Attend: Screening of the Day
The Color of Pomegranates | Sergei Paradjanov | USSR | 1969 | 77 minutes
UW Cinematheque, 4070 Vilas Hall, Friday, November 13, 7:00pm»
Pretty hard to pick a screening of the day in the middle of the WUD Film Marquee Film Festival and the openings of Labyrinth of Lies (Sundance) and Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (Marcus Point). But with all of the commotion this week we did not get a chance to write up a preview of the UW Cinematheque’s screening of Sergei Paradjanov’s 1969 classic, The Color of Pomegranates. The screening at 7:00pm on Friday, November 13 will be followed by a lecture by film scholar James Steffen, author of The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013).
Luckily, Steffen contributed some thoughts on The Color of Pomegranates at the UW Cinematheque blog. He explains that the film is a poetic fantasy inspired by the Armenian poet, Sayat-Nova:
During the 1960s, Sayat-Nova was officially celebrated in the Soviet Union both as a great Armenian national poet and as a symbol of the brotherhood of the peoples of the Transcaucasus, since he wrote in three languages: Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian. . .
. . .Parajanov introduces striking, at times baffling visual metaphors, surreal dream-visions, and an undercurrent of bawdy humor. Despite these provocations, the film expresses a profound reverence for the peoples of the Transcaucasus, their historical travails, and their deeply spiritual creative vision.
You can get as sense of the imagery in The Color of Pomegranates from this unofficial trailer (with some unfortunate music, in our opinion). It should inspire some of you to seek out the film on the big screen Friday night.