The Color of Pomegranates

The absolute 'must see'...no movie will ever look the same after seeing this one. This is the alphabet of understanding the art of motion pictures. Before I saw this movie, I thought that movies can be fun, sad, yearning or heart-warming, that they are entertainment for heart, mind or fantasy, that they can have some message, teach you something, that they can improve your morals, that they can hit great technical achievement, but I never realized that movies belong to the family of real arts and that they can hit into deepest,the most pure, the least understanding parts of human soul. Pictures that are changing, moving, pulsating, travel in its own rhythm with its very own sounds and music- that is the art of motion pictures, that is the art of what we call "The Movies". And what is more natural and more appealing to human kind then sense of movement, breathing, living? I can only thank to Sergei Parajanov for helping me to understand this, for opening my "third eye" for movies.

A beautiful, moving, lyrical movie. This allegorical tale is visually stunning and at times terrifying. Each scene is like a painting and the colors and costumes alone are worth the viewing. The movie may be abstract but the payoff for anyone with a decent attention span is wonderful. The soundtrack is equally gorgeous, and the movie is utterly captivating.

The Color of Pomegranates (made in 1968, and also released under the name Sayat Nova) is not really a conventional movie. It is more like a series of tableaux "inspired" by 18th century Armenian poet Nova. It is nonetheless fascinating, and should be required viewing for anybody interested not only in Armenian culture but in cinema in general (or, if you wish, the visual arts). This movie has inspired many artists, including some music videos (admittedly not among the arts' highest form), including REM's "Losing my Religion" and Deep Forest's "Sweet Lullaby. There is a heavy homo erotic subtext to many of the tableaux, and as a matter of fact, Paradjanov would later spent several years in jail in the Soviet Union accused, among other things, of homosexuality. Though released under international pressure, it would take him another 16 years to make another movie, shortly before his untimely death in 1990.

How do you go from rich cinematic intuition to stifled ceremonial posing? I don't get it. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is one of the most enthralling films I have seen, it's just an endlessly spinning dance between the camera and a mystical world of song and suffering, spun and diffused into air. It rested on a profound realization that life is both real and has the mechanism of dreams.

It was a multifaceted world of many allusions but all of it was deftly integrated into the experience, you didn't need separate keys. This on the other hand is a notoriously difficult work, for a simple reason; you need a bunch of keys, and most of those are outside the film (it suffered at the hands of Soviet censors, no doubt, my guess however is that Parajanov's authorial version would operate on the same principles).

It is everything that grates at me as outmoded and needless obfuscation in cinematic narrative. Allegory. Symbolism (the nagging notion that the pomegranates ought to 'stand for something'). Cryptic dealings.

Instead of opening up our gaze to a world, it reduces to a set of paintings, supposedly that you have to decode. It is very much a presentation of cultural history, but at the expense of all the distinctly cinematic advantages of the medium.

This mode survives in a way in Peter Greenaway. But Greenaway works from Hamlet as his main reference, so all you need to know about the play is usually inside the play-within. This has no framework. It isn't the stuff that life is made from - it's only the stuff that art is.

For those who need an American equivalent to compare to, it is similar to the work of Brakhage or Anger, the American experimental filmmakers.

It is not Hollywood in that the movie does not rely on a plot, although there is a semblance of one present in this particular movie. The life and poetry of Sayat Nova, the great Medieval Armenian Troubadour, albeit abstractly, is the basis for all the images presented. It is also not Hollywood in that there is no dialog. The interest rests in the unforgettable and arresting images, lovingly created and edited together in the manner of Eisenstein. So in this regard it has more in common with silent film.

Yes, this is an abstract film. Yes, it is pretentious. But what is wrong with that? Prtensious is, after all, what most call something that they have a hard time understanding. Make no mistake, this is an art film to the extreme. A film whose primary concern is not to entertain, but rather to express Parajanov's personal view of Sayat Nova,and more importantly, to preserve to film the medieval Armenian culture which was almost completely eradicated in the Armenian Massacre of 1915 at the hands of the Turkish Empire. This film is historically important for this reason alone. The fact that Parajanov was imprisoned by the Russian Government for not conforming to the strict Social Realist code of film underscores this point. This film was a slap in the face to Communist Russia which wanted to erase the old traditions.

There is nothing much you have to get to enjoy this film, except to marvel at images inspired by an ancient little known culture. There is a lot of beauty in these images which probably seem so foreign and alien to Westerners. That is the point. That is the effect that I believe Parajanov is after. Those that don't get it either lack patience and subtlety, or are under the mistaken assumption that good films must follow the American Hollywood script model. The latter would be making the same mistake as the Russians who put Parajanov in the Gulag. No one who as seen even a bit of this film, could deny that it is unforgettable. And that is what to me makes a good film.