The Color of Pomegranates is one of those films that I’ve always told myself I’d watch in a moment of contemplative quietude. Naturally, that moment didn’t come. Instead fate brought me to a screening of Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 rose-tinted collage at the Philadelphia Film Society theater. More specifically, I caught wind of my girlfriend and one of her roommates going to see it, so I invited myself.

To set the scene for the more atmospherically-minded reader, the movie theater was dead silent. Silent to the point that we, having arrived a single minute shy of the screening time, sheepishly set in the nearest seats, which happened to be reserved for disabled viewers. Even more sheepishly, we then, guided by one another’s whispers that were almost less audible than the surrounding silence, moved one row back. In my experience, it’s been rare to sit in a theater without at least a few disruptions, if not the addition of a full-blown fourth dimension. So right away, I knew I was in store for one of those ~arthouse movies~. I’m about four years shy of an undergraduate degree in film history, but my guess is that The Color of Pomegranates is one of the films that invented (or at the very least crystallized) that phrase in our lexicon.

According to my post-viewing research, the film was inspired by the life of Armenian poet-musician (or bard, depending on your penchant for flourish) Sayat Nova. Part Tarkovsky, part Holy Mountain, and part Mishima, it is an exercise in visual poetry. A squashing of wet books here, a reaping of the roof there, and all manner of optic splendor in between, and you have what amounts to an homage unsullied by hagiography. Interspersed between the barrage of carefully orchestrated imagery are fragments of Sayat Nova’s poetry, delineating for the viewer where one “chapter” ends and another begins. While the word “narrative” doesn’t necessarily spring to mind, there is a chronological thread between these chapters, surfaced almost exclusively by the aging of the central character: a stand-in for Sayat Nova himself. At the risk of completely butchering this thread and damning it to the wastebin with whatever Parajanov was weaving, it seems to depict his childhood (including what is almost undoubtedly his sexual awakening), his maturing and falling in love, his life after having taken the cloth, and finally his elder years and death (including a possible angel?). What matters though more than the accuracy of that half-hearted description is what is conveyed by pure virtue of medium.

As the late Jean-Luc Godard said, “In the temple of cinema there are images, light and reality. Sergei Parajanov was the master of that temple…” It’s a good proclamation. I like it. In this temple of what I would call cinematic impressionism, there is a remarkable capacity for expressing and soliciting emotion. Films like this one make me think of what first stole the hearts of moviegoers around the world in the Silent Era. The prickly hook of that silver screen, breaching our subconscious and prodding it with moving pictures that bely our very reality. We know what’s up there isn’t real, but there’s something real about it. Something almost more real than the world outside, if just for a moment. Stop me before I complete my transformation into Nicole Kidman. But, getting back to the point, what is it about imagery that moves us? It’s not dissimilar from the sensation of reading a good novel, where instead the projector is all in your own head. But giving you a tangible image, that changes the game. It forces you to see things a certain way and to reconcile what you see with what you expect, anticipate, or think you know. On one hand, I’m probably just circling why we have such strong opinions about adaptations. But, in the case of a film like this one, there’s no frame of reference, unless the history of Armenian poetry is familiar to you (which it very may well be, I salute you). Instead, everything is said while saying very little, if anything at all. All you get is a mirage of dialogue, significance bleeding out from the screen like the juice of the titular pomegranate over its bed of linen. We can piece a loose story together if we like, but the beauty is in these moments, these fragments of meaning. A woman’s chest, with one breast exposed and the other covered with a sea shell, is so filled with primordial meaning that it transcends whatever fleeting and superficial sexuality lingers on screen (even though its arguably the scene of a sexual awakening). It’s more than sexuality. It’s curiosity, bewilderment, gravitation, layered in the mind of every being that remembers what it felt like to not know what desire is or what safety is and to feel it nonetheless. A picture is worth a thousand words, to put more simply.

And that’s not even nearly the most surgically designed or ostentatious shot in the film. It may even be one of its most stripped down (shit), but it carries such weight nonetheless. Of course, there are countless more stunningly beautiful scenes, most carried by Parajanov’s muse Sofiko Chiaureli, who ascends to the lofty roosts of Mike Meyers and Peter Sellers by playing no less than six different roles (however ethereal and effervescent each may be). She’s a chameleon and yet incredibly recognizable, injecting a unique and mesmerizing countenance into each character she inhabits. I was obliged to remember Margarita Terekhova in Mirror, who similarly provoked numerous double takes as she shifted fluidly from mother to wife and to mother again. But these beautiful scenes, lush with color and iconography, differ in at least one notable way from the work of Tarkovsky and his acolytes. In my review of Stalker, I wrote how his meditative shots seem suffused with a purposeful and secret language. How, regardless of time and however rapt your attention is, it feels like the filmmaker has withheld the thousand words that we expect to read in each picture. In contrast, the methodical movements and imagery conjured in Pomegranates comes across as transparent. Less shrouded in arcane knowledge and instead confronting the viewer, bringing them face to face with exactly what is on the screen. There is something incredibly honest and forthright about Parajanov’s work. It’s poetry in the purest sense — appealing to all who consume it because it appeals to what makes us human, even if we can’t articulate it ourselves.