A master of visual cinema, primus inter pares, Sergei Paradjanov was a law unto himself in Soviet cinema of the 1960-1980s; his body of work from the Caucasus in that period is as visually innovative and brightly colourful as anything in cinema. A “magician in cinema”, indeed. Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates is being reissued with very welcome and full additional commentary.
Pomegranates, from 1968, was the second film he made in the region of his birth, and tells the story of Armenian national poet Sayat Nova. Its intertitles are extracts from the poet’s verse, and it loosely follows Nova’s life, from childhood, to court poet, his love for a Georgian princess, retreat to a monastery, and death. But the narrative is loose. Marking the bicentenary of the poet’s birth, this was a huge project for the Armenfilm studio, and Paradjanov received full access to the country’s distinctive monasteries, as well as original, rich ecclesiastical garments (live animals, from black horses to sheep to doves, are aplenty, too). Paradjanov’s muse Sofiko Chiaureli plays no less than six parts, including the youthful poet and his princess love. With music that draws powerfully on Armenian liturgy, the result is intoxicating.
I often berate some of the DVD companies which re-release world classics for the paucity of their bonus materials, so it’s a pleasure to say that Second Sight has provided an extremely comprehensive add-on assortment, giving a context, both artistic and historical, to a complicated enough work. There’s a full new documentary by Daniel Bird, The World is a Window, with interviews with Paradjanov’s contemporaries in Moscow, Tbilisi and Yerevan, as well as American film scholars.
The path from Paradjanov’s first Armenian version through censorship and recutting for its eventual Soviet release was fraught: another extra here has Paradjanov’s assistant Levon Grigoryan talking his way through some of the scenes removed from the final version; long thought lost, they tantalisingly hint at what might have been.
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