The Color of Pomegranates

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David B It isn’t really a film, just a series of very pretty scenes with no real discernible plot. It got old very quickly, after about the fifth scene of people just standing around making strange arm gestures while annoying sounds play in the background. Rated 0.5/5 Stars •  Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 09/26/24 Full Review Audience Member Call me picky but I like to be entertained by films. This isn't film at all, it's just 80 minutes of moving art and it is indescribably boring. Beautiful colour palette though. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 01/28/23 Full Review Audience Member Not without taking an academic deep dive into Armenian history, culture and superstition, Christian symbolism, the life of national figure poet Sayat-Nova ("King of Songs", 1712-1795), and the sometimes troubled, sometimes mischievous life and times of the film's maker, Sergei Parajanov. Without all of that in tow, sitting through this film amounts to looking at a most ornate, impenetrable motion slide show; one with a deduced narrative built upon a soil of old-world metaphor set to atonal sitar music. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/27/23 Full Review s r 1001 movies to see before you die. An original film to say the least. Bizarre visuals and a slow narrative really similar this up, but it was worth seeing for its artistic direction. It was on daily motion. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member Stellar woven textiles, karpets, nimble greetings and prepossessing blinks moralize Sayat-Nova's tableaus in vibrating alto tootles. Being an ageless subversion of cinema, it's an indecipherably celestial film that keeps on giving no matter how much time you put into it. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/19/23 Full Review William L Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates is a strange bird. It's a complex, often surrealist biographical film (whose subject, the ashugh Sayat-Nova, is realtively little known outside his eastern European geography) that relies on emotion and tone rather than narrative. I believe that my lack of familiarity with the source material likely takes away from my understanding of the film, but there is still a strangely captivating nature to the combination of the unusual imagery, the distinctly Armenian culture, and the lack of significant dialogue (even though I'm not really a huge fan of art film in general) Some of the individual scenes are wonderful, especially in the recent 4K restoration; the 'book drying', 'cloth dyeing', and 'headless chickens' scenes in particular are exceptionally well done. The film's unusual editing techniques are also notably daring (with some scenes including interesting quick cuts, removal of surrounding environments such that certain scenes take place in an almost void-like space, and alterations to practical visuals, such as the falling face of a saint from a fresco) and most scenes are shot in a distiinctive manner, lacking any horizontal angle, facing their subjects head on (eerily reminiscent of silent film staging). I did particularly like the use of occasionally showing small clips twice in quick succession, revealing at the end the parallels to a song's echo in a church. While I certainly can't count it as a personal favorite, there seems to be some context that I simply lack due to unfamiliarity with the historical subject, and there is a clearly unique artistic vision at play hear that should be appreciated. (4/5) Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 10/24/20 Full Review Read all reviews

The Color of Pomegranates

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