The Colour Of Pomegranates - Sergei Parajanov

Sergei Parajanov's The Colour Of Pomegranates is a series of crafted and truly original paintings that move. The thought and time and work that normally go into the techniques of camera and editing and involvement of the audience, here have gone into the concepts and originality of these tableaux. Whether The Colour Of Pomegranates works or not depends on the quality of them. Are they beautiful or original enough? Watching this film is like opening an art-book albeit one with a narrative. What's interesting is that it has the same limitations of any art-book, as well as its strengths. That coffee-table Giotto? That heavy gallery of Dutch masterpieces lying on the bottom shelf of your bookcase - be honest, exactly how often do you pick that book up, and with fluted lips blow off the dead fly, then pore over the colour prints for a studied hour or so? It's like 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band': consistently voted best album of all time; yet how often do people actually sit down and listen to it?  The Colour Of Pomegranates has to be listened to at least once though. Don't miss out.

                                                                             

                                                                         We spun a cocoon around you

                                                                         that you may emerge as a butterfly

                                                                         in your new life

(Off-film.) Early on in The Colour Of Pomegranates Parajanov shows a line from the poet Sayat Nova - "Three sacred goals exist: to cherish the pen, the written word and the book." Later, one character says to the child Sayat Nova: (paraphrased) "Read a book loudly for all to hear . . . lest the ignorant rule the world." Well; the Sayat Novas of the 1700's have now read the books loudly, and so have the ones of the 1800's and the 1900's. It must have seemed to Sayat Nova back then, and certainly to Sergei Parajanov in 1960's Soviet Russia, that knowledge would make an enormous difference to the quality of 'rulers'. That ubiquitous hard knowledge, freely spread, would spike the delusions of rulers and somehow lead to common truths and wisdoms. They were wrong and it would probably surprise them, were they to be around now, to see that it is so.

(If you haven't seen it.) This is his masterpiece. The Colour Of Pomegranates is made up of art-gallery-quality tableaux vivants, or paintings that move, filmed in front of a largely static camera. Made in 1968 it's a poetic realization of the life of Sayat Nova, an Armenian poet from the 1700's. For the interpreting types, there is much here for them to turn-over, but that is not what most audiences will be doing. Put simply, if you can overcome the habit of watching a film to be drawn in to the drama, and instead try something that is truly original, and probably more difficult, something that is akin to following a gallery of moving paintings that nevertheless do follow a story, then give this a go.