Sergei Paradjanov
Costumes from the Paradjanov Museum
Judith Clark Costume Gallery
9 June - 3 July 1999

From his student days until his death Sergei Paradjanov never missed an opportunity to decorate his mundane surroundings, transforming any space into a theatre where everything was subordinate to a Maestro who was at the same time director, artist and performer. Whether in his own home or in a hotel room, he performed kaleidoscopic manipulations, aestheticising his environment to suit his own style. He also transformed everyone who crossed his stage, conducting them in an absolutely organic Paradjanovian mise-en-scene.

Clothing people like living mannequins was his passion and stage costume became an integral part of his art. There are a great many references to costumes in the director's scripts. They were certainly accorded a very important place amongst the plastic elements of his films, both those realised and those left on paper. Historical authenticity was kept to a minimum. The main thing that he wanted was to secure the truth of images and communicate the spirit of the time. In one of his prison letters he evokes the 'mood and style' which is involved in the creation of costumes. Inventing clothes for him happened lightly and without visible effort as if everything had been deftly conjured by his hand. Although luxuriant on screen the costumes were only briefly hinted at in scripts, sometimes only by their colour. Thus in the script Ara the Beautiful: 'Shamiram in olive green','Ara in a lilac costume', or in The Colour of Pomegranates: 'A nun in white lace'.

Paradjanov was especially attracted to headdresses and hats, of which he made several dozen. These were in essence little installations, devised in a kind of real or imaginary, usually retro, feminine style. The hats are redolent with the rippling fragrances of past epochs and the scents of women, refined, colourful and at times ironic. Paradjanov restored the tribute of vanity to their hypothetical owners. These hats are like stereotypes, of the coquetry and feminity, playfulness and affectedness, supposedly characteristic of European women.

Each of these hats is a graceful rebus allowing one to imagine the beauties who wore them. As always with works of the Maestro they engender a multitude of both secret and obvious associations. One hat features a swallow made from mole skins, perhaps hinting at the swallow who saved Thumbelina from the mole in the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, about whom, incidentally, he wrote a beautiful scenario, A Miracle in Odense and to whom he devoted one of his finest collages. Not forgetting, too, that the hat covered with irises in a delicate Secession or Belle Epoque style, and who is to say those gloves on another do not in fact symbolise the hands of fate?

Karen Mikaelyan
Deputy Director,
Paradjanov Museum, Yerevan