An email from Amsterdam University Press, dated 4 December 2019, informed me that Thomas Elsaesser – whose work has been of fundamental importance to me as a film scholar since the late 1970s – had endorsed my book proposal for the series he edits, Film Culture in Transition. Soon after, I heard that Elsaesser had suddenly died on that very day in Beijing, where he was on a visiting professorship. This uncanny coincidence, of what appears to me to be an endorsement by death, immediately reminded me of my treatment of the death of the Sufi minstrel, his astonishing manner of dying, and his burial between a rock and a hard place, in Parajanov's Ashik Kerib. It is this chapter on two films by Sergei Parajanov that I sent as a sample of my writing, which I know Elsaesser had read. The following passage on death now appears in Chapter Two of this book.

I now feel that death has cast its shadow over this project. Does death have a shadow? Death is shadow-like. Elsaesser has shown us how and why Weimar cinema invested the shadow with vitality, a non-organic life which displaced the opposition of the organic and the inorganic. Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates presents us with the Angel of Death, who arrives as a blindfolded, stumbling, winged soldier, to present the poet Sayat Nova with a parcel of earth wrapped in a piece of unleavened bread. The usual solemnity and fear accompanying the arrival of death is undone in these scenes of levity, in which two boy angels push and pull the Angel of Death towards the poet, in an ancient Armenian Apostolic Christian cemetery.