Sergej Iosifovic Paradzanov
The Color of Pomegranates. One of the milestones of dissent cinemas of those years. Example of how human resistance can and must express itself through the quiet force of poetry. Such a film, which appears unsettling now, in the era of socialist realism cost the director a sentence to forced labor for long years based on a certainly fabricated charges that only thanks to the international solidarity of famous colleagues like Trakovskij, Antonioni, Godard, Fellini, Visconti, Resnais, Yves Saint Laurent will be able to return to a free and creative life. Forget about a movie that tells you a story and surrender to style in the service of storytelling. Together with his great friend Andrej Tarkovskij he traced a path without return in a completely different way to a cinema that Pasolini woulc call 'prosaic'.
Parajanov celebrates the culture of origin in this film through what is considered the greatest Armenian troubadour poet og the eighteenth century, Sayat Nova. Filmed in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, the director gives us a very personal, enigmatic and allegorical portrait of the beloved poet. Divided into 8 tableaux vivants all introduced by a verse of Nova, it traces its existence from the childhood to death. The images are lush yet not baroque, orchestrated in a myriad of opulent details but always in a balanced compositional balance.
The actions of the characters are allegorical and ritual the use of the actors is singular, with the muse Sofiko Chaureli engaged in six different roles, including male. The props rise to complex symbols, geometries organized in the visual space in an imaginative way. Dialogue are almost non-existent, while the sounf plays an important role, with songs and musics of the Armenian tradition and noises used as filimc punctuation. The strong ethnographic and symbolic value of the objects raises them to living witnesses of the man of the past. A magnificent visual experience for which The Color of Pomegranates is an exciting meeting point between cinema, poetry and video art.
The Color Of Pomegranates
year 1969
director SERGEI PARAJANOV
director of photography SUREN SHAKHBAZYAN
cast SOFIKO CHAURELI, MELKON ALEKSANYAN, VILEN GALSTYAN and GIORGI GEGECHKORI
words SILVIA GAIA MARCELLI
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