Parajanov, Troublemaker from the Caucasus
Jean Radvanyi

Talk

February 13, 2019 / 18.30

Geographer and film critic Jean Radvanyi is giving a talk as part of “Parajanov with Sarkis” exhibition, exploring Parajanov’s cinema in the Soviet context. Sergey Parajanov was born in 1924, in a family of Armenian merchants in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. His neighborhood was a multicultural bath typical of this city. The dominant languages were Russian and Georgian, mixed with Armenian and many other languages of the region. Very early, Russian dominated his education, due to his studies at the VGIK (the Moscow film Institute) and his long stay in Ukraine where he shot his first films and his first masterpiece, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (renamed Wild Horses of Fire) in 1965. Two founding elements characterize the films of this unique director. The first is its aesthetic, breaking with all the established frameworks of socialist realism. The second is more subtle, but equally unbearable because of the censorships of this country. Born into a multiethnic and multicultural environment, he never stopped questioning and provoking fierce discussions with each masterpiece.

Jean Radvanyi is a geographer and film-critic, professor at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris. He specialised in geopolitical studies on Post-Soviet Space, specially Russia and the Caucasus.Among his publications, Le cinéma géorgien (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1988), Le cinéma d'Asie centrale soviétique (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1991), Le cinéma arménien  (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993), La Nouvelle Russie (A. Colin, 2010) Atlas géopolitique du Caucase  (with N. Beruchashvili), (Autrement, 2010); La Russie entre peurs et défis (with M. Laruelle), (A. Colin, 2016). He also contributed to the exhibition catalogue “Parajanov with Sarkis” (Pera Museum, 2018).

The talk will be in French with simultaneous translation to Turkish.

Temporary Exhibition

Parajanov
with Sarkis

Pera Museum presented for the first time in Turkey a selection that brought together all periods of the versatile, multicultural visual world of renowned director Sergey Parajanov, master of poetic cinema.

Parajanov <br> with Sarkis

The Welcoming of Venetian Balios to Ottoman Lands

The Welcoming of Venetian Balios to Ottoman Lands

The series of paintings depicting the audience ceremonies of European ambassadors hold a unique place among the works of Jean-Baptiste Vanmour of Valenciennes, who lived in İstanbul from 1699 until his death in 1737.

Rational Medicine in Byzantium

Rational Medicine in Byzantium

Byzantine medical art was grounded in the Greco-Roman medicine transmitted by Hippocrates and Galen and new concepts introduced by such physicians as Oribasios of Pergamon, Aetius of Amida, Alexander of Tralles and Paul of Aegina. 

Midnight Stories: The Soul <br> Aşkın Güngör

Midnight Stories: The Soul
Aşkın Güngör

The wind blows, rubbing against my legs made of layers of metal and wires, swaying the leaves of grass that have shot up from the cracks in the tarmac, and going off to the windows that look like the eyes of dead children in the wrecked buildings that seem to be everywhere as far as the eye can see.