GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Numerootno A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Walter Sloane Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

alexdeleonfilm THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (Armenian, Նռան գույնը) -- AKA "Sayat Nova", Viewed at 2014 Yerevan Golden Apricot IFF Director, Sergei Parajanov, 1968. RT 79 minutes. Languages of the poetry: Armenian, Geogian and Azeri Turkish 32E0CC90-FBBD-4A04-9EF6-1C87A431AD42 Generally regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of the 20th century, the "Color of the Pomegranates" is a dazzling pictographic biography of the famous 18th century Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova (King of Song) revealing the poet's life more through the visualization of his poetry than a conventional narration of the events of his life. Or, one might even say that Parajanov simply used the poetry of Sayat as a launching pad to trip out on his own kind of unique cinematic poetry. However you look at it the result is a memorable film experience. The eleventh annual installment of the Yerevan International Film Festival opened last night with a grandiose red carpet invitational gala at the Yerevan opera house and the screening of a digitally restored print of this magnificent but all too rarely seen film, a one of a kinder that resists classification. The Color of Pomegranates is in structure a metaphoric biography of the many sided prolific Armenian poet, musician, courtier, and eventually monk, Ashug Sayat-Nova, (King of Song) revealing the stages of his fantastic life visually and poetically rather than literally. The film is presented as a virtually silent movie with active tableaux depicting Sayat's life in eight chapters: Childhood, Youth, The Court of the prince, The Monastery, The Dream, Old Age, The Angel of Death and Death. There are sounds and music and occasional singing but almost no dialogue. Each chapter is indicated by a title card and framed through both the director's imagination and Sayat Nova's poems. Georgian actress Sofiko Chiaureli plays six roles in the film, both male and female.Among other things this film celebrates the survival of Armenian culture in the face of oppression and persecution. Sayat was executed and beheaded when he refused to renounce his Armenian Christianity before conquering Persian invaders. Visually luscious with many images that are highly charged such as blood-red juice spilling from a cut pomegranate onto a cloth and forming a stain in the shape of the boundaries of the Ancient kingdom of Armenia -- dyers lifting planks of wool out of vats in the colors of the national flag, and so forth ... This film is on many critical lists of the greatest films of all time. A dazzling festival opener. Parajanov, who was a maverick Soviet film director working often in the Ukraine and Georgia was constantly hounded by the Soviet establishment, but he is a national hero here in Armenia with a museum devoted entirely to him alone. His abstract non- linear films were regarded as provocations by the Soviet censors who couldn't even understand them but assumed that they must be subversive because Parajanov himself absolutely refused to toe the party line in his private or artistic life. As a result he had to spent much time in Soviet jails which limited his total output, but all of his films are regarded as landmarks of one kind or another and will all be shown here, an unusual opportunity to catch up with the rarely seen works of a little known cinema master.

chaos-rampant How do you go from rich cinematic intuition to stifled ceremonial posing? I don't get it. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is one of the most enthralling films I have seen, it's just an endlessly spinning dance between the camera and a mystical world of song and suffering, spun and diffused into air. It rested on a profound realization that life is both real and has the mechanism of dreams.It was a multifaceted world of many allusions but all of it was deftly integrated into the experience, you didn't need separate keys. This on the other hand is a notoriously difficult work, for a simple reason; you need a bunch of keys, and most of those are outside the film (it suffered at the hands of Soviet censors, no doubt, my guess however is that Parajanov's authorial version would operate on the same principles).It is everything that grates at me as outmoded and needless obfuscation in cinematic narrative. Allegory. Symbolism (the nagging notion that the pomegranates ought to 'stand for something'). Cryptic dealings.Instead of opening up our gaze to a world, it reduces to a set of paintings, supposedly that you have to decode. It is very much a presentation of cultural history, but at the expense of all the distinctly cinematic advantages of the medium.This mode survives in a way in Peter Greenaway. But Greenaway works from Hamlet as his main reference, so all you need to know about the play is usually inside the play-within. This has no framework. It isn't the stuff that life is made from - it's only the stuff that art is.

jennyhor2004 A true labour of love, this film is a meditation on the life of the Armenian poet who came to be known as Sayat-Nova (Persian for "King of Songs"). Since the film isn't intended as an authentic blow-by-blow account of Sayat-Nova's life, here is a quick rundown of his life: born in Tbilisi in Georgia in 1712, Sayat-Nova acquired skills in writing poetry, singing and playing at least three types of stringed musical instrument. He entered the court of King Irakly II of Georgia as both full-time professional poet and diplomat and in his capacity as a diplomat helped forge an alliance of Georgia, Armenia and Shirvan (a former state now part of Azerbaijan) against Persia. Sayat-Nova was expelled from the court for falling in love with his employer's daughter and became a wandering troubadour. He entered the priesthood in 1759 and served in various monasteries, dying in Haghpat monastery in northern Armenia in 1795 when a foreign army invaded the building and killed the monks inside.The film follows Sayat-Nova's inner life and impressions of the world around him based on his poetry and songs. The structure of the narrative is straightforward and organised into chronological episodes starting with the poet's childhood and youth and continuing into his time at the royal court and later entry into monastic life. Each episode of Sayat-Nova's outer and inner life is an opportunity for director Parajanov to highlight the culture, music and society of the poet's time: to take one example, the poet's childhood becomes a device to emphasise the importance of learning, education and religious study in Armenian society at the time. Scenes of the young Sayat-Nova surrounded by open books on roof-tops stress the value of books and their preservation. When the young budding poet is tired of studying books, he hangs around wool-dyers and the bath-house and again various tableaux show the dyers at work. boiling pots of dye and drenching wool into them, and various men relaxing and being scrubbed in the bath-house. These and all other tableaux of 18th-century Armenian life and culture in the film are often symbolic in ways that may be religious or hint at something darker. Viewers are invited to wonder at the richness and complexity of the culture and values inherent in these scenes and to meditate on what meanings, personal or otherwise, may exist within. Magic may be found and for some viewers the past itself may come alive with personal messages for them and them alone.For this viewer at least the music soundtrack itself is amazing: it has many Middle Eastern influences, Christian choral elements and there are even hints of musique concrète: in one scene, men are working on part of a church with chisels and the noise they make is incorporated into the soundtrack rhythm. The film suggests a link between one musical instrument that Sayat-Nova plays and his sexual desire: in one scene the poet traces spirals around the body of a lute as if tracing spirals around a conch (already established as a sensual symbol of the female body). The implication is that much of Sayat-Nova's poetry and music was inspired by personal lust and desire translated into inspiration. As though to drive the point home, the film provides an actual lust object of a muse played by Georgian actor Sofiko Chiaureli who handles five different roles in the film including the poet himself as a teenager. The very fact of a woman with flawless features playing an adolescent boy introduces a homo-eroticism into the movie which among other things got Parajanov in trouble with the Soviet government. Chiaureli and the other actors speak no dialogue and perform minimal actions with expressions that are either blank or at least gentle, kindly and serene. In maintaining a steady, calm composure throughout their scenes, not giving the least hint of injecting their own thoughts, feelings and misgivings into what they are doing, the actors demonstrate their skill.Apart from necessary scene breaks there isn't much editing and the camera rarely moves so each scene has a painterly quality and is a diorama of moving characters who appear two-dimensional in the way they may move from side to side. Close-ups of actors playing Sayat-Nova and those who influenced his work portray them as if they are religious icons.For Western viewers the first half of the film is of more interest in showing more of the traditional folk culture and values of the Armenians and the pace is steady though not fast; the second half of the film which deals with Sayat-Nova's inner life much more, with his dream and contemplation of death, is slower and more esoteric. As the poet revisits his childhood in parts, some scenes may confuse viewers with the sudden appearances of the same child actor who played Sayat-Nova early in the film. The last two episodes appear redundant as they revolve around death. In the second half of the movie also, there is a sense of aloneness and alienation: Sayat-Nova appears to be at odds with the monks in the monastery at times and doesn't participate in the monks' communal activities. At one point in the narrative, he even leaves the monastery to go and work among the common people. It is possible that Parajanov was projecting something of his own life and experiences in the "life" of Sayat-Nova as it plays out here.

shusei Almost everybody talks about the film's beauty and the difficulty of its understanding. It's true. But the difficulty is not from the director's pretension or other shortcomings. When this film was first released in Soviet Union, it was shown in third-rated theaters and with limited number of prints. It was not an original version of Sergo Parajanov, because it was re-edited by another director(director's version is said to have been lost for ever, after frequent showing in professionals' circle). The film's title was also changed--"The Color of Pomegranates" was the title which the administrators of USSR's cinema policy selected to deny "biographical" character of the film. In fact, we can see at the very first title that says "This film is not a biographical film about Sayat Nova...". In short, they didn't admit such an extraordinary approach in making a film about historical important persons. Parajanov's artistic intention apparently went too far, ahead of his time. He wanted to identify the classic poet with himself through the magical play of cinematography, multi-layered mirror-like structure made of image and sound. "Sayat Nova"--it's me", wrote the director in his screenplay by his own hand. Soviet censorship may have cut some shots or shortened some episodes, to make meanings and intention,which originally were clear,remain ambiguous. For example, Sayat Nova's anxiety for his Christian homeland threatened by Islamic enemies(this theme is clearly developed in the film's scenario recently published in Russian).Parajanv, an artist indifferent to politic issues, didn't think that religious theme, as well as aesthetic "anomaly", might be very dangerous for Soviet directors after the end of "time of thaw". Thus the film could'n be a full realization of authors's original scenario.Nevertheless,the difficult situation didn't distort the film's concept and vision as a whole. "Sayat Nova" is still brilliant art of work,and, as many masterpieces of Cinema, will overcome Time by its beauty.