The National and the Cosmopolitan in Sergei Parajanov’s “The Legend of Surami Fortress”

Conférence de Harsha Ram (University of California, Berkeley)

The National and the Cosmopolitan in Sergei Parajanov’s The Legend of Surami Fortress
The Legend of Surami Fortress stands out as Parajanov’s most explicitly “patriotic” film, proposing a feudal imaginary drawn from Georgia’s medieval kingdoms. At the same time the film’s protagonists fit awkwardly into the national imaginary, bespeaking a cosmopolitan or transnational impulse which the film both celebrates and denounces. The Legend of Surami Fortress appears in fact to equivocate between two registers, one of symbolic national depth, the other of alien surfaces. This equivocation might reflect a wider tension in the postwar “poetic cinema” of the USSR between an implicitly nationalizing or decolonizing impulse on the one hand and a cosmopolitan longing for wider cultural geographies on the other. 

Harsha Ram is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley. His first book, The Imperial Sublime (2003) addressed the relationship between poetic genre, aesthetic theory, territorial space, and political power in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian literature. His recent publications chiefly concern Russian-Georgian, Russian-French and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of theories of world literature and comparative modernities. His current book-project, The Geopoetics of Sovereignty. Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter seeks to provide a historical account of cultural relations between Georgian and Russian writers and intellectuals over the course of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on how Georgia and the Caucasus region were mapped geopolitically as a contested territory and geopoetically as a space of natural and ethnolinguistic diversity. 

16h-17h30 – Projection du film “La Légende de la Forteresse de Souram” (1985)
de Serguei Paradjanov.

17h30-19h – Intervention et discussion avec Harsha Ram

Contact : irina.tcherneva@cnrs.fr