This wedding tableau reminds me of The Color of Pomegranates. Like Grossman’s wedding dance, the film moves “slowly and solemnly,” suggesting that, despite suffering, there is something—artistic creation, sacred ceremony—that endures.
At one level, The Color of Pomegranates has a simple, linear plot. It follows the life of Sayat-Nova, an eighteenth-century Armenian troubadour-poet, moving from his childhood spent dying wool and loving books; to his years at the royal court, where he plays the lyre, falls in love with the king’s sister, and is ultimately banished; to his later years as a monk, baptizing and burying and consecrating; finally, to his death.
But if ever there were a work that suffers from plot summary, this is it. At the beginning of the film, white-on-black text informs us that this is:
not the story of a poet’s life. Instead, the filmmaker has attempted to recreate the world of a poet—the modulation of his soul, his passions, and his torments—broadly utilizing the symbolism and allegories of medieval Armenian troubadours.
Parajanov is a realist; it’s just that he’s after a deeper realism than we’re accustomed to.
Indeed, the film doesn’t narrate Sayat-Nova’s life so much as suggest it by a series of rigorously composed images. Suffused in bright blues and reds and golds, largely lacking dialogue, the images resemble Armenian illuminated miniatures—highly stylized paintings that have begun to move, often in ritualized, choreographed fashion. (The camera itself remains still throughout.)
Some of Parajanov’s images are purely symbolic: three pomegranates bleeding red onto a white sheet; a woman, dressed in red and black, holding a seashell over her left breast, the shell caressed by white lace. Others exist somewhere between visual poetry and narrative incident: an older Sayat-Nova digs a grave in the floor of a cathedral, surrounded by hundreds of lambs.
Intercut with these images are scraps of language, sometimes voiced and sometimes presented on screen, almost all centering on the experiences of passion and suffering that lead to poetry and religion: “I am the man whose life and soul are torment”; “The bread you offered was beautiful, but the earth is more beautiful still.”
In other words, Parajanov takes on many of the same questions as Grossman: Why do we suffer? What value do beauty and ritual have in our vale of tears? The Color of Pomegranates may be less flexible in its tone than An Armenian Sketchbook. But it’s just as daring in the terrain it covers—and more daring in its rigorous commitment to a distinctive form and style.
Did The Color of Pomegranates move you as much as it moved me, Griffin? How would you compare Parajanov’s brand of realism to Grossman’s?
**
Tony,
I think you’re absolutely right: both Grossman and Parajanov share a deep commitment to realism, to art as a means of getting at the truth. It’s just that their emphasis falls on different spheres of human activity: Grossman on the political, and Parajanov on the numinous.
Grossman approaches religion skeptically, but he’s barely able to suppress his curiosity. Recall the scene when he drives into the mountains, through the Semyonov Pass. Struck by the “vastness of the sky and the infinite forest,” Grossman daydreams about performing “heroic feats of asceticism” and living as a hermit. But then something holds him back, as he makes “a beast of himself,” getting drunk and waking up in a nauseous stupor.
The spiritual purity Grossman seeks is rooted not “in the words of a priest in his church” (he’d been disheartened by his meeting with the worldly Vazgen I, Catholicos of All Armenians) but in something more vital. It’s in the “awkward, ungrammatical peasant speech” of ordinary villagers, far removed from the capital, Yerevan, that Grossman finds a “great power”—that is, an unpretentious faith that’s one and the same “with everything in their long hard lives.”