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Guest reviewer Lee Broughton assesses the Armenian director Sergei Parajanov’s poetic and metaphor-filled biopic about his countryman Sayat Nova, the Armenian poet-troubadour. This new disc edition offers both versions of the picture, Parajanov’s original and the Soviet-approved version cut by seven minutes. As we learn, if a Soviet film director found favor internationally, they often landed in trouble back home.

The Colour of Pomegranates

Region B Blu-ray

Second Sight (UK)

1969 / Color / 1.33 flat full frame / 79 min. / Sayat Nova, Nran Guyne / Street Date, 19 Feb 2018 / £29.99

Starring: Sofiko Chiaureli, Melkon Alekyan, Vilen Galstyan, Gogi Gegechkori, Spartak Bagashvili, Medea Japaridze, Hovhannes Minasyan.

Cinematography: Suren Shakhbazyan

Film Editor: Marfa Ponomarenko

Production Designer: Stepan Andranikyan

Original Music: Tigran Mansuryan

Written and Directed by Sergei Parajanov

Reviewed by Lee Broughton

Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates is a film with a troubled release history. The Russian censor ruled that Parajanov’s initial cut of the...

Above: Bedrich Dlouhy’s 1970 poster for Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1950).Flipping through the website of the incomparable Czech poster store Terry Posters the other day, I came across an artist whose name I hadn’t known before. I was aware of some of Bedřich Dlouhý’s posters: his split-screen design for Věra Chytilová’s Something Different was one of my favorites in Isabel Stevens’s recent piece on Chytilová’s posters in Sight & Sound, and I knew his designs for Rashomon, Red Desert, The Pink Panther and 8 1/2, but I had never put two and two together that they were by the same designer.Part of the reason I didn’t know more of his work is that most of the films Dlouhý worked on in the ten years that he was designing posters (from 1962 to 1971) were films from the Eastern Bloc that are little known here. Films from Hungary, Yugoslavia...

Above: Us 2014 re-release poster for Othello (Orson Welles, Morocco/Italy, 1952) designed by Dark Star, Paris.

Orson Welles' glorious, noirish, idiosyncratic, benighted Othello opens in New York and Chicago today in a new restoration. And Wednesday, not coincidentally, saw the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth. Shakespeare has been adapted for film since the silent dawn of cinema, so it seems only right and fitting that I should mark this occasion with the best posters for Shakespeare on film through the ages, presented here in chronological order.

Above: German poster for Hamlet (Svend Gade & Heinz Schall, Germany, 1921).

Above: Us one sheet for The Taming of the Shrew (Sam Taylor, USA, 1929).

Above: Us lobby card for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Dieterle & Max Reinhardt, USA, 1935).

Above: 1956 Polish poster for Henry V (Laurence Olivier, UK, 1944) by Jozef Mroszczak.

Above: Australian poster for Henry V (Laurence Olivier, UK, 1944).

Above: French poster for Hamlet (Laurence Olivier,...

Above: 1960 poster by Jerzy Flisak for Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957)

One of my favorite Polish poster designers, or indeed favorite poster designer from any country, is Jerzy Flisak (1930-2008). Incredibly prolific—I’ve seen maybe 200 Flisak movie posters and he made many more during his 30 year career—Flisak started out as a satirical cartoonist. A cheerful, simple, almost childlike style is evident in much of his work, which tends towards the bright, bold and colorful, often peopled with rosy cheeked buxom ladies. Much of that work is terrific and quite well known—like his posters for The Fireman’s Ball and Paper Moon—but what draws me to Flisak is his work that pulls in the opposite direction: towards the more serious, abstract and monochrome. Before Flisak was a cartoonist he had studied architecture and there is a very strong sense of structure, space and form in his work.