The Color of Pomegranates

Tomorrow, 7 November, is Lidong, the Start of Winter. A classical Chinese almanac defines the term as the point when 'all things are gathered in and stored away' — the moment in the year when whatever must be kept is brought indoors. Today pairs two films that each fold an entire era into a single work. Farewell My Concubine (1993) gathers half a century of Chinese history into one Peking opera; The Color of Pomegranates (1969) spreads the life of an eighteenth-century Armenian poet across a sequence of near-still images. In one, a person is swallowed by a role; in the other, a person is laid out as a picture. Made 24 years apart at opposite ends of Eurasia, both ask the same question: as the world outside keeps being rewritten, can anyone still gather themselves back in?

它不按故事讲。以 18 世纪亚美尼亚诗人 Sayat-Nova 为题，却几乎没有对白，也不去演他做过什么；镜头摆出一幅幅近乎静止的画面——染坊里提起的毛线、摊开的手抄书页、石榴剖开后洇开的汁液、修道院的石墙——由字幕卡分成童年、青年、宫廷、修道院、梦、老年等章节。声音、音乐与偶尔的吟唱一直在，只是不负责解释。看它更像翻一本被拆散的画册：每一页都摆得很满，页与页之间得由你自己补上。

It regularly appears on lists of the greatest films ever made: 84th in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, in Cahiers du cinéma's top ten for 1982, and holding a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 18 retrospectively collected reviews. Its claim to that status, however, is that it very nearly abolishes acting. Parajanov said his inspiration was the Armenian illuminated miniature, and that he wanted 'that inner dynamic that comes from inside the picture, the forms and the dramaturgy of colour'; he also described the film as a series of Persian miniatures. The result is a chain of near-static, frontal compositions in which people and objects are arranged as pictures, action is reduced to a minimum, and colour, fabric, utensils and ritual do the work of plot. Sofiko Chiaureli plays six roles, male and female among them, so that one face can be the poet, his lover and his muse in different chapters. None of this was acceptable in the Soviet Union of 1969. Censors objected that the film failed to educate the public about the poet: the title was changed from Sayat-Nova to The Color of Pomegranates, the poet's name was removed from the credits and chapter titles, and Sergei Yutkevich cut several minutes, reordered sequences and supplied new Russian chapter titles; outside Armenia the film received only a limited release. Michelangelo Antonioni called it 'of a stunningly perfect beauty'. Mikhail Vartanov went further, placing it beside the linguistic revolutions of Griffith and Eisenstein. In 2014 a digital restoration by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna returned it to the screen at the 67th Cannes Film Festival.