The Color of Pomegranates looks great. Director Sergei Parajanov films textures so they pop out of the screen as much as two dimensional images can. This film's strengths are first and foremost visual. There is not much of a story in a traditional sense, nor is Parajanov interested in providing one. Whether this is a problem depends on whether the individual viewer is receptive to Parajanov's intent. The film follows the life of one man. We begin with this boy as a curious, young man in an Armenian village whose primary business involves mats (dyeing, washing, and hanging them). From there, the boy becomes a young man and joins a group of performers. The young man mimes his roles for an unseen audience. Next, our protagonist is older, in his thirties, and living in a monastery. He does much of the physical work at the monastery, but this viewer remained uncertain if the character was actually a priest. Finally, the man is older still (in his fifties), still residing at the monastery yet remaining distant from the other residents. He mostly wonders around outside, much as he did as an imaginative boy in the film's first section. This man is supposed to be an Armenian poet, but he is never shown writing. However, the film often transitions between sequences with a few poetic lines, which one assumes belong to the protagonist, it is not always clear how the verse applies to the images. That brings up back to the images. The film contains some eye popping ones. My personal favorite is in the first section, when as a boy, the protagonist climbs up to a roof to read a large book. On the roof and the adjourning slanted roofs are dozens of open books apparently drying. The image conjures up something magical about the printed word, books as sacred items. I have watched The Color of Pomegranates twice over a period of seventeen years. I have admired, and liked, it both times, yet I am still not quite converted to its greatness. I don't understand much of the film. This might be on account of my utter ignorance of Armenian history and folklore. Also, I tend to prefer my images in the context of a film with more of a narrative (Eraserhead, Orpheus, Stalker). This second reason may be why I prefer Sergei Parajanov's earlier film Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors to this one. Regardless, every film fan should watch The Color of Pomegranates once. I will probably return to the film again at some point. Maybe then I will find the film to be the masterpiece of cinema that I have read.

A super-stylized, surreal biography of Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova, whose life is depicted through non-narrative amalgamations of poetic images.Five minutes were cut (mainly due to religious censorship) for release in the Soviet Union beyond Armenia. It was refused a license for export outside of the Soviet Union and was withdrawn after a two months circulation in the Soviet Union. Allegedly those five minutes remain lost in a vault somewhere, unfortunately, and the current DVD releases are good but not great in terms of picture quality.At first I thought for sure Alejandro Jodorowsky was influenced by this film. In many respects they seem similar. But because of the way the timeline works out, now I wonder if it was even possible for him to have seen it... could their exploration of religious symbolism be coincidental?

This was another foreign film I found listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, as with many of the other titles I watched previously I didn't know what to expect, but I hoped for the best with this Armenian/Soviet Union film. Basically this film is supposed to be a biographical piece about Armenian poet Arutiun Sayadin, formerly the apprentice of a carpet weaver who rose to become first the court minstrel Sayat Nova ("the king of song"), and then an archbishop. But the film is much more surreal and obscure than that, and there seems to be hardly any real plot at all, it is simply a series of fascinating imagery, including by the leading actress Sofiko Chiaureli, playing both male and female characters. Rather than focusing on the depiction of actual events of the real person involved, the film is a depiction and symbolisation of the many ideas written in Sayadin's poetry, the actors on screen dress up and create things to portray religious iconography and nationalist folklore as big art pieces and illustrations. Starring Sofiko Chiaureli as Poet as a Youth / Poet's Love / Poet's Muse / Mime / Angel of Resurrection, Vilen Galstyan as Poet in the cloister, Melkon Alekyan as Poet as a child and Giorgi Gegechkori as Poet as an old man. The title comes from the fact that there are pomegranates seen on screen, and specifically the colour of them, the red colour is seen on screen in many of the artistic visuals, this film works especially well if you have keen eye or interest in art, you will not necessarily be able to decipher the ideas behind what is created in each scene, but it is a remarkable and beautiful biographical drama. Very good!

I stopped watching at "Grief, Grief, Grief". This is the worse film imaginable. Pretentious, boring, simply awful. I would have sent the Director to the Gulag just for the 30 minutes I was unfortunate enough to see. It is astonishing that this film has received so many positive votes. I watched the film with a roomful of film buffs and everybody was hurling abuse at the television after just 15 minutes! I had to switch the film off as I was afraid someone would throw it out of the window. Parajanov obviously really liked the poet that this film is an ode to, but unfortunately it doesn't change how I feel about it. He is no Tarkovsky!