A life in moving image

               The Colour of Pomegranates.

A wonderful film, directed by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1989.)  With this film he explores the poetic potential of cinema, creating a series of autonomous images, directly inspired by the Armenian troubadour-poet Aruthin Sayadian (1712-1795) , who was known as Sayat-Nova.  Born in the capital Georgia, Tiblisi, Sayat-Nova began his career as a wool-dyer , educated by the Armenian Church, he composed hundreds of songs and poems. He rose to become a poet in the royal courts of Tiblisi and Telavi in Eastern Georgia. Later in life, after the death of his wife Sayat-Nova became a monk at Haghpat monastery; he lived there until his death at the hands of the Persian army, when Agha Mohammed Khan sacked Armenia. His songs are still sung in Caucasus today. 

Paradjanov has describes the film as a series of Persian miniatures. Camera fixed in place as in early cinema, and stylised animals and characters move closer and further away, objects relating to each other in a two-dimensional manner. 

"Paradjanov's style is punctuated by the blurring of the line between symbolic and ethnographic film making.."

The colour of Pomegranates is a heady mixture of styles and ideas both archaic and modernist- it is this iconoclastic director's masterpiece.