The Color of Pomegranates had been on my list for a long time and watched it recently. I came to the movie knowing close to nothing about Armenian culture or history and had not heard of Sayat-Nova whose work and life the movie is the subject of.
Every scene in the movie could have been a work of art in a museum - visually striking, perfectly composed and rich in detail. It's easy to want to pause and take in the every detail of the frame. I can't claim that I understood much of what I saw notwithstanding the subtitles, but this was still among the most remarkable movie experiences I have had. Maybe that was the director's intent as well - for viewers (even uninformed ones like me) to steep in the experience:
The Color of Pomegranates, inventively reveals the life of the 18th century Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova (King of Song) through his poetry and his inner world instead of a conventional narrative. We see the poet grow up, fall in love, enter a monastery and die, but these events are depicted through images of how Paradjanov’s imagination perceived Sayat Nova’s poems, poems that are seen and rarely heard.
The movie can be explored in so much detail, a perfect treat for anyone who wants to learn the craft.
Following the intertitle, We were searching for ourselves in each other, a sequence of shots juxtaposes Arutin and Ana within what would appear to be the same space, dressed in similarly blue clothing, and, in keeping with Parajanov's deliberately loose treatment of personal identity, played by the same actress, Sofiko Chiaureli. Several of these compositions are repeated almost exactly the same way in a later sequence following the intertitle How am I to protect my wax-built castles of love from the devouring heat of your fires. Again, colour functions as the most obvious variant, with the poet dressed entirely in black and Ana in red. A framed, spinning or swaying cherub returns, as does a length of lace, which changes from white to red and finally black in the hands of the poet. The implication that we have reached another stage in the life of the protagonist and his relationship with Ana is clear from the chronological progression of the story, but more importantly, these sequences and others where we see Sayat Nova together with his younger self, bring to the surface a sensation of the past repeating in the present, and doing so in what would seem an aesthetic accord with Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal return.
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