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Armenian Non Linear Surrealism

Color of Pomegranates is a sort of tribute to Sayat Nova, an Armenian poet. It begins with some indecipherable credits and a series of intertitles that explain that this film isn't an attempt to tell the poet's actual story but rather an attempt to show his inner self and to illustrate his poetry by means of symbolism and allegory. For the first few minutes the camera cuts from an open book to some strange imagery: bleeding pomegranates, a dying fish and so on. A narrator reads us a bit of Nova's poetry while this is all going on.

Cut to a small child in a temple, the temple, a woman making up a bed, stacks of books being pressed dry, the book pressers, a child and a lecture, the child on a ladder, on a rooftop, the pages of a book, many pages of many books, a singer, the child swinging from the rooftops. Women washing their feet, women washing carpets, the dying of fabric, the dying of a chicken and so on...

Any attempt to describe this would fail miserably. It is extremely surreal and very difficult. It's also very beautiful and will probably open a window to a world that you're unfamiliar with; even if you can read the intertitles unassisted. This out "Fellinis" Fellini and goes well beyond even Bunuel's early work when it comes to strangeness and does it with virtually no effects {violence, sex or narrative for that matter; though there is an uncomfortable sequence which involves the slaughter of farm animals.}

This is relatively short and weighs in at only fifty-seven minutes, is all sorts of fun and comes complete with a nifty, free-form sound track.. The Kino disk comes with a documentary about the director's life entitled "Paradjanov: A Requiem", and a short by the same artist named "Hagop Hovnatanian". Apparently, the director spent a goodly amount of time in prison. I don't suppose it was all that healthy to be a Surrealist under the old Soviet regime. If you don't like extreme artsy strangeness do not buy this. For lack of an Armenian category, this has been lumped into the Russian pages.