THE MISSING LINK: Sergei Parajanov's THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (1969, dir by Sergei Parajanov, USSR, 78mns)

Have you ever caught up with a movie you had meant to see for years (maybe even. . .gulp. . .decades) and realized, watching, it was the missing link to an entire sub-genre of movies you HAD seen?

Such was the case for this writer after finally watching Armenian director Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 cinematic frontier crossing The Color of Pomegranates.

A movie “about” 18th century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, it really is more like an epic poetic ode. Busting at the seams with mind-exploding, eye melting, irreducible imagery, The Color of Pomegranates defies easy explanation. The experience of watching it is really what it’s about. Not the story. Not the content. Not the message.

The disorientation it creates puts you into a kind of fugue state. And that seems to be the point.

Wait a second, Matthew Barney. . .

Once you see The Color of Pomegranates, you understand where movies like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre come from. After watching The Color of Pomegranates, you feel like you better understand the possible subconscious origins of something like Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle. And lesser efforts (which will go unnamed) by visually oriented cinematic sensualists only suffer in comparison. Their works are all surface visual riot with little of the mountain peak scaling ambition of Parajanov.

This still frame only begins to capture the disorientation one experiences actually watching this scene. . .

The movie alternates between intertitles that appear to quote Sayat-Nova with scenes/sequences often staged with a static camera and lots of kinesethetic movement of human and animal bodies, color, spiritual and natural objects WITHIN the frame. The camera angle is occasionally disorienting. Are we looking down at something? Are we looking up at something?

Statue-esque enigmatic women run beautiful swaths of colored lace in front of their eyes. Fabrics spontaneously erupt in geysers of blood (the “color of pomegranates” referred to in the title). A young boy, ostensibly the poet as a child, observes many things: Russian Orthodox Christian services, near homo-erotic bathhouse tableaux, the daily working class killing of animals for food.

The dynamic alternation between text, tableaux, shocking (without ever being mindlessly provocative) imagery, spirituality, sensuality eventually puts the viewer in a poetic fugue like state.

Fashion week could take some tips from this movie. . .

The movie may exhaust in its ask for the audience’s engagement in its strange parade of weird imagery. But it is such a singular experience, the work is worth it.

Like almost all truly sui-generis works of art, creativity, The Color of Pomegranates may be most important in how it breaks with the widely held movie conventions that came before it. Even Godard’s New Wave masterpieces told a story and often found ways to entertain in a recognizable “classic” way. The Color of Pomegranates is iconoclastic like Kubrick’s 2001 and Tarkovsky’s body of work.

Wait. . .what’s going on? Whatever. . .I’m just going to let the poetry wash over me

It is its own thing.

It may not be wise to try to re-attempt what Parajanov accomplishes in The Color of Pomegrantes (or in a different way in his equally stunning Ukranian made Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors). But The Color of Pomegrantes can serve as a reference and inspiration for daring to attempt one’s own truly felt sense of cinematic poetry.

And hell. . .this writer wouldn’t be above cribbing some of the editing effect as well. The alternation of disorienting movement/framing with bold static tableux is so dynamic few movies capture the power of contrasting alternation in edits/montage/cuts as strongly as this one.

So all of this is to say if you’re a restless cinematic soul looking for that next “cinema can do this?!?!” fix, watch The Color of Pomegranates.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.