918 The Color of Pomegranates

[jsteffe]

Huh... this is really interesting. I *never* change the color settings on my TV for individual shows, but I gave this a try.

Using a cooler image setting as mhofmann suggests does help with the white balance in some shots, I think because it partly compensates for the suppressed blue channel in the video. It still does not fix the problem of too much green in the image. But if you find it looks better than the untouched Blu-ray, why not?

You could also turn up the brightness, since the LUT apparently left the image too dark, as well. The prints I've seen have always had a bright, even appearance.

[Mr Sausage]

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[Kat]

It's often discussed as visual, obviously, but I saw it recently and the beautiful music struck me very much and the meetings of the two. The next day I saw Legend of the Suram Fortress and thought likewise.

I first saw it on late night tv in the 80s and fell in love with it, though until that recent screening it had not hit me as powerfully again, I was definitely overcomplicating it and this recent screening I just let wash over me, what a treat.

I'm not sure what I can say. I always meant to explore the music and will now.

It strikes me now that the closest to it I can think of may be Cocteau's Blood of a Poet, though I have no idea if he had any awareness of that (anyone else?). I do understand Tarkovsky was a huge influence. Bunuel's tone seems different.

I have the second sight dvd, though I've never watched it and my tv is on the blink at the mo. I think I watched a version i recorded on tape and again later onto hd over the years. But I was so happy to find it again and its inspiring affect fully, without having to know or searching too hard, but knowing something else instead, which feels right for Parajanov and what i've learned and re-learned of him. Probably helped by the screening being at a local art gallery where an artist/poet friend had some work on show inspired by it which set tone.

[Sloper]

I feel like I’m just starting to get my head around this film after a couple of viewings. I’ve also just read Chapter 4 of James Steffen’s The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, which was fascinating and helpful. Here are four passages from his account that really struck me, and that might provide some prompts for discussion:

Parajanov represents, in purely cinematic terms, how the young Arutin already displays a basic trait of poets – the ability to transform concrete sensory impressions into something new via metaphorical thinking. (p. 140)

[An] important theme running through the film is the struggle between asceticism and sensuality. Indeed, the film embodies this opposition through its very style: one the one hand it is constructed largely from a series of tableaux using a restricted color range and a limited degree of movement within the frame; on the other hand it displays a great deal of surface tactility and employs a densely layered soundtrack. In the childhood scenes this dynamic is established already in the episode portraying the young Arutin’s monastic education, which is followed immediately by the scenes depicting his sensual discovery of the world. (p. 144)

If The Color of Pomegranates represents in part a long vanished, alien past gazing back at us on the screen, these objects also gaze back at us as the sole remaining witnesses of that past. (p. 151)

[Sabir] Rizaev [a contemporary critic]…hinted at the film’s problematic treatment of gender: “But the main thing is that the spiritual anguish of man in medieval Armenia, as the literature, the astonishing miniatures, and the national architecture all attest, is full of poetic passion, which was always remarkably transparent, enviously strict, and emphatically manly [muzhestvennyi, which as Steffen points out can also be translated as ‘courageous’].” In contrast, he characterized the passions of the film’s hero as “luxurious,” a quality which he argued was alien to the era. (pp. 154-5)

And here are a few thoughts in response…

At the beginning of the film, we see pomegranates bleeding (not spilling) juice into the white cloth beneath them, without having been visibly cut or bitten; then we see a knife also bleeding into the white cloth, but because the object is now a knife, we associate the colour with blood; so maybe it is blood instead of (or as well as) pomegranate juice. These images are juxtaposed with recurring shots of an open manuscript and, on the soundtrack, a recurring line of poetry: ‘I am he whose life and soul are torment.’ So this is a person talking about himself, but we don’t see him, we see fruit, and a knife, and then fish and bread; and the fruit oozes juice without being touched, and the knife draws blood without being used.

Later on, when Sayat Nova enters the monastery, we see the other monks noisily eating pomegranates; later still we see a knife stabbing a wall, prompting blood to flow from it. These images (and sounds), though still metaphorical, denote literal gluttonous consumption, and literal violence, from which Sayat Nova distances himself. As a great-souled poet, he is always at one remove from reality, learning and communicating through figurative texts and images, evoking the colour and taste of a pomegranate without actually eating one, bleeding from mortal wounds that are emotional and invisible, and even making love from a distance (to the point of ‘ejaculating’ milk onto a glass screen that separates him from his beloved, in one infamous outtake).

Those opening images introduce us to the poet’s mindset – his modes of feeling and thought – and much of the film is about his sense of detachment and alienation from the world. He is ‘luxurious’ and revels in colours, tastes, and textures, but his luxuriousness is also that of the rarefied aesthete, burying himself in books, seeing and experiencing the world through beautiful but highly artificial caricatures of reality. Indeed, as portrayed in this film he even has an unstable relationship with his own physical identity, and his gender: he is played by three different actors, the first two keep re-appearing in other forms, and the second (who portrays his coming of age, his entry into manhood) is a woman (Sofiko Chiaureli).

My favourite sequence is the one where the young Arutin is instructed in the value of texts, and the importance of those who communicate texts to the masses; and then he carries a book up to the rooftop, pores over those extraordinary miniatures, and lies amongst an infinite number of drying manuscripts, in a shot that seems to defy the laws of physics by covering every vertical and horizontal surface with flapping books; is the boy lying down or standing up? He gradually assumes a cruciform posture, and I guess this is partly a secular appropriation of religious iconography – but it feels more like Arutin taking his place amongst these texts, opening himself up like them, facing the heavens but expressing an earthly perspective, receptive to the world but reflecting it back through figures and symbols, forever staring through a window which is also the wall of his cage. He is part of humanity but elevated from it, on a rooftop, a product and disseminator of higher learning.

As in a lot of medieval love poetry, there is a strong link between this detached, textual, figurative attitude to life, and the pain of loneliness or unfulfilled desire which lies at the core of the poet’s work. He is cursed to look at an everyday object like a curved hunk of bread, and see in its place a fish out of its element, curled up in agony; he is that fish, perpetually out of his element and trapped in a crass, brutal world. So he retreats into gorgeously illuminated dreams full of otherworldly colours, objects, and spatial relations, but he also stays in the world and travels through it, and that world infuses those beautiful dreams.

This ties into the archaism of the film as well. It reminded me of other films that try to adopt (as well as evoke) a ‘medieval’ aesthetic and point of view, especially Rohmer’s Perceval. There’s something so beautifully unforgiving about the fixed-camera aesthetic, the stylised pantomime action (even the horse isn’t allowed to trot like a normal horse), and the impenetrable coded tableaux. It really is like opening an old manuscript and finding some weird medieval allegory, with illustrations around the margins that might aid understanding or might just be jokes (which of course you also won’t understand), but still feeling totally absorbed by these voices from the past. There’s an echo here of Parajanov’s previous (completed) film’s title, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, only these feel more direct than shadows.

And that’s a nice paradox: we’re brought into what feels like very direct contact with a medieval voice that is characterised by indirectness; we’re engaging in a very ‘real’ way with something very artificial. That’s also the paradox of poetry, or art, in general, that it uses lies to give a special insight into truth. Medieval art is, to modern eyes, alarmingly artificial, static, and two-dimensional, but somehow also incredibly dynamic, full of texture and depth and emotion; it’s amazing that Parajanov captures these same qualities in this film. And it really does make you feel something profound about love, loneliness, and existential pain – I’d echo Kat’s point about the importance of the music (and the soundtrack in general). Tigran Mansuryan (in the ‘World is a Window’ documentary) talks about the effect of repeating the phrase ‘shatatsel e’, which he says means ‘increases’, and which I think in context refers to the ‘overflowing’ of the river banks; it is an unforgettably haunting sound.

[Kat]

I like that overflowing idea and a river, I'll think on that when(if at the moment) I get to watch my dvd. Sayat Nova must have been a musician too, and Paradjanov i understand was too. I now have cds.

when I first saw it, and I have a bias, I thought it looked at gender -- this time I was not sure. It was clearer to me the love story aspect. I also think that without an lgbtqi+ reading it is not unusual to conceptualise the soul (of men) as feminine, and this (for me) may also be related to poetry and a sort of mystical wholeness (sacred marriage). I thought there was symbolisation of the soul as a bird too (maybe, for me in my northern european viewing). My words may be crass, as this is done with such sensitivity of subject matter so beautiful and realised so beautifully.

It makes me think something else - some artists I wonder about, no matter how brilliant, always present something or look at something, are not wholly given up to it (maybe a dangerous thing). And I read them and watch them and spend all my time showing myself ways they are totally empathic and get it, yet i still remember them as clinical somehow in how I feel-- and I need to be careful, sometimes it may be the subject matter, and sometimes it may be proper for the subject not to be shown like that. But some you feel dance with it, maybe in it, flirting with identity shifts before coming back to sit with it respectfully, hopefully still buzzing with life. You'll guess where I am seeing Paradjanov? This film seems to overflow with having got something, and it may be something sacred, something poetry is intimately to do with, something about life at heights of experience.

edit - something/s i'd be better off not trying to say, and maybe it helps if the subject is loveable.

PPS 20/4 - I was just reading of Basho who in what I read was after staying as the subject - I was being soft saying comes back and sits alongside -- but what a great coincidence -- but it also somehow makes me wonder if part of that, any identity with the poet, was also a discovery of himself to himself, and then think how he dissed his pre '65 films and think this also embraces form, this discovery, maybe - and maybe or maybe its just me getting my dilution of it, but I think of his leaping photo, wheeeeee