Cinema
Georgia on their minds
Peter Ackroyd
It is difficult to explain a film which itself makes a point of not explaining anything. It was preceded by Street of Crocodiles, a `short' by the nicely named Quay Brothers which used macabre animation to suggest that the absence of ordinary narrative can provoke a range of curious but sometimes beautiful effects. It was, at least, an appropriate prelude to The Legend of Suram Fortress which held the attention throughout without making a bit of sense. Ostensibly it was concerned with the legend of a golden youth who allows himself to be immured in a fortress; by being entombed in its walls he can protect it, in a mediaeval but perhaps more reli- able version of damp-proofing. It is a potent myth, of course, and one so firmly connected with the oldest superstitions that it can be expected to throw a garish light over all other human activities.
And so it proves, in a film which from the first uses a series of emblematic or statuesque scenes to convey a past as savage as it is remote — this is ancient Georgia, and the images of faces and of landscapes, of rituals and of battles, approach the condition of vision or art as much as that of narrative. The fact that it has been made by a Russian, Sergo Parad- j anov, helps; one of the oddities of the contemporary cinema lies in the fact that Russian film-makers have managed to keep faith with their predecessors and this film, in particular, is clearly in the tradition of the silent cinema. Of course there are also traces of the silent screen in the work of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, but the Americans seem to revert to the 'one- reelers' of adventure or comedy, while the Russians inhabit the more spacious tradition of the epic.
Certainly Suram Fortress is conceived on the grandest possible scale; it may not be Eisenstein, but there are some extraordi- narily wide shots. Some might describe its richly brocaded manner as 'melodramatic', but some might be wrong. Melodrama is characterised by heightened language, by a rhetoric in excess of the usual emotional or linguistic capacities of those who employ it, but in this film the dialogue is cryptic, sketchy, providing no more than an ob- lique commentary upon the visual specta- cle which gradually unfolds. One can put up with the fortune-teller's hag-like wis- dom for the sake of the landscape which she inhabits, and for the clothes which she wears. Seeing this film is rather like seeing a series of 15th-century religious frescoes come suddenly and colourfully to life.
The less enthusiastic members of the audience may miss the guiding hand of an obvious 'plot' to steer them through the thickets of imagery, of course, and in fact it takes a certain aptitude to 'read' these cinematic illustrations without the help of verbal commentary. One of the curiosities of our so-called 'visual' culture is the fact that most of those who live in it are visually illiterate: 200 years ago, any street urchin would have understood a Hogarth illustra- tion. Now it is all most of us can do to decode a cigarette advertisement. Never- theless, a little time and a little patience are all that is required to enjoy this quixotic but often beautiful film.
It is episodic in its structure, with titles like 'Fate's Road' and 'The Prayer' announcing the scope of the action in advance. And, like all good episodic narra- tives, it manages to conflate the salient elements of fairy tale and legend. This is very much a Georgian Arabian Nights, a miraculous concatenation of imagery and colour; and, with sudden transformations and equally remarkable changes in plot, it does manage to roll a magical carpet beneath the narrative. In so doing, of course, it also taps a power in the cinema which is rarely exploited — the power to change the world, and so to hypnotise the spectator that even the most bizarre or stunning images can be immediately accepted as real.
No doubt all this is intimately related to indigenous Georgian culture, but no one outside Georgia will ever know. As a result some of the proceedings may be baffling to an ordinary audience (even in the remoter regions of Camden Town, where you would think that wizened peasants are so many coals to Newcastle), but as an insight into another world — and into another way of telling stories upon the screen — The Legend of Suram Fortress is as fascinating as it is instructive. I defy anyone to tell me what it was actually 'about' but, equally, I defy anyone to forget its purely visual impact.
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