The world of Hutsuls through the eyes of Sergei Parajanov: semiotic translation, film language, existential invariants

Abstract

The article analyses Parajanov's reflections on semiotic translation, on the example of the life, traditions, and customs of the Hutsuls, as recorded in his article “Eternal Movement” about his film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors became a stylistic and semantic invariant for Parajanov's subsequent films. In fact, it became a manifesto movie. Parajanov found his own thematic language and creative constants, such as rituals, traditions, customs, and sacraments. By focusing on the creative invariants of the lives of different peoples (Hutsuls, Armenians, Turks, Tatars, etc.), Parajanov began to aesthetically conjecture and reveal their inner worlds, customs, and more. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is based on a deep love of Hutsul culture, as well as I. Savchenko's “method” that assumes a direct cognition and absorption of the object-culture, nature, and the sensual world on different communication channels (visual, auditory, olfactory). Based on the deep knowledge of the Hustsul culture, Parajanov works with the world of values, by translating the text into a visual image, as well as fantasizing visual customs. Through the bearer of culture, an elderly woman, he began to look at the world of the Hutsuls and absorb their spirit for the correct reconstruction of the material in the transnational language of beauty and recoding denotative codes into connotative ones. Parajanov's reflection on the film showed the transition from the amorphous cinematic language of socialist realism to the language of auteur cinematography: the rejection of clear plot reproduction, photographic reproduction of everyday life, manners and customs, “notorious canons”, “old habits, and impressions”. The emergence of the author's cinematic language made his conflict with the Soviet cinematic system and nomendaturai “elite” even clearer. This is evidenced by the fact that Parajanov still had to defend his position and argue against dubbing his film, since in that case, the viewer would lose the authentic auditory world of the Hutsuls.