The Legend of Suram Fortress

A fortress in Georgia keeps collapsing. However many times it is rebuilt the walls come down. A seer is consulted and the answer is this: the fortress will not stand unless a young man goes willingly into the wall and dies there. Zurab agrees. Sergei Parajanov directs, working with Dodo Abashidze. The source is a Georgian folk legend and Daniel Chonkadze's nineteenth century novel. This is the first feature Parajanov made after four years in prison. He had been prevented from making films for fifteen years. The form is his known method. The scenes are built as flat compositions, the actors face the camera, movement is reduced to a minimum, and the narrative proceeds through objects rather than plot: carpet, cloth, pomegranate, weapon and icon. The subject is sacrifice and how it is handed down as legend. The film does not tell the story; it shows the manner of its telling. Sound and image work separately. The speech is dubbed, the music is continuous, and the two deliberately never quite meet. The film returned Parajanov to international visibility, and Ashik Kerib followed. Who it is for: viewers who follow Parajanov and films fed by a visual tradition. Who it is not for: there is no plot to follow, there is almost no acting, and the film does not narrate at all in the usual sense.