The Colour of Pomegranates: Cinema as Illuminated Manuscript

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Most films ask you to follow. Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) asks you to look, the way you’d look at a page of an illuminated Gospel — a thing built to be dwelt on rather than turned. It runs about seventy-eight minutes, purports to tell the life of the eighteenth-century Armenian troubadour Sayat-Nova, and contains almost nothing a screenwriting manual would recognise as a scene. People rarely move toward a goal. The camera almost never pans. What you get instead is a sequence of frontal, jewel-coloured compositions, each held long enough for the objects inside it to start meaning something.

Armenian Cinema - vo.rs

The Colour of Pomegranates: Cinema as Illuminated Manuscript