Florence Mackenzie

It's a tough call to ask of an artist that he produce something in response to the work of the Armenian film-maker Sergei Paradjanov. Although relatively unacclaimed - compared with his friend and contemporary Andrei Tarkovsky - Paradjanov is one of cinema's geniuses. His films are marked not only by their beauty, but also by an unusual stillness: much is conveyed and little is said. But of course Mat Collishaw has his own brilliance and technically he is innovative. Paradjanov would have been flattered by his homage at the BFI.

Ostensibly Paradjanov retells the stories of local folklore, fusing elements of traditional iconography with references to Western European Surrealism. Each shot is a tightly composed tableau, saturated with colour and often depicting unsettling or amusing juxtapositions. Yet in spite of his stylised, theatrical framing, there is also a very human quality to Paradjanov's work. The director grew up in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide and as an adult he was tortured by the Soviet state.

"What do I lack as a director?" Tarkovsky once asked him, to which Paradjanov replied, "You lack one year in a Soviet maximum security prison". Five years of imprisonment gave him insight into suffering, and his films are imbued with a deep empathy for the human spirit. Beautiful faces stare silently at the camera, their expressions filled with contentment, longing, grief or joy - reminiscent of Arshile Gorky's The Artist and His Mother of 1926.

Mat Collishaw's Retrospectre is an altarpiece composed of antique window frames with mirrored fronts. Onto these, sequences of footage (he filmed himself in Armenia) are projected, creating the effect of an animated stained glass window, and recalling the decorative partitions in Paradjanov's films.

Paradjanov was an artist dealing with his own time, even if the stories he told have a timeless quality. The relentless human suffering of the twentieth century has a latent presence throughout his oeuvre. Collishaw is very much of the twenty-first century and he parallels the director by making art pertinent to today, taking the environment as his subject. He portrays Nature's beauty - flowers opening slowly into bloom, a stag in mist; and her inherent violence - lava spurts from a volcano, water is ejected from a geyser. Most stunning is the slow-motion close-up of an owl swooping on its prey. The images are familiar, almost clichéd, but the message is clear - a great reverence for the forces of Nature.

References to Paradjanov are made with the depiction of Middle Eastern symbols and folkloric traditions. A single explicit quotation is made with Collishaw's inclusion of the frightened white horse that appears at the horrifying close of The Legend of the Surami Fortress, when a man is buried alive inside a wall.

Beauty will save the world, said Dostoevskij. Perhaps not quite. But Paradjanov and Collishaw believe that it can humble us and make us think.