“Watching Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, or Sayat Nova, is like opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed. On a very basic level, it’s a biography of the Armenian poet Sayat Nova, but before all else it’s a cinematic experience, and you come away remembering images, repeated expressive movements, costumes, objects, compositions, colors.” (Martin Scorsese)
The Film Foundation’s painstaking restoration of the original Armenian version of Sayat Nova –a cinematic Holy Grail– represents “the closest thing we have to Parajanov’s eccentric, at times bawdy, yet profound vision for the film,” according to scholar James Steffen. Bursting with enough pomegranates to stain the heavens, Sayat Nova is a stunning conflation of the medieval and modernist, of pagan and Christian influences, inhabiting the unlikely frontier between Soviet silent cinema and the outré artistry of such figures as Jack Smith and James Lee Byars. JQ
D, G: Sergei Parajanov
F: Suren Shajbazian
E: Marija Ponomarenko
DA: Stepan Andranikian, Mijail Arakelian
S: Yuri Sayadian
M: Tigran Mansurian
P: Aleksandr Melik-Sarkisian
CP: Armenfilm Studios
Sofiko Chiaureli, Melkon Alekian, Vilen Galustian, Georgi Gegechkori, Hovhannes (Onik)
The Film Foundation / World Cinema ProjectKristen Merola / Cecilia CenciarelliE kmerola@film-foundation.org - cecilia.cenciarelli@cineteca.bologna.itW film-foundation.org
The son of Armenians, he was born in Georgia, USSR, in 1924. He studied at Moscow’s State Institute of Cinematography, and since he began directing in 1954, he made more than fifteen titles, such as Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and The Legend of Suram Fortress (1985; awarded at the Rotterdam Film Festival). He died in 1990, at...
05 May 2015
25 April 2015
25 April 2015
