknowledged the inapplicability of Socialist-realist aesthetic approaches to the display of the peripheral location. In his 1966 essay “Perpetual Motion,” the filmmaker stated:

When I began to work on the film The First Lad, I opened myself for the first time to the Ukrainian countryside: its impressive beauty, its poetry. I tried to express that fascination on the screen. However the whole work collapsed under the blows of the story, which was, essentially, a rather primitive humoresque. It had nothing to do with the landscapes, stone babas, storks, tractors, and straw wreaths.11

The film indeed follows the conservative codex of Stalinist cinema and does not touch upon any of the poetic or mystical matters that fascinated Parajanov. The First Lad tells the story of a young mechanic, Yushka, who is in love with the kolhoz secretary, Odarka. Meanwhile, the demobilized soldier Danylo comes back from the front and inspires community sports activities among members of a collective farm called “Victory.” A set of comic situations ensues, all related to the kolhoz and a unique selection of pigs there or to sports or romantic affairs. Odarka supports Danylo’s efforts, while Yushka tries to win her heart with his sporting talent. These elements culminate in the festive abundance of the kolkhoz, the exhilaration of sports in the new stadium, and the blissful harmony of love.

The film also incorporates non-narrative elements typical of Socialist Realism, indicative of a unifying colonial vision expressed through specific stylistic standards. One of these elements—perhaps the one that informed Parajanov’s remark about his inability to adequately capture the locality—is the folkloric mode of representation. In parallel to the storyline of Odarka and Yushka, a marriage ceremony is about to happen in the village. The screen oozes with Ukrainian traditional costumes and rituals and wide shots of the picturesque steppe as if taken from romantic landscape paintings; elements are collated in the image of the nearly timeless periphery of the Soviet Union.

The rhythm significantly speeds up, however, in the closing part of Parajanov’s film, which increasingly employs dynamic shots that incorporate a multiplicity of figures—a hurrying bride, rushing pigs—and reaches its culmination with the final football match. Amid tense competition, Yushka’s excellent game ultimately helps him to enchant Odarka.12 The montage combines elements that, within the narrative, seem separate from one another. Its sensuous mediation, the rich fertility of the socialist collective farm, the festive ornaments of Ukrainian traditional outfits, the players’ mighty bodies, the love story—all these elements blend together in vibrant ornament of the images of the thriving collective farm “Victory.” The plot of the film taps into the ideological meaning attached to the fragment’s excessively elaborate montage, which opens an affective tunnel that navigates the sense of orchestrated historical change under the Soviet rule. As the film scholar Elizabeth Papazian notes, Parajanov’s later recognition of the conflict between ”cinematic language” and “excessive impressions of reality” was all-too-common for Thaw-era “poetic cinema,” represented by figures such as Yuri Ilyenko and Andrei Tarkovsky. However, for Parajanov this conclusion also opened up “a site for playing out the contradiction among temporalities and spatialities in post-Stalin culture”, thus “creating the possibility for subverting the colonial function of Soviet cinema”.13 The de-Stalinization of filmmaking triggered a search for cinematic strategies of organizing the sense and perception of time and space which could offer an alternative to the constitution of the historical timeline of Soviet modernity. Therefore, drawing on First’s analysis and Papazian’s argument, the following section shows how Parajanov’s further experimentation became a fertile ground for a cinematic remediation of temporality and spatiality of the Soviet peripheries.

From the “Backward” to the “Primitive” in the Thaw-Era Cultural Politics

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) designates a key moment in the decisive shift away from the Stalinist cinematic regime in Parajanov’s oeuvre. It is an adaptation of an impressionist novel under the same title, by the nineteenth-century Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, and set among the Transcarpathian Hutsuls. The unique economic and geographic circumstances of mountain dwelling, coupled with their position on the fringes of “plain” societies, kept the paths of the Hutsuls’ everyday lives quite remote from those of the majority of their Ukrainian contemporaries. The film adaptation was ordered by the Dovzhenko Film Studio in anticipation of the writer’s centenary. This became a perfect opportunity for Parajanov to experiment in bridging the cinematic language and the impressions of peripheral locality. However, once on location, he was disappointed by the twentiethth-century Hutsuls, who failed to meet his expectations of authenticity:

My attention was instantly drawn to the elements of everyday modern life. I saw European shoes, asphalt, bicycles, high-voltage towers […] Honestly, I was distressed by this strange combination of the ancient and the modern. The buzz of the wires and the drawn-out wail of the trembita.14

This forced Parajanov to involve a rich arsenal of cinematic techniques to convey a vision of the Hutsuls as present in Kotsiubynsky’s novel and his own imagination, rather what he saw during his daily observations. The more so that the locality itself appeared to be contradictory and full anachronisms, a jarring juxtaposition of trembita horns and modern European footwear. Parajanov clearly tends to treat such contradictions in a strictly bipolar way: as a “combination of the ancient and the modern”. His search for the “ancient” aligns with the Thaw-era return to modernist experimentation in Soviet culture and the search for the “primitive” as a source of formal exploration. Paradoxically, this turn was also significantly facilitated by technological advancements in post-Stalinist filmmaking. Similarly, yet independently, such development also paved the way for the Italian post-Fascist neorealist cinema.

The increased availability of portable cameras, faster film stock, and lighter equipment freed filmmakers from the confines of the studio. Utilizing these previously inaccessible locations helped bridge the disconnect between the realities of the postwar situation and the outdated cinematic approaches to film them, which were tied to the old political regime. In Italian neorealism, this offered an opportunity to abandon the “historical set-pieces” of nationalist culture and engage with “human problems and human point of view”, as noted by Cesare Zavattini, screenwriter and close collaborator of Vittorio De Sica.15

In turn, the Soviet poetic cinema’s exploration of this technological potential was accompanied by a search for the way out from the Socialist-realist cinematic regime. For Ukrainian poetic cinema, as cultural critic Vitaly Chernetsky points out, technological innovations lifted the horizon of “‘fondness for the ethnographic, the emphasis on an impressionistic presentation of experienced reality, and frequent reliance on unusual camera angles and fluidity”.16 What prompted the turn to “the human point of view” in Italian neorealism enabled the discovery of impressionist vision in Soviet Ukrainian cinema, which opposed the homogeneous Stalinist standards of realist visuality. Technological and stylistic configurations of poetic cinema offered strategies distinct from those found in the ethnoscapes of Socialist-realist films. For one thing, the increased mobility of filming disrupted the film studios’ exclusive control over the conventional association of a specific landscape with a specific “color”. For another, the overall impressionist trend allowed for a relative diversification of artistic forms. While the extent of this pluralism in Soviet cinema shouldn’t be exaggerated, the overall trend clearly deviates from the standardized displaying of Soviet peripheries established during the Stalin era.

Despite Parajanov’s refusal to include modern attributes of the Hutsuls’ lives in the frame, the enhanced portability of film production opened up the possibility of his integrating the impressionist visuality with the effect of ethnographic documentary records. The film was shot in a number of locations in Transcarpathia and the Carpathian Mountains: Verkhovyna, Bystrytsa, Sokolivtsa, and Kryvorivna. The crew encountered difficulties on the site of shooting, mostly caused by harsh weather conditions, resulting in a total of thirty-four days of shooting delays. Parajanov paid particular attention to the presence of the Hutsuls’ material culture: costumes, crafts used in religious rituals, but also the already mentioned trembita horns as musical instruments specific for the region. Alongside Myroslav Skoryk’s orchestral compositions, the film features recordings of the Hutsuls playing instruments.

Henceforth, in several cases the documentary precision of Shadows is to be questioned. As Joshua First noticed, a great number of frames were composed in the neo-primitivist vein, including the flattening of the space, introduced by the “artistic consultant” of the film, painter Fedir Manailo.17 Another telling example of such flattening is the tableau-like framing of Hutsul dancers, who stand in the geometrically perfect line, in an evidently choreographed and unnatural way. After all, Shadows is a feature film, an adaptation of the novel, which did not prioritize documenting actual ways of life, but merely included some shots of “the Hutsuls ‘playing’ themselves”.18

Nevertheless, First concludes, the film created a sense of “authenticity” with its documentary-like, rather than documentary, imagery. The persuasiveness of such staged images was enhanced by the already-mentioned overabundance of ethnographic elements and, in equal measure, by Yuri Ilyenko’s innovative cinematography. Importantly, such innovations were made possible by the above discussed technological advancement. Ilyenko’s approach involved observational camerawork, dizziness of the picture, and point-of-view shots, thus creating the effect of intimately observing the characters. Instead of subordinating them to the diegetic space to seamlessly engage with the plot, this positioned the viewer as an outside observer. In other words, this alienated gaze served to create the effect of an experienced reality, reached through an immediate impression. This is how the film managed to organically merge the fabricated sense of a documentary record with more illusionist tableau-like scenes, such as the one with the Hutsul dancers. As Papazian rightly notes: “The mobile camera serves not to establish a sense of spatial and temporal continuity, but to plunge us into a sensual experience of form in which space and time are layered.”19 The layeredness is that of the lived experience that sees each place and every specific moment as tied to involuntary associations, memories, and cultural references. Consequently, imagery in Shadows appears to be unquestionably “authentic” despite the stark contrast between the daily lives of Parajanov’s contemporary Hutsuls “in European shoes” and the characters of Hutsuls in the film. They are convincing rather than realistic, evident rather than true.

The constellation of film techniques used in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors marks a turning point in the display of peripheries in Soviet cinema. It breaks away from the Stalinist subordination of the “backward” to a monolithic historical narrative. Instead, it presents a construction of the “primitive” as a collectively-shared nucleus of the national identity. This is where Papazian’s and First’s interpretations meet. The former admires the radical break with “the inexorable forward movement of [Soviet] modernization,” which is not reduced to “the regressive movement of recovery of an originary moment,” but becomes “a creative act.”20 The latter highlights the relevance of this creative intervention ‘”in the politically charged atmosphere [of the 1960s], with the recent arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals,” when “Thaw-time cultural politics intersected with issues of national representation in Ukraine.”21 Indeed, the premiere of Shadows in Kyiv on September 4, 1965, drew a significant protest from the Ukrainian dissident movement—including Vasyl Stus, Mykhailyna Kotsubynska, and Ivan Dzuiba, to name a few—struggling against a new wave of colonial violence radiating from Moscow.

Hence, one significant site of the strife seems to be neglected in the constructionist enterprise of Parajanov’s film. Although it failed to dismantle the colonial centralization inherited from the Russian empire, the Soviet experiment harbored the promise of emancipating the labor of the colonized peoples. While the constructed ‘primitive’ Hutsul performance served as a means for constructing the national identity, the Hutsuls in “European shoes” suffered brutal exploitation. In the concluding section of this essay, I elaborate on the possible meaning of Parajanov’s Sayat-Nova (1969), a film dealing with the questions of labor performed by subaltern peoples and the labor of the body. While not explicitly intended by the filmmaker, this film allows us to speculate about what the non-metropolitan socialist filmmaking could have taken on.

Within and Besides the Colonizer’s Gaze: The Censored Sayat-Nova Project

Sayat-Nova (1969) was Parajanov’s next feature film after Shadows. Between these two projects, the director was working on unrealized Kyiv Frescoes, supported by the Dovzhenko Film Studio. The unfinished piece was meant to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Soviet “victory” in the Second World War. But production was halted by the authorities, and the fourteen minutes of preserved material clearly show why. The introductory sequence, a series of screen tests assembled by Parajanov, deviates sharply from the patriarchal Soviet commemorative style, venturing into the grotesque rather than glorification. The dreamlike montage collates phallic obelisks in honor of the “heroes” and “victory” in the Great Patriotic War with a no less phallic golden dome of the Orthodox church and a bulava, a club-like weapon with a heavy head, which was a symbol of authority and leadership in Cossack communities. Upon visualizing the morphological similarities between various elongated attributes of power, Parajanov’s audiovisual collage continues with a series of tableaux combining war-related glorification with cliched images of Ukrainian culture. No wonder this approach could not be accepted by authorities as a relevant way to address one of the most ideologically charged motifs in postwar Soviet culture.

Despite this obvious farce, the festival acclaim of Shadows enabled the continuation of Parajanov’s experiments, albeit now under the auspices of the Armenian Film Studio. James Steffen, a historian of Parajanov’s oeuvre, assumes that by involving the director, the studio attempted to secure greater budget allocation from Goskino (the primary filmmaking authority in the USSR), as this had previously happened with the Dovzhenko Film Studio after Shadows.22 Consequently, he was invited to make a film on Harutyun Syatyan, better known as Sayat-Nova. In the Soviet 1960s, Sayat-Nova was the most popular Armenian ashugh, a medieval traveling poet. (The closest analogue of such a figure in European history of literature is a troubadour.) He was born in Tiflis, contemporary Tbilisi, and declared his adherence to Armenian Christianity. Sayat-Nova wrote his poetry in a mixture of Georgian and Armenian, as well as Azerbaijani Turkish (Azeri). Therefore, as Steffen explains, for Soviet authorities, Sayat-Nova served as a perfect figure to promote their “Friendship of Nations” cultural policies in the Transcaucasian region. The utilization of the poet as a symbolic pocket of “friendship” gained significant momentum at that point. Aside from the numerous reprints and translations of his work, Sayat-Nova became the topic of a documentary short film that entered Soviet screens in 1963, shot by Gurgen Balasanian for the Yerevan Chronicle-Documentary Film Studio.23

In those circumstances, after failing his ideological mission with Kyiv Frescoes, Parajanov engaged with Sayat-Nova’s figure as another mainstream myth of the official Soviet media regime in the postwar era. The film project that shares his name developed in a way that obscured its initially sanctioned ideological framework. “This film does not attempt to tell the life story of a poet”, says the opening intertitle. “Rather, the filmmaker has tried to recreate the poet’s inner world.” This reveals the impressionist orientation of Sayat-Nova, which not only led to the experimental use of tableau framing, but also the circumvention of censorship. The film consists of sequences of painting-like static frontal shots, each depicting a particular period of the poet’s life with corresponding—even though apparently mythopoetic—objects of material culture of that period. We see Sayat-Nova as a child surrounded by books and women washing carpets, then as an adult among angels joining the monastic clergy, later praying in the company of sheep, and so one. As it is widely recognized, Sayat-Nova is heavily imbued with religious symbolism and homoerotic visuality, particularly for a Soviet film. A largely overlooked aspect, as far as I know, is the significant number of shots showing bodies at work: the mentioned women with carpets, monks stomping grapes, a mason constructing a temple’s wall in the closing episode. Thus, the film progressively unfolds through a series of tableau shots, while the narrative remains largely opaque. It is divided into chapters, each identified in the intertitle. In the original version, these hardly help to follow the plot, with chapter titles such as “Sacrificial Offering” and “Angel of Resurrection” denoting associations evoked by Sayat-Nova’s writings rather than the stages of his life.

Sayat-Nova did not enter Soviet screens in its original variant—it was re-edited, restructured, and renamed to The Color of Pomegranates. This new version, termed by scholars as the “Russian cut”, was created by Sergei Yutkevich, who, in the more voluntary period of Soviet history, had started his career in the field of avant-garde theatre as a student of Vsevolod Meyerhold and collaborator of Sergei Eisenstein. The reworked version excluded certain segments present in the “director’s cut.” The chapter structure was changed to describe Sayat-Nova’s life in a more conventional biographical manner, which reduced Parajanov’s explorative speculation on the “inner world” to a mere metaphorical play. Steffen discovered that, according to various evidence, the original cut might have been twenty minutes longer than Yutkevich’s edition, yet the version restored after the fall of the Soviet Union and known as “director’s cut” is only ten minutes longer. The missing part of the original version was possibly lost or simply planned but ultimately not produced.24 After comparing the two available versions and the original script, Steffen concludes that there’s no clear rationale behind the re-editing choices, since a “large number of homoerotic and religious elements” remain in the “Russian cut”.25 But just because clear censorship criteria are missing does not mean that no systematic ideological adjustment is made. The most immediate assumption one may have after comparing the two cuts is that the “Russian cut” was meant to be a “comprehensible” version of the film, with a division into chapters displaying the stages of poet’s life. The form of an artwork can be comprehensible when it corresponds to dominant—and therefore commonly known and easily decipherable—aesthetic and ideological codes. Hence, just as in the previously discussed fragment of Kyiv Frescos, in Sayat-Nova Parajanov uses these codes—clichés—in a subversive way.26

One of the fragments of the “director’s cut” excluded by Yutkevich is of particular interest for our exploration of Parajanov’s deviation from the colonial function of Soviet cinema. The sequence in question shows a group of shirtless men cutting grass on temple grounds. Each man’s head is covered with a piece of cloth, a regionally-specific attribute for a Soviet spectator, although most commonly used in the parts of the USSR where it’s essential to shield your head from the sun’s harsh rays. The men’s muscled hairy bodies are merging in the gestural performance of labor. Their tools move in a rhythmic dance to the sound of the grass being cut and the sunlight glinting off their bodies. The sequence is undoubtedly erotic and echoes the earlier shot with monks’ furry legs stomping grapes. Despite the unusual seductive charge of the sequence and the regional headpieces, the images of mowers are all too typical for Soviet cinema, particularly kolhoz films ranging from Eisenstein’s The General Line (1929) and Dovzhenko’s Ivan (1932) to Parajanov’s own The First Lad. Obviously, none of these films combines such images of labor with religious themes, eroticism, and evidently regional material culture. Perhaps it was this very representational eclecticism that informed Yutkevich’s decision to remove the scene.

Stills from the censored sequence of Sergei Parajanov, Sayat Nova (Color of Pomegranate), 1969. Courtesy of National Cinema Centre of Armenia (NCCA).

This sudden—again, symptomatic rather than intentional—return of a colonized, alienated body should be seen as Sayat-Nova’s key intervention into Soviet cinematic culture. In this text, I sought to outline three strategies of such a display employed by Parajanov. The first one refers to the filmic organization of the colonizer’s gaze, constituting the periphery’s “backward” position within the sense of monolithic historical time, the coordinates of which are imposed from above, by the metropole orby the party, as in the case of The First Lad. The second strategy, exemplified by Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, embraces the construction of the “primitive” periphery for the national identity, which comes at the cost of distorting the periphery’s actual social conditions. After all, it is an internalized gaze of the colonize envisioning the peripheral as timeless, while the “backwardness” harbors the projections of “authenticity” Nevertheless, by acquiring a special value as an exotic fetish, this perspective served as a tool of struggle against structural violence at a particular historical moment. Finally, the third strategy does not seek to represent a periphery. Instead, via symbolic eclecticism and affective charges disentangled from this representational amalgamation (i.e., the sexual pleasure of observing the mowers’ sequence in Sayat-Nova), it opens up the conflict between the form of expression and its seductively masked content.

The stark contrast between overused cliches and the undeniable appeal of alluring visual texture is left unresolved, with no effort made to reconcile these conflicting elements. It is hardly possible to depict a colonized locality beyond the colonial regime of display. Yet, the exposed rupture between the gaze and its object extends into the uncanny present tense, equally filled with colonial projections, routine labor, eroticism, and the possibility of becoming something else.