By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 12/13/24 – Wednesday evening at the Los Feliz Theatre in Los Angeles was a screening of the restored print of Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova, Soviet Union, 1968). Parajanov was an Armenian-born major filmmaker in the former Soviet Union, who made his films in the Ukraine and also in his homeland of then-Soviet Armenia. Sayat Nova is a kaleidoscopic biography of 18th-century Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova (born as Harutyun Sayatyan), who was a poet and wandering troubadour in Armenia and Georgia but later became an Armenian monk and eventually an archbishop before his death at the hands of the Persians in a war.
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. There are sounds, music, and occasional singing, but dialogue is rare. 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.
According to film historian 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 colors of the national flag, and so on.”
The landscapes and architecture depicted are also a huge reason to watch the film. It was filmed in various historic locations including the Sanahin Monastery, the Haghpat Monastery, the St. John church at Ardvi, and the Akhtala Monastery in Armenia and, in Georgia, the Alaverdi Monastery, the countryside surrounding the David Gareja monastery complex, and the Dzveli Shuamta complex near Telavi. Azerbaijani locations included the Old City of Baku and Nardaran Fortress.
Parajanov 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.” He has also described this film as a series of Persian miniatures. This dazzling epic film is as far from a traditional biopic as one can imagine. Parajanov, writing in the 1970s about “The Color of Pomegranates,” wrote that it was inspired by the concept of miniatures in art, especially Persian ones.
Because there is little dialogue involved in the actual movie, you can really begin to see this inspiration as you pause the scenes and take a closer look. Every single scene is meticulously blocked, every image and person representing something or someone important in the grand arc of the narrative.
The film employs remarkable, dreamlike imagery to capture the essence of Sayat Nova’s work rather than portray a strict chronology of his life. Parajanov’s film has been much esteemed by other directors – including Michelangelo Antonioni, who stated “Color of Pomegranates is of a stunningly perfect beauty. Parajanov, in my opinion, is one of best film directors in the world.” Soviet authorities, however, were less sympathetic, suppressing the film and ultimately jailing its director.
