The Color of Pomegranates is a biography of the Armenianashug Sayat-Nova (King of Song) that attempts to reveal the poet's life visually and poetically rather than literally. The film is presented with little dialogue using active tableaux which depict the poet's life in chapters: Childhood, Youth, Prince's Court (where he falls in love with a tsarina), The Monastery, The Dream, Old Age, The Angel of Death and Death.[6] There are sounds and music and occasional singing but dialogue is rare.[8] Each chapter is indicated by a title card and framed through both Sergei Parajanov's imagination and Sayat Nova's poems. Actress Sofiko Chiaureli notably plays six roles in the film, both male and female.[9] According to Frank Williams, Parajanov's film celebrates the survival of Armenian culture in face of oppression and persecution, "There are specific images that are highly charged—blood-red juice spilling from a cut pomegranate into a cloth and forming a stain in the shape of the boundaries of the ancient Kingdom of Armenia; dyers lifting hanks of wool out of vats in the colours of the national flag, and so on".[10]
Parajanov, the director, said his inspiration was "the Armenian illuminated miniature," and that he "wanted to create that inner dynamic that comes from inside the picture, the forms and the dramaturgy of colour."[11] He also described this film as a series of Persian miniatures.[12]
His close friend Mikhail Vartanov has maintained that Parajanov's misunderstood cinematic language is "simple and only appears to be complex",[13] and he partly demystified it in Parajanov: The Last Spring.[14]
Some Russian versions of The Color of Pomegranates have Special Edition features.[15]The Memories of Sayat Nova, by Levon Grigoryan, is a 30-minute synopsis that explains what is happening in the tableaux and in each chapter of the poet's life. G. Smalley asserts that every carefully composed image in The Color of Pomegranates is coded to a meaning, but the key to interpreting them is missing. He agrees with Parajanov that "If someone sat down to watch The Color of Pomegranates with no background, they would have no idea what they were seeing."[16] The making of the film and its different versions are explored in the other special features: "Introduction" by writer and filmmaker Daniel Bird; The World Is A Window: Making The Colour of Pomegranates—a new documentary by Daniel Bird; and "Commentary" by Levon Abrahamyan, moderated by Daniel Bird.
Cast
Sofiko Chiaureli – Poet as a Youth/Poet's Love/Poet's Muse/Mime/Angel of Resurrection
Melkon Aleksanyan – Poet as a child (as Melkon Alekyan)
Soviet censors and Communist Party officials objected to Parajanov's stylized, poetic treatment of Sayat-Nova's life and complained that it failed to educate the public about the poet. As a result, the film's title was changed from Sayat-Nova to The Color of Pomegranates, and all references to Sayat-Nova's name were removed from the credits and chapter titles in the original Armenian release version. The Armenian writer Hrant Matevosyan wrote new, abstractly poetic Armenian-language chapter titles. Officials further objected to the film's abundance of religious imagery, although a great deal of religious imagery still remains in both surviving versions of the film. Initially the State Committee for Cinematography in Moscow refused to allow distribution of the film outside of Armenia. It premiered in Armenia in October 1969, with a running time of 77 minutes.[18]
The filmmaker Sergei Yutkevich, who had served as a reader for the script in the State Committee for Cinematography's Script Editorial board, recut the film slightly and created new Russian-language chapter titles in order to make the film easier to understand and more palatable to the authorities. In addition to cutting a few minutes' worth of footage—some of it clearly due to its religious content—he changed the order of some sequences. The film ultimately received only a limited release in the rest of the Soviet Union, in Yutkevich's 73-minute version.[19]
Reception and legacy
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 94% based on 18 retrospectively collected reviews, with an average rating of 7.2/10.[20] In 1980 Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that "the film is elusive in any circumstances. However, anything this purely mysterious has its magic."[21]The Color of Pomegranates made the Top 10 list for 1982 in Cahiers du cinéma.[22]
Filmmaker Mikhail Vartanov has said, "Besides the film language suggested by Griffith and Eisenstein, the world cinema has not discovered anything revolutionarily new until The Color of Pomegranates, not counting the generally unaccepted language of the Andalusian Dog by Buñuel". According to Michelangelo Antonioni, "Parajanov's Color of Pomegranates is of a stunningly perfect beauty. Parajanov, in my opinion, is one of the best film directors in the world."[23]
French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard said, "In the temple of cinema there are images, light and reality. Sergei Paradjanov was the master of that temple."[24]
Film critic Gilbert Adair argued that "although in both style and content it gives us the impression, somehow, of predating the invention of the cinema, no historian of the medium who ignores The Color of Pomegranates can ever be taken seriously."[6] The work ranked 84th in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the world's greatest films[25] and appeared in another list of the greatest films by Time Out.[26]
Restoration
In 2014 the film was digitally restored and re-edited to be as close as possible to the director's original vision and world premiered at the 67th Cannes Film Festival.[27][28] The US premiere took place on 20 September 2014 at The academy at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and was introduced by Martiros Vartanov. The East Coast premiere took place at the 52nd New York Film Festival on 2 October 2014, and was introduced by Scorsese. The restoration was completed by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation in conjunction with Cineteca di Bologna, and was, described by critic and Toronto festival programmer James Quandt as "a cinematic Holy Grail".[6] Martin Scorsese received the 2014 Parajanov-Vartanov Institute Award for the restoration of The Color of Pomegranates.[9]
A Blu-ray of the restoration was released in the UK on 19 February 2018,[29] and an American release by Criterion with Mikhail Vartanov's 1969 documentary The Color of Armenian Land on 17 April 2018.[30]
Storytelling and "Tableau Vivant"
Parajanov takes an unconventional approach to storytelling in The Color of Pomegranates. Rather than adhering to a traditional narrative structure, he opts for a series of visually captivating and carefully composed tableaux vivants to capture the essence of the poet Sayat-Nova's life and creations. The outcome is a visually enchanting and symbolically rich exploration of art, culture, and spirituality. What adds a layer of intrigue to these "tableaux" is their inspiration from Parajanov's own life experiences, as highlighted by Leah Feldman in her article Strange Love: Parajanov and the Affects of Late Soviet (Inter)nationalisms. Feldman notes that the cinematic tableau vivant, marked by Parajanov's personal incarceration, draws upon the convergence of painting, sculpture, and theatrical arts. It depicts live subjects in static compositions, playing with the dynamics between movement and stillness, as well as the interplay between animate subjects and inanimate objects. Feldman further argues that the director's fascination with flatness, texture, and surface, as well as his exploration of the animation of everyday inanimate objects as artistic subjects, is rooted in his time in prison. [31] Each scene in the film is meticulously crafted to mirror a living painting or photograph, with actors strategically posed in visually arresting ways. The composition of each tableau is also a deliberate nod to the visual aesthetics found in Armenian illuminated manuscripts and religious art.
Queerness in the film
The film is further characterized by queer and androgynous imagery. For example, the main actress Sofiko Chiaureli plays both the Poet and his lover; imagery like the conch shell and feather, symbols of the female and male respectively, are used in tandem by multiple characters; and the young poet’s sexual awakening comes when he sees nude male and female bodies in the bath house. This is in line with Parajanov’s own life, as he was convicted for homosexual acts multiple times in the Soviet Union, which discriminated against homosexual people due to demographic concerns and an ideological basis: it was seen as a social disease that threatened the collective Soviet ethos. Thus, this androgyny can be read as parallel to the film’s disruption of the traditional ethnic unity, permeated by state ideology, which it accomplishes by interweaving facets of Armenian, Georgian, Ukrainian, and Russian cultural traditions.[32] In this way, the orientalism present in Soviet ethnostate propaganda is subverted, and the Soviet Union’s true multicultural nature is celebrated, challenging the State (as Parajanov did in his own life).
Influence in popular culture
Madonna's 1995 music video Bedtime Story restages some content from the movie (such as the scene of a young child lying in a fetal position on a pentagram on the floor while an adult covers it with a blanket, and another where a naked foot crushes a bunch of grapes lying on an inscribed tablet), among other artistic inspiration depicting dreams and surrealist artwork in the video.[33][34]
Without permission, Nicolas Jaar released the album Pomegranates, described as an "alternative soundtrack" for the movie, in 2015.[35] A screening of the film with a live performance by Jaar was scheduled at Cinefamily in Los Angeles for February 22, 2017, but the performance was replaced with the original soundtrack due to objections from the Parajanov-Vartanov Institute and The Film Foundation that the live performance would not present the film as Parajanov intended it.[36]
Jean Vigo was a French film director who helped establish poetic realism in film in the 1930s. His work influenced French New Wave cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Sayat-Nova was an Armenian poet, musician and ashugh, who had compositions in a number of languages.
Sergei Parajanov was an Armenian film director and screenwriter. Parajanov is regarded by film critics, film historians and filmmakers to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in cinema history.
The Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, officially the S. A. Gerasimov All-Russian University of Cinematography, a.k.a. VGIK, is a film school in Moscow, Russia.
Artavazd Peleshyan is an Armenian director of essay films, a documentarian in the history of film art, a screenwriter, and a film theorist. He is renowned for developing a style of cinematographic perspective known as distance montage, combining perception of depth with oncoming entities, such as running packs of antelope or hordes of humans. Filmmaker Sergei Parajanov has referred to Peleshyan as "one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema". Peleshyan was awarded the title of Merited Artist of the Armenian SSR in 1979, and Merited Artist of the Russian Federation in 1995.
Mikhail Vartanov was a Soviet filmmaker and cinematographer who made significant contribution to world cinema with the documentary films Parajanov: The Last Spring and Seasons.
Norayr Mnatsakanyan was a Merited Artist of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (1965).
The cinema of Armenia was established on 16 April 1923, when the Armenian State Committee of Cinema was established by government decree. The National Cinema Center of Armenia (NCAA), founded in 2006, is the governing body of film and cinema in Armenia. The NCAA preserves, promotes and develops Armenian cinematography and provides state financial support to full-length feature, short and animation projects. The Director of the NCCA is Shushanik Mirzakhanyan, and the headquarters are located in Yerevan.
Ashik Kerib, sometimes known internationally as The Lovelorn Minstrel, is a 1988 Soviet art film directed by Dodo Abashidze from Georgia and Sergei Parajanov from Armenia that is based on the short story of the same name by Mikhail Lermontov. It was Parajanov's last completed film and was dedicated to his close friend Andrei Tarkovsky, who had died two years previously. The film also features a detailed portrayal of Azerbaijani culture.
The Legend of the Suram Fortress is a 1985 art film directed by Georgian SSR-born Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Parajanov and Georgian actor Dodo Abashidze. Sergei Parajanov's first film after 15 years of censorship in the Soviet Union, it is a film stylistically linked with his earlier The Color of Pomegranates (1968): The film consists of a series of tableaux; once again minimal dialogue is used; the film abounds in surreal, almost oneiric power.
Sophia Chiaureli, professionally known as Sofiko Chiaureli, was a Soviet Georgian actress. Thought to be the muse of filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, she played a significant role in the 20th century Georgian theater and was associated with the country's two most prominent theaters, the Rustaveli Theatre (1964–1968) and Marjanishvili Theatre.
Igor Andreyevich Savchenko or Ihor Andriyovych Savchenko was a screenwriter and film director, often cited as one of the great early Soviet filmmakers, alongside Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Aleksandr Dovzhenko. He is also known for teaching Sergei Parajanov at the Russian film school VGIK, also attended by Parajanov's best friend Mikhail Vartanov.
Saint George's Church is a 13th-century Armenian church in the old city of Tbilisi, Georgia's capital. It is one of the two functioning Armenian churches in Tbilisi and is the cathedral of the Georgian Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church. It is located in the south-western corner of Vakhtang Gorgasali Square (Meidani) and is overlooked by the ruins of Narikala fortress.
Parajanov: The Last Spring is a 1992 award-winning documentary by the Russian-Armenian filmmaker Mikhail Vartanov, that also includes the complete surviving footage of Sergei Parajanov's unfinished last film The Confession, Vartanov's behind-the-scenes sequences of Parajanov at work on the shooting of the Color of Pomegranates and other material. Featured in 7th Annual Russian Academy of Cinema Arts Awards (1993).
The Sergei Parajanov Museum is a tribute to Soviet Armenian film director and artist Sergei Parajanov and is one of the most popular museums in Yerevan. It represents Parajanov's diverse artistic and literary heritage.
Arto Tchakmakchian (Armenian: Արտո Չաքմաքչյան, was a Canadian-Armenian sculptor and painter, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He was awarded by the Armenian Order of Honor in 2015.
Gayane Khachaturian was a Georgian-Armenian painter and graphic artist.
Pomegranates is a 2015 album by Chilean-American composer Nicolas Jaar, intended as an unofficial alternative soundtrack to the 1969 Soviet Armenian film The Colour of Pomegranates.
The Parajanov-Vartanov Institute is an American film organization based in Los Angeles, California, that works to study, preserve and promote the legacy of filmmakers Sergei Parajanov and Mikhail Vartanov.
References
↑ Peter Rollberg (2009). Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema. US: Rowman & Littlefield. pp.156–157. ISBN978-0-8108-6072-8.
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