the colour of pomegranates (w&d parajanov)

How to write about a film which refutes every conventional notion of what a narrative film should be and at the same time reinvents the possibilities of what a narrative film might be. Storytelling through the amalgamation of images. Post-post-modernism, a generation or two before digital. You can discern an axis in Parajanov’s masterpiece. A moment where the word would be supplanted by the image, setting fire to 500 years of conventional thinking, after Gutenberg, that the word should hold priority. Parajanov destroys that theory. Every image contains the semiotic power of a word, with a seductive power the humble word and its cousin alphabet could never aspire to. The pictures ravish, charm, provoke. The camera lingers on them just long enough for the questions to arise. Who is the boy? The woman? The man? Why is he holding a peacock feather? What is the silver ball? And so on, an endless parade of information bathed in all the colours of the rainbow. Yet, at the heart of the film, a story is still being narrated. The story of a poet, but also the story of a culture, a culture that feels at once eternal and transient. Armenia, a land that time forgot. 

Nb I note I saw the film previously in 2008. The print of this version was far superior to the one I saw back in the Cine Lumiere, a cinema in South Kensington I can scarcely recall. 

andriesh (d.sergei parajanov, yakov bazelyan, w. yemelian bukov, grigoriy koltunov, sergey shvartszoyd)

Parajanov’s first film is a Chagallian eco-fable. A boy loses his flock after the intervention of a malevolent storm god. The film occupies a space between nature and art, between naturalism and the oneiric. As the boy walks out of his village in the Caucasus, it feels as though we are witnessing images from a lovingly filmed documentary. Then, the film switches register. Nature speaks. The boy talks, memorably, to a weeping willow. He helps out a giant, who reciprocates. Myth and fable weave their way into the story. Andriesh is epic poetry reincarnated as cinema. 

about him or how he did not fear the bear (w&d nariné mkrtchyan, arsen azatyan)

Another film from the fringes of the former Soviet republic, describing, as the none-too-subtle title makes clear, the relationship of Armenia with present day Russia. The film’s opening titles state that it is based on a true story. A Russian soldier runs amok and kills an entire Armenian family. He then flees and seeks refuge in a Russian army base. The film follows three men who seek to go about the process of revenge by killing the soldier, one of them a priest. There is use of actual documentary footage, presumably taken from the protests that occurred at the time of the incident. There’s some stunning scenery in the mountains. There’s a near ten minute steady cam shot to open the film. There’s fruitful use of a children’s dance performance, complete with dancing bear, interspliced into the action. In short there’s plenty of lovely moments and promising ideas, but never enough to create a film that really grips the attention. 

the legend of suram fortress (d. parajanov, dodo abashidze, w. vaja gigashvili, daniel chonqadze)

This is a wonderfully chaotic film, a beautiful collection of images, stories, characters, thoughts, dreams. Like stumbling across the notebook of an unknown genius in a language that you can’t read, but whose very form is enough to tell you all you need to know. In a way perhaps cinema at its purest is a return to the pictogram, sign and meaning unified to reveal all in the image of a frame. If this were really so, Parajanov is one of those few poets who offers hints of what a wonderful world it could be.

Legend of Suram Fortress is ‘about’ a fortress which has been destroyed and cannot be rebuilt. Until, the soothsayer, whose circuitous story we have already learnt, reveals what’s required and a valiant young warrior agrees to entomb himself in the castle walls. However, most of this emerges in the film’s final ten minutes. In the preceding seventy, we travel the length and breath of Georgia, meeting too many characters to keep count of. Pomegranates are abused, bagpipes are blown and camels wend their way towards the coast. In one dazzling scene, medieval warriors pace the waterfront with supertankers lurking in the sea behind them.

There must be a whole host of ways of interpreting The Legend, with subtexts relating to national myths; the filmmaker’s own relationship to the USSR; and who knows what else. These aspects for now pass me by. What remains is the declaration of a filmmaker who’s willing to challenge his audience into re-evaluating what the experience of watching cinema can be. Not the act of following the thread of a narrative, but leaping from star to star. As such he almost seems to be challenging the whole notion of the Western narrative tradition, which had been waiting for cinema to be invented and Parajanov to arrive and show that stories don’t need beginnings, middles and ends. They need visions.  

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.