Cinema and painting in Parajanov’s aesthetic metamorphoses

In this article I examine the painterly qualities of Sergei Parajanov’s films and argue that these qualities are profoundly related to the alteration of the spectatorial experience and reinvention of the aesthetic possibilities of the cinematic medium. In particular, I analyse how in his films the implementation of inverted perspective alters the spectator’s perception of the cinematic world. Furthermore, I explore how the painterly qualities in Parajanov’s films open new aesthetic possibilities through the hybridization of cinema and painting. This leads me to reconsider the genealogy of Parajanov’s cinematic experimentations within an alternative history of the moving image.