Abstract

Cinema can offer authentic visual traces of the past, and can also reveal the essence of a specific period of time. This study focuses on Sergey Parajanov’s art through an analysis of three of his films. These films reunite Armenian, Georgian and Ukrainian cultural motifs in the postwar Soviet cinema. They may be as well considered meaningful discourses on the concepts of collective memory, identity, cinema and time within the theoretical frames of Maurice Halbwachs (2007) or Jan Assmann (1995), as well as Gilles Deleuze’s (1997) varieties of images. They awaken and redefine our relationship with the world, through the frame of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. All Parajaov’s work stimulates awareness of another layer of reality, a deeper one, with a very personal vision of the world, the reality for Parajanov being a perpetual transformation and a meaningful discourse of our own concepts of identity.