Persianate Poetics and “Poetic Cinema”: The Soviet Literary Biopic Before and After Parajanov
online ZOOM lecture by Samuel Hodgkin | Yale University
Abstract In the 20th-century prestige film genre of the literary biopic, what is the place of actual literature? In the nebulous cluster of art films that have been called “poetic cinema,” what is the place of actual poetry? The Soviet Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov answered both of these questions in new and transformative ways in The Color of Pomegranates (Nran guyne) his 1969 film about the verse of the 18th-century multilingual Armenian bard Sayat’ Nova. This talk considers Pomegranates in relation to earlier and later visions of Persianate poets on the Soviet screen, from the 1948 Uzbek biopic of ‘Alisher Nava’i to the 1973 Azerbaijani biopic of Nasimi. I will argue that Parajanov established an unusually literal practice of poetic cinema by the classical practice of tazmin—the direct sampling of previous texts—and by building a cinematic idiom from the conventional elements and syntax of Persianate verse. I will conclude with the afterlives of this new idiom in the late Soviet Union and in the early Islamic Republic of Iran.
Samuel Hodgkin is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He has published on the modern verse, theater, and criticism of Iran, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. His research engages with theories of representation, translation, and world poetics, and with the history of literary institutions. His first book, forthcoming from Cambridge, is entitled A Poetics of Eastern Internationalism: Persianate Verse and World Communism. He is a co-organizer of the “Cultures of World Socialism” working group. His articles have appeared in Iranian Studies, Cahiers de Studia Iranica, Cahiers d’Asie centrale, and in edited volumes, and he is guest editor of an upcoming special issue of Comparative Literature Studies on communist world poetics.
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