The Colour of Pomegranates: A poetic state of mind

Do you remember the music video for Lady Gaga’s “911” that came out two years ago? Watch it here if you don't. In the Tarsem Singh-directed short, the singer-songwriter wakes up in the middle of a white desert, blindfolded with red fabric and surrounded by pomegranates. The candy-coloured fever dream ends with her waking up in the real world, where she is seen being revived by EMTs. She is outside of a cinema whose marquee reads, “Armenian Film Festival”. One of the posters on the walls is of a film called The Colour of Pomegranates, a film Singh makes plenty of visual nods to over the course of the video.

Now and then, perhaps less so now than then, you come across a film that challenges the way you see the medium — and counters the idea of a prescribed order to how stories must be told/retold when change is the only constant in the chaotic design of our world. Watching The Colour of Pomegranates evokes such a reorienting experience. In substance, it is a biopic. Not the shop-worn, conventional and reverential treatment that gives Oscar voters a come-hither look. Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov explored the life of the 18th-century ashugh (an Armenian troubadour) Sayat-Nova in a lyrical, abstract head-trip. And as lyrical, abstract head-trips tend to go, the effect is at once frustrating and spellbinding.

Frustrating because the film doesn’t open itself to ready interpretation. Spellbinding because Sayat Nova’s story is presented as a series of tableaux vivants whose compositions borrow from the poetic idiom, mosaic art, Christian frescoes and Armenian illuminated manuscripts. The result is a film which gives expression to the intangible beauty of poetry beyond a visual medium’s reach. To create a more holistic portrait of a poet, Paradjanov invested less in a traditional narrative, more in the thoughts and feelings of a poetic consciousness. Even if the logic to the rhapsody of images may elude us, the underlying sensations do not.

When the film was completed in 1969, the Soviet censors didn’t take too kindly to Paradjanov’s experimental direction which ran in opposition to the Communist Party-sanctioned socio-realist house style. A censored cut was given a limited release. Four years later, he was imprisoned and sent to the Gulag on charges related to homosexuality. The version of the film, as Paradjanov had hoped for us to see, was almost lost until Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project led the digital restoration efforts.

Beginning with Sayat-Nova’s childhood right through to his self-discovery via art to his death at the hands of an invading army, the film stitches together a patchwork quilt of milestones. Paradjanov’s vision strives to align with Sayat-Nova’s perception as he reimagines 18th-century Armenian society through the eyes of the poet. As each frame is meant to resemble a tableau, the camera remains fixed while the world it depicts remains in flux. Being as much an ethnography, the film illuminates the traditions, culture, and the world as navigated by Sayat-Nova. Each segment is introduced with a brief verse that establishes the symbolism and allegories to follow.

“I am the man whose life and soul are torment,” repeats a voice over the imagery of the opening segment: an open book, the juice of three pomegranates bleeding onto a white cloth, a dagger staining another, a man’s foot stomping grapes on a stone tablet, fish out of water writhing in agony, an ashugh’s kamancheh (bowed string instrument) lying next to a vase with a single white rose, and a thorny branch. If the red juice of the pomegranate symbolises life, the red stain of the dagger symbolises death. The white rose and the thorns represent the love and hardship, joy and sadness experienced in between. This montage establishes Paradjanov’s desire to capture the essence and sensibilities of his subject by visualising what is often written or heard.

As themes recur in poetry, so do associative images and choral chants in the film as it charts the making and maturing of an artist. A young Sayat-Nova’s early education is shown with him lying down on a roof full of open books whose pages flutter in the wind. Sexual awakening triggers as he watches naked men being cleaned at a communal bath and a naked woman whose one breast is covered with a conch shell. The animals that populate the screen are used for their Biblical symbolism, from a flock of sheep crowding a church to the kissing of a peacock (which represents the resurrection and eternal life). Reinforcing the effect of recurrence is Paradjanov’s casting of actors in multiple roles. At various moments, Sofiko Tschiaureli plays the poet and his lover. All this amounts to watching the dissolution of the boundary between the life and the art of a poet.

Paradjanov’s instincts for the conceptual and the sensorial, the poetic and the cinematic converge in a film that searches for its own form and personal connection with the subject, instead of reaffirming existing conventions. It’s why he credits himself as the author of the film, rather than the director. Not to be precious about it, given Anthony Russo’s recent comments, The Colour of Pomegranates is an articulation of an unmistakable personal vision (what Andrew Sarris described as “interior meaning”), as Paradjanov transfigures a biopic of a poet into a poetic meditation, or rather a cinematic approximation of a poet’s state of mind. Let Scorsese best describe it, “Watching Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates is like opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed.”

The Colour of Pomegranates is available for streaming on MUBI.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

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