The Greenaway connection is intriguing, but sounds misleading to me. PG's tableau style probably has similar origins as Paradjanov's: the filmic imitation/representation of existing artworks/paintings, with Renaissance painting and Vermeer in Greenaway's case, Russian icons etc. in Paradjanov's. But the effect is completely different: in Greenaway, it has a distancing, reflective (if you like the term, call it 'postmodernist') and very self-conscious character, in Paradjanov it's hallucinatory, meditative, mystical. I'd also say that much of Greenaway comes from late Powell. I lost a tiny bit of my still huge admiration for "Prospero's Books" after seeing "The Tales of Hoffmann", which I find incredibly similar in places. But it was made 40 years earlier....jsteffe wrote:I don't doubt that Peter Greenaway was familiar with Paradjanov and POMEGRANATES in particular, since a new print of the Yutkevich cut was distributed in the UK in the early Eighties. Derek Jarman also makes some direct allusions to it in WAR REQUIEM.
I find the comparison of Paradjanov to Pasolini made some posts above much more convincing (for the archaic quality of their films, the search for an almost lost tradition); also to Jarman in places: while I haven't seen "War Requiem", I'd name "Caravaggio" here. But in any case, Paradjanov is still a one-of-a-kind filmmaker, although he belongs into a 'painterly' tradition of filmmaking, as all the directors mentioned here.