In 1938, poet Antonin
Artaud wrote his famous polemic, The
Theater and its Double, in which he bemoaned the fact
that contemporary theater was so bound to the written word, and
called for a radicalization of theater that stressed at atavistic
return to the theater’s origins of ritual. Audiences watching ritual
Balinese Theater, for example, could interpret the most symbolic
images intuitively without text, and Artaud proposed a new ritual
theater. While this fascinating idea has really never taken root in
the theater, there have been a few brave souls who have tried to
adapt a similar aesthetic to film. And perhaps no other filmmaker
was more inclined to let the most arcane images speak literally for
themselves then the late Sergei Paradzhanov.
Paradzhanov, who died in 1990, was an Armenian director who
gained some international acclaim with his stylized Ukrainian folk
tales in Shadows
of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), but when he made The
Color of Pomegranates in 1968, his highly poetic visions caused
a major stir within the Kremlin. Paradzahnov’s film was considered
dangerous enough to Soviet "realism" with its relentless Christian
iconography that it was not shown outside the Soviet Union until the
‘70s, while Paradzhanov himself was sent to a gulag. What the
Kremlin saw and suppressed was a valiant effort to portray poetry
directly in images without the intermediary of a traditional
screenplay.
The film is a series of tableaux based on the writings of 18th century
Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat Nova (the film’s true title is indeed
Sayat Nova). In a series of meticulously composed frames, the
static camera shoots a loosely connected series or surreal, poetic images
that tell the life story of the poet. We first see him as a young boy
being taught a love for books in a domed library whose roof is covered
with books, their pages open and blowing in the wind. He watches his
parents work at looms dying fabric the titular blood red color that
pervades nearly every scene.
We see his sexual confusion early on, when as a boy he watches men
through the portal of a public bath. When he reaches adulthood the sexual
confusion intensifies, and throughout the film we see his female ideal –
his muse and his protector – who bears a striking resemblance to the poet,
and who in effect becomes his female alter ego. He becomes a poet and
traveling troubadour, but his impressions of the world are only ones of
despair and unhappiness. He sees the world as a place of death, and as a
result, he joins a monastery where he becomes a priest and performs
marriages and funerals. He lives to old age in the monastery, visited by
the images and figures from his childhood, until his death.
The story presented is the model of simplicity, but the images are a
different story. Like religious icons come to life, Paradzhanov’s images
are stuffed with the arcane symbols of religion poetry: the silver
seashells of femininity, the golden spheres of childhood, and there are
roosters everywhere. It’s a difficult film to grapple with, in that
Paradzhanov presupposes an ignorance of Nova’s poetry and the audience is
left to sort out the allegories for themselves on a purely intuitive
level. The overall effect is much like walking through a museum and seeing
paintings that chronicle specific historical events; we can guess much of
their meaning without having to identify specific images. In that regard,
this is an extraordinarily difficult film.
On a purely visual level, it’s stunning. It recalls Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s framed images in the style of Giotto frescoes in his film of
Boccacio’s The
Decameron or his recreations of Bosch in his Canterbury
Tales. Most of the images here are exquisite: a burial where a
church fills up with sheep (borrowed from one of Luis Bunuel’s most famous
images from The
Exterminating Angel), a wonderful scene where a silver-painted
warrior fells an image of the Virgin Mary, and a scene where workmen
harvest wheat off the Monastery roof with scythes, wheat falling like
rain. And plenty of roosters. Living roosters, dead roosters, roosters
raining down on the poet as he dies (Jodorowsky cribbed this image for his
Santa
Sangre).
Cinema is often spoken of as a poetry of images, but film rarely
achieves that. Even more than Tarkovsky, Paradzhanov comes closest to a
pure, cinematic poetry – this film can be seen as the Armenian counterpart
to Jean Cocteau’s Blood
of a Poet – and the purity of his filmmaking makes this a
singular film experience.
From
PIF
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