the colour of pomegranates (d. sergei parajanov)

The film buff suggested we go. He and I both thought we'd seen it twenty years ago. I thought it was 4 hours long and he said it was 72 minutes. He was almost right, it would have been, if it wasn't for the fact the print kept going into meltdown, the lights coming up and down, the washed colours dissolving into the orange glow of a blank screen.

The scratchiness of the print and its state of imminent collapse contributed to the sense of watching a relic, discovered perhaps in one of the ruined churches the film shows. The film has the feel of a tone poem. It is a succession of mise-en-scenes, artfully put together, with no dialogue and little narrative. Every image is a thing of beauty, from the carpets flapping in the wind to the sheep bleating in a church. Like looking at a Renaissance fresco that's faded through the centuries, it's hard to tell what the original colours would have looked like, but in this print they had a subdued grandeur, hinting at the richness of the colours that underpin the images shown on the screen, without quite giving them away.

Parajanov's film is meditative. It felt to this viewer like a cross between a sixties acid movie and a nineties fashion spread in a glossy magazine for people with so much money they needed to prove it through the quality of their austerity. The only people in the audience who looked like this was their reason for watching it left after the second projector meltdown. Maybe 7 minutes was enough for them to get a feel. No matter how beautiful, Pomegranates is not an easy thing to watch, stripped away as it is of assumed dramatic ingredients. Towards the end the poet's voice says - I'm so tired, I'm even tired of writing poems - and the audience knows where he's coming from. We too couldn't go on for much longer staring at this alien beauty, not without pharmaceutical assistance.

The film buff noted that there was a surprising amount of religious imagery for a film made in the Soviet Union. I felt as though there may well have been a thousand messages contained within the images that I had missed, which perhaps all save a few now-elderly Armenians would miss. However, to go and see this film expecting to make sense of it would appear to be missing the point, for it's a film that deals with the limits of intellectual understanding, provoking a sensory response instead. It's as close to an experience of other-worldly asceticism as you can get without spending a year sitting on a pillar in the middle of the desert.