A still from Paradjanov’s 1969 film The Colour of Pomegranates. Photograph: BFI

Between his abandonment of socialist realism in 1964 and his death from lung cancer in 1990, Sergei Paradjanov made four of the weirdest and most beautiful movies ever seen. An ethnic Armenian, Paradjanov was born in Soviet Georgia in 1924. His mother was “very artistic”: she “used to adorn herself with Christmas tree decorations and curtains and join her friends on the roof to enact legends”. In 1947, Paradjanov spent a brief stint in a Georgian prison for committing “homosexual acts” (which were illegal under Soviet law) – with, of all people, a KGB officer. He later disavowed the seven films he shot in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1962, he saw Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood and completely changed his artistic method, which had previously been quite normal.

The first film in Paradjanov’s mature style, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), brought him instant fame and notoriety. Filmed in the Ukrainian Carpathians, in a regional dialect that couldn’t be understood by most Russians (Paradjanov refused to have it dubbed), Shadows tells the story of the doomed love of Ivan and Marichka, children from feuding families. Marichka drowns relatively early in the film, and critics have justly celebrated its representation of lost childhood love, brutal slayings and various Ukrainian folk ceremonies. To me, however, the most moving and surprising aspect of the film is the depiction of Ivan’s second marriage.

After Marichka’s death, Ivan lapses into grief and madness – this part of the film is shot in black and white – before finding himself attracted to the comely Palagna. (They share an erotically charged moment when she is holding a horse’s hoof for him to hammer on a shoe.) The two are united in a bizarre ceremony which involves blindfolds and a wooden yoke. They seem happy at first, but Ivan grows distant and brooding, and Palagna is unable to conceive a child. One gorgeously composed scene shows the couple at the dinner table: both are facing the camera, and a calf is sitting under the table, looking cramped and miserable. Every unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion – but how recognisable and universal Paradjanov renders this highly particular unhappiness! Both the spouses, it turns out, are dabbling in sorcery: Ivan has taken to inviting the spirits of the maimed and drowned into their home, hoping that he may be visited by Marichka; Palagna, meanwhile, wanders naked in a forest, exhorting the dark forces to bring them a child. In a mind-blowing convergence of literal and symbolic narratives, Palagna starts cheating on Ivan with the local sorcerer. Then the marriage really hits the rocks.

Shadows has the most legible storyline of all Paradjanov’s films. He followed it with The Color of Pomegranates (1969), a 90-minute, Armenian-language meditation on the life of the 18th-century poet-troubadour Sayat Nova. The film consists of a series of dreamlike tableaux, designed to “recreate the poet’s inner world”. Particularly astounding are the courtship “scenes” in which the poet and his lover are both played by the lithe, unearthly Sofiko Chiaureli: a trick that renders visual and literal the union of the poet-lover and the beloved-God in eastern mystical poetry. The only “narrative” is provided by the successive replacement of a small boy with a youth, a monk and an old man: it’s like an illustration of the riddle of the sphinx.

Though Paradjanov was eight years older than Tarkovsky, he described the younger film-maker as his “teacher and mentor”, and Pomegranates clearly invites comparison with Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), based on the life of the great 14th-century Russian monk and icon painter.

In Andrei Rublev, nearly 200 minutes of black-and-white narrative are followed by a meditative colour slideshow of Rublev’s icons. Pomegranates is a hallucinatory mash-up of these two types of material: a life story told in brilliantly coloured and animated Persian miniatures. The actors, dressed in outlandishly detailed handmade costumes, move as if by some strange clockwork, performing repetitive stylised gestures, tossing a golden ball in the air or gesturing enigmatically with some symbolic-looking object: a seashell, a candle, a rifle. Paradjanov himself compared Pomegranates to a “Persian jewellery case”: “On the outside, its beauty fills the eyes; you see the fine miniatures. Then you open it, and inside you see still more Persian accessories.” An accurate description: every last article and action in the film seems precisely placed, exquisitely detailed and designed to serve a particular purpose in some unknown ritual.

The Color of Pomegranates was the last film Paradjanov would make for 15 years. In 1973, after indictments for art trafficking, currency fraud, “incitements to suicide” and surrealist tendencies, the director was sentenced to five years in a maximum-security gulag, where his duties included sewing sacks. An indomitable spirit, he became an expert at making dolls from leftover sackcloth. He made a doll of Tutankhamen and another of his friend Lilya Brik. Through the offices of Brik, Tarkovsky and other powerful friends, Paradjanov was released one year early, in 1977. He wasn’t allowed to work, and lived in utter destitution in Tbilisi. At one point, Tarkovsky gave him a ring to pawn, but Paradjanov decided to keep it as a souvenir of their friendship.

In the early years of the thaw, Paradjanov finally returned to the studio and made his last two movies: The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988). Suram Fortress, shot in Georgia, is a Poe-like patriotic yarn involving an accident-prone fortress in Tbilisi that is destined to remain standing only when a young hero has been buried alive in its walls. The fortress also apparently has to have a giant cart full of eggs dumped into the foundation and crushed with a sledgehammer – a peculiarly disturbing and indelible image.

Based on Mikhail Lermontov’s retelling of a Turkic folktale, Ashik Kerib is the story of a troubadour obliged to spend 1,001 days wandering the land, in order to make enough money to marry his beloved. The hero is played by Yuri Mgoyan, a picturesque 22-year-old Kurdish “hooligan” and car thief recruited by Paradjanov for his “plasticity”. (In one behind-the-scenes clip, Paradjanov demonstrates this plastic quality by wrapping a blanket around the young man’s head and declaring: “A complete metamorphosis! He’s a pharaoh!”) These last two films somehow manage to seem at once naive and sophisticated, with the hyper-realism of a puppet show. Mastiffs rest their great weary heads on their paws, as evil henchmen force a slave to toss pomegranates for them to impale on their sabers. A gigantic flock of running sheep, filmed from overhead, shifts into strange formations. Endless rites and rituals unfold to unheard-of music.

Ashik Kerib is the only one of Paradzhanov’s films to have a happy ending. The lovers are reunited and a white dove alights on a movie camera, representing Tarkovsky, to whose memory the film was dedicated. But to me, the outrageousness of Paradjanov’s imagination is best encapsulated by the final scene of The Color of Pomegranates, in which death comes to the poet in the form of a shower of live chickens. Dressed in white, the troubadour lies on the floor, surrounded by candles; the chickens, who seem to be upset about something, fall on to him from a great height, dispensing a flurry of white feathers and extinguishing the candles. It’s not the way you would expect a national poet, or anyone really, to depart this world – but Paradjanov makes it look inevitable.

• The Paradjanov Festival 2010 runs in London and Bristol until 9 May. paradjanov-festival.co.uk

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