Die Farbe des Granatapfels

A beautiful, moving, lyrical movie. This allegorical tale is visually stunning and at times terrifying. Each scene is like a painting and the colors and costumes alone are worth the viewing. The movie may be abstract but the payoff for anyone with a decent attention span is wonderful. The soundtrack is equally gorgeous, and the movie is utterly captivating.

This is a Soviet arthouse film from writer-director Sergei Parajanov. Ostensibly about the life of medieval Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat Nova (which was the film's original title), this is instead a series of tableaux meant to visualize the "mood and feeling" behind the artist's work, as well as the Armenian people and their cultural heritage. It's a series of brief, carefully framed shots, with some movement within the shot but none by the camera, that look like paintings come to vibrantly-colored life. There is no narrative at all, and nothing in the way of a traditional biopic. It's unusual, a continuation of the style Parajanov demonstrated with his earlier Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964). If you know what you're in store for, then this can be enjoyed as an artistic experience, but anyone put off by non-traditional filmmaking will have very little tolerance for this. Its rather brief 79-minute runtime helps soften the experience, as well.

This film also features several sheep getting butchered, and a half dozen or so chickens beheaded and their flailing bodies cast upon the floor around the main character.

How do you go from rich cinematic intuition to stifled ceremonial posing? I don't get it. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is one of the most enthralling films I have seen, it's just an endlessly spinning dance between the camera and a mystical world of song and suffering, spun and diffused into air. It rested on a profound realization that life is both real and has the mechanism of dreams.

It was a multifaceted world of many allusions but all of it was deftly integrated into the experience, you didn't need separate keys. This on the other hand is a notoriously difficult work, for a simple reason; you need a bunch of keys, and most of those are outside the film (it suffered at the hands of Soviet censors, no doubt, my guess however is that Parajanov's authorial version would operate on the same principles).

It is everything that grates at me as outmoded and needless obfuscation in cinematic narrative. Allegory. Symbolism (the nagging notion that the pomegranates ought to 'stand for something'). Cryptic dealings.

Instead of opening up our gaze to a world, it reduces to a set of paintings, supposedly that you have to decode. It is very much a presentation of cultural history, but at the expense of all the distinctly cinematic advantages of the medium.

This mode survives in a way in Peter Greenaway. But Greenaway works from Hamlet as his main reference, so all you need to know about the play is usually inside the play-within. This has no framework. It isn't the stuff that life is made from - it's only the stuff that art is.

For those who need an American equivalent to compare to, it is similar to the work of Brakhage or Anger, the American experimental filmmakers.

It is not Hollywood in that the movie does not rely on a plot, although there is a semblance of one present in this particular movie. The life and poetry of Sayat Nova, the great Medieval Armenian Troubadour, albeit abstractly, is the basis for all the images presented. It is also not Hollywood in that there is no dialog. The interest rests in the unforgettable and arresting images, lovingly created and edited together in the manner of Eisenstein. So in this regard it has more in common with silent film.

Yes, this is an abstract film. Yes, it is pretentious. But what is wrong with that? Prtensious is, after all, what most call something that they have a hard time understanding. Make no mistake, this is an art film to the extreme. A film whose primary concern is not to entertain, but rather to express Parajanov's personal view of Sayat Nova,and more importantly, to preserve to film the medieval Armenian culture which was almost completely eradicated in the Armenian Massacre of 1915 at the hands of the Turkish Empire. This film is historically important for this reason alone. The fact that Parajanov was imprisoned by the Russian Government for not conforming to the strict Social Realist code of film underscores this point. This film was a slap in the face to Communist Russia which wanted to erase the old traditions.

There is nothing much you have to get to enjoy this film, except to marvel at images inspired by an ancient little known culture. There is a lot of beauty in these images which probably seem so foreign and alien to Westerners. That is the point. That is the effect that I believe Parajanov is after. Those that don't get it either lack patience and subtlety, or are under the mistaken assumption that good films must follow the American Hollywood script model. The latter would be making the same mistake as the Russians who put Parajanov in the Gulag. No one who as seen even a bit of this film, could deny that it is unforgettable. And that is what to me makes a good film.

One of the great films in all cinema, virtually incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with Armenian or Georgian history and culture. Whatever the dubious politics in enjoying a subversive political work as an aesthetic spectacle, there is much to astonish. The nominal story concerns an 18th century Armenian poet/national hero/martyr, but Paradjanov rejects biographical narrative in favour of a montage stream of religious, political, cultural, sexual imagery, composition and allegory unparalelled in the history of the medium, although fans of Von Sternberg will not be bemused.