⭐️⭐️⭐️½
52-week film challenge, film 25
With most commercial movies, you can walk into the cinema not needing to know much about the subject and still enjoy (or hate) them, either because they explain the story within the film or some portion of needed background knowledge is communicated to you through the promotion or trailer or title of the film. Most movies touch on universal themes in their tales, or reference moments in time that are reflective of those periods, and what I’m trying to say here is that most of us have some frame of reference heading into a given film.
Not so much with The Color of Pomegranates. I watched this thing completely cold. Big mistake. After viewing it, I then had to go back and watch no less than five short documentaries about it to really get a fix on what the hell it was I’d seen.
So why did I watch it at all? Because it kept showing up on Sight & Sound’s list of some of the greatest movies ever made, that’s why. If you’ve seen another such film, the unconventional sci-fi flick La Jetée, this might remind you of it in its unconventional, idiosyncratic presentation — but that’s where the comparison ends.
With as many films as I’ve watched at this point (hundreds, maybe even a thousand), it’s pretty shocking when one comes along that throws me a complete curveball. Not an unpleasant shock, mind you; more intriguing than annoying. This is a really innovative and thus important use of film as art, but if you don’t have the aforementioned frame of refererance to understand where it’s coming from, it’s pretty bewildering for its hour and 20-minute run time.
So what we have here is an attempt by director Sergei Parajanov to illustrate the life and times of a heroic 18th-century Armenian poet, who went by the name Sayat-Nova (though he was born as Harutyun Sayatyan). To give you the shortest possible backstory, he was mostly an ashugh — a poet and bard who recites or sings their poetry while accompanying themselves on an instrument; similar to a troubadour. He remains a very influential cultural figure in Armenian history, though he is celebrated also in the countries of Georgia and Azerbaijan, since he spoke and composed in all three languages, and wandered freely among them.
What Parajanov did that makes this film so flummoxing to anyone not steeped in both Armenian culture as well as the dominant Catholicism in that region of the world is that he didn’t attempt any sort of conventional narrative film structure at all. Instead, Parajanov attempts to illustrate “the mind of the poet” through a series of active tableaux, some virtually still and others in motion, illustrating ideas and motifs taken from both Sayat-Nova’s life as well as his compositions. Living photographs, dripping with symbolism but also reminding me of artful dreams.
So you kinda have to take at least a crash-course on this tri-national folk hero and his writings before any of this is imbued with meaning. Thankfully, Parajanov does follow the life of Sayat-Nova pretty much linearly, starting with his birth and going to through to the end of his life, utilizing his own visual symbology to accompany Sayat-Nova’s own poetic metaphors and allegories.
The areas covered include Childhood, Youth, the Prince’s Court (where Sayat-Nova falls in love for the first time), The Monastery, The Dream, Old Age, The Angel of Death, and Death. There are title cards that let you know where you are in his life story, but again you still need to have a knowledge and appreciation of Sayat-Nova’s life and work to translate what you are seeing.
So what are you seeing? Artfully-created scenes, usually without dialogue at all, of actors dressed in beautiful Aremenian costumes, posed or interacting with other symbolic objects. Many are shot on a box-like set meant to represent Armenian illuminated miniatures, which are little hand-crafted, three-dimensional picture boxes. It would seem dreadfully pretentious if it wasn’t all so earnest.
There is sound throughout, and some singing later on, and as the subject of the film moves into adulthood, the film relies more heavily on location shooting around various ancient monasteries in the three countries where Sayat-Nova mostly lived, including the one where he spent the last 20 years of his life (and where he is buried).
As an almost unique cinematic language, Parajanov should get five stars, but I originally deducted two of them for a couple of reasons. The fifth star went for having to know so very much backstory before you should even be allowed to watch this film — let’s just say it wasn’t intended for the wider distribution it eventually got. The fourth star was removed for the lack of clues as to how to interpret what you’re seeing — there’s no explanation at the beginning that Sayat-Nova’s story will be told in visual metaphors and allegories, only that the film is about him.
I put a half-star back because, despite the requirements to understand the film, a story about a poet of such influence probably should be told in an unconventional way. Once you finally understand what Parajanov is doing, and what some of the symbolism means, it still doesn’t make full sense, but you appreciate much better the use of a completely different visual “language” within this visual medium.
Thankfully, I discovered after screening the film that the Criterion Channel has what they call a “collection” to go with the movie, including a commentary track on the film which I will avail myself of if I ever re-watch it, and the previously-mentioned documentaries that range from a profile of the director, to a potted history of Sayat-Nova, to a literal “decoding” video to help with the translation of the visual imagery.
It must be said that those documentaries helped me enormously in moving from “what the hell was that?” to an appreciation for the unconventional way I learned a lot about the central subject, his poetry, his background, and some core Armenian-Georgian-Azerbaijanian history and cultural influence, both from Sayat-Nova and his religion of choice. My brain feels bigger now.
It turns out the film was originally titled simply Sayat-Nova, but the title was changed when Russian censors thought the style of filmmaking was a little too difficult, though they only cut a small portion of the film and rearranged a few scenes. Indeed, Parajanov was later jailed by the Russians for his later work.
That said, pomegranates do indeed contribute meaningful metaphors that are less difficult to understand, especially in the clever use of their blood-red juice. I did not know until afterwards that the flow of the juices in some white-linen tabletop scenes are deliberately controlled to “draw” a map of the region, and in other instances to make a commentary on sexual desire, and on war.
As glad as I am to have been challenged in this way, and to have seen a film this unusual, I find it very difficult to recommend it to most others. I can think of a few academic friends (and one particular Russian history buff I know) who might be interested, but this is absolutely not a film the average person not familiar with that region of the world would want to just put on because one enjoys the aforementioned fruit.
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