The Colour of Pomegranates: A Biopic Like No Other

Illustration Credit: Evie Heathcock

Tom Paterson reviews the Soviet Armenian film The Colour of Pomegranates, which, more than 50 years after its release, remains a landmark piece in USSR film history.

Upon its completion in 1969, Sergei Parajanov’s groundbreaking film The Colour of Pomegranates was met with severe condemnation from Soviet censors. The complaints were mostly the usual, formulaic criticisms churned out whenever the authorities in Moscow decided a director had overstepped the mark: excessive formalism, unintelligibility, structural incoherence. Parajanov had also allegedly failed to fulfil his initial brief. The authorities had requested an educational biopic on the life of legendary Armenian bard Sayat-Nova, targeted at Russian-speaking audiences with little prior knowledge of the poet’s work. What they eventually received was a daring formal experiment that reconfigured the very language of cinema and still retains its unique capacity to astonish and astound, even today.

Parajanov’s aim, as explicitly stated in the film’s opening title card, was not simply to tell Sayat-Nova’s story, but to present it through the lens of the poet’s soul, utilising in his portrayal the symbolism and allegoresis intrinsic to the tradition of the Armenian ashug (troubadour). This unprecedented approach no doubt contributes to the film’s creation of a ground-breaking, inimitable cinematographic style. However, as this review will discuss, such abstract, conceptual thinking tends a little too far to the esoteric, and much of the film’s erudition is lost in its elusive formal structure.

Throughout the film, the utmost emphasis is placed on visual content, individual shots saturated with colourful, symmetrical cinematic imagery to create a beautiful, indeed poetic aesthetic that draws the spectator’s gaze towards the spectacle. The act of looking as a means of deciphering meaning is actively encouraged. Frames are filled with symbolic value; one of the most famous and widely-discussed images in the film is that of pomegranates bleeding red juice into cloth in the shape of the ancient Kingdom of Armenia, while other highly suggestive images include a foot crushing grapes into a stone tablet and the protagonist sitting among a sea of books flapping in the wind.

Critics have gone as far to suggest that this innovative semiotic language created by Parajanov constitutes a revolution in film theory. I do not disagree with this hypothesis. However, it must be said that this ‘revolution’ is not one that paves the path towards the filmic nirvana of clarity and coherence. Indeed, a strategy for decoding Parajanov’s obscure language of signs remains elusive to this day. Certain common components between shots help to provide a key for some aspects of the film’s mysterious semantic cipher. The image of a shell, shown atop a woman’s breast and later featured in scenes between the bard himself and his muse dressed in dazzling red garb, creates a clear motif of sexuality and eroticism, for example. But for the most part, shots such as fish floundering in the space between what appear to be two ribs are simply too absurd and singular for analysis to even be attempted.

A more successful aspect of the film’s prioritisation of aesthetic material is that it lays extra emphasis on the film’s striking exposition of Armenian national culture in all its ornate glory. Traditional dress, architecture, art, religious practice, and music are all lingered on unapologetically. In a potent act of rebellion against the imperial designs of a USSR hell-bent on cultural homogeneity borne of artifice, the profilmic space is reclaimed by organic folk culture, perhaps another reason for the film’s troubled journey to the big screen.

Parajanov even models his visual style on that of Armenian iconography, opting primarily for shots which frame scenes head-on and cut out any sense of depth of field to reflect the stationary beauty and absence of perspective endemic to this type of art. This, however, as far as film craft is concerned, actually proves extremely limiting. The minimalist persistence throughout the film with the same type of angle destroys any potential for dynamism in shot selection and montage, whilst characters, portrayed as the subject of these sketches, are expressionless and stationary. Their movements, stilted and mechanistic, distort their image to the point of almost complete estrangement from any concept of humanity. No doubt this bizarre, defamiliarised representation is intended as a means of illustrating the bard’s chiefly artistic, stylised mode of perception, but to select the medium of the moving image for this purpose only to have it imitate a separate, still art form is to neglect its immense possibilities as an art in its own right.

But let us put such criticisms to one side, as the Colour of Pomegranates has much to recommend it to the eager viewer. It broaches rare territory for a film released under the spectre of Soviet censorship, daring to dream of an independent national identity for a country swallowed up in the throes of state-prescribed ideology and the propagandist culture of Socialist Realism. It is glorious to look at, too. Yes, it comes with its stylistic challenges, but in many respects this complexity is part of its charm, its enigmatic portrayal of Sayat-Nova preserving the poet’s obscure, legendary status yet inviting the spectator to actively engage in the drawing of his portrait.