A digitally restored version of Armenian director Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 ‘cinematic Holy Grail’ is set to dazzle the London film festival 2014 this week, The Guardian said.
When Martin Scorsese introduced his Film Foundation’s newly restored version of The Colour of Pomegranates at the Toronto film festival in September he told the expectant audience they were going to witness images and visions “pretty much unlike anything in cinema history”.
The 1969 Armenian film, voted 84th best of all-time in the most recent Sight & Sound magazine greatest movies poll, only gained a belated official release in western cinemas in 1982, but even the cinephiles and critics who have lauded the film with such extravagant praise since should now prepare to see Sergei Parajanov’s masterpiece afresh.
The digital restoration, completed in conjunction with Cineteca di Bologna, comes as close as possible to the director’s original vision and it is this version, described by critic and Toronto festival programmer James Quandt as “a cinematic Holy Grail”, which will screen at the London film festival in October.
Four years after Parajanov completed what was then titled Sayat Nova – his dazzling film poem inspired by the life of the eponymous 18th-century poet and musician – he was arrested by the Soviet authorities and spent more than three years in jail while suffering the indignity of seeing his film re-edited and given a limited release.
The first work of his mature period, and the feature which brought Parajanov to international attention, was Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), a story of doomed love among feuding families in the harsh Carpathian mountains. But it was The Colour of Pomegranates, organised as chapters depicting the life of Sayat Nova in a series of poetic, dreamlike tableaux which was to cement his legacy and led the late Gilbert Adair to state in his book Flickers that “although in both style and content it gives us the impression, somehow, of predating the invention of the cinema, no historian of the medium who ignores The Colour of Pomegranates can ever be taken seriously”.
According to The Guardian, The Colour of Pomegranates can be a bewildering experience for western viewers or, indeed, for anyone not steeped in the history of the region in which it is set, but the magnitude of Parajanov’s cinematic achievement is clear to see. At the Toronto screening, Scorsese said: “I didn’t know any more about Sayat Nova at the end of the picture than I knew at the beginning, but instead what Parajanov did was he opened a door into a timeless cinematic experience.”
Jean-Luc Godard, one of the directors who fought for Parajanov’s release in the 1970s, said: “I think you have to live at least 15 miles away and feel the need to walk there on foot to see [The Colour of Pomegranates]. If you feel that need and give it that faith, the film can give you everything you could wish.”
