"The Colour of Pomegranates incorporates so many art forms, it's a beautiful piece of work. It's endlessly mysterious to me and it's quite inspiring. It gives me sustenance, I suppose." - Atom Egoyan
The work of painter, musician, mystic and filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov
(1924-1990) constantly defies categorisation. His films are notable for
their lyrical inspiration and great aesthetic beauty, but riled the Soviet
authorities to such an extent that Paradjanov faced constant harrassment
throughout his life. Like his earlier film, Shadows of Our Forgotten
Ancestors (1965), The Colour of Pomegranates was banned. Shadows, a tale of love and betrayal in a C19th Carpathian village, infuriated the authorities with its "decadent" formalism and political symbolism and, when The Colour of Pomegranates was eventually given a half-hearted release in 1972, it was in a heavily censored version.
Ostensibly a biopic of rebellious 18th century Armenian poet Sayat Nova,
The Colour of Pomegranates follows the poet's path from his childhood
wool-dying days to his role as a courtier and finally his life as a monk.
But Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov warns us from the start that this is
no ordinary biopic: "This is not a true biography," he has his narrator state
during the opening credits.
Indeed it is not. With barely any dialogue, The Colour of Pomegranates depicts the poet's story through a series of extraordinary lyrical tableux set to
his work - read by the narrator at the start of each new chapter of Sayat
Nova's life. It's akin to visual choreography, with esoteric, intriguing and
often unforgettable imagery: the child poet, surrounded by a mosaic of books
flapping in the wind; an entire monastery of monks crunching on apples; or a
church burial scene invaded by a swarming flock of sheep.
Vivid and iconographic, the images interweave landscapes, costumes and music
to form a metaphorical history of the Armenian nation and a tangible
expression of its spirit, free from any Soviet ideological constraints of
the time of its making.
Reviewed by Monika Maurer
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