The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
★★ — The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
There are films that tell stories, and there are films that exist as something closer to moving paintings. The Colour of Pomegranates, released in 1969 and produced by Armenia Studio under the Soviet system, sits firmly, almost defiantly, in the second category. Based loosely on the life of Sayat-Nova, the celebrated 18th-century Armenian poet and court musician, the film makes no real attempt at conventional biography. Instead, director Sergei Parajanov organises the material into a sequence of largely static visual tableaux drawn from Sayat-Nova's own poetry, tracing a life from childhood through to death in a manner that owes far more to iconographic religious art than to anything you might recognise as cinema in the traditional sense. The result is a film that has spent decades sitting at the centre of arguments about what film can and should be, which is either a recommendation or a warning, depending on your temperament.
Parajanov was already an established figure within Soviet cinema when he made this film, though his career was marked by persistent tension with Soviet authorities who found his work too formalist and insufficiently ideological. That political friction gives the film an added layer of context: its refusal to conform was not simply an aesthetic choice but something of a personal statement. The production leans almost entirely on visual language, with the camera placed at a fixed distance from its subjects for much of the runtime, favouring composition and colour over movement or drama. For comparison with other Soviet films of the era that also pushed against mainstream expectations, it is worth looking at how the tradition of formal experimentation runs through films like Man with a Movie Camera and Earth, both of which similarly prioritised image and rhythm over conventional narrative. Parajanov is working in a recognisable lineage, even if he takes it somewhere quite distinct.
The cast includes Sofiko Chiaureli, who takes on multiple roles across the film's episodic structure, as well as Spartak Bagashvili, Medea Japaridze, Vilen Galstyan, and Gogi Gegechkori. Because the film dispenses with dialogue and conventional character arcs, the performers function less as actors in any familiar sense and more as figures within a series of composed images, present to embody symbolic meaning rather than to convey psychological interiority. It is a film very much of its late 1960s moment, sitting alongside other European and international art cinema of the period (you might think of Persona from the same decade as another film that tests the patience of viewers expecting something more conventionally structured) in its willingness to prioritise form over accessibility. Whether that willingness reads as courage or self-indulgence is, rather famously, a matter of fierce disagreement among those who have seen it.
The Colour of Pomegranates (1969), Sergei Parajanov's much-lauded Soviet Armenian arthouse film, is the kind of movie that wins rapturous praise from cinephiles and leaves the some of us checking our watches. Presented as a series of painterly tableaux loosely inspired by the life of 18th-century poet Sayat-Nova, it abandons narrative, dialogue, and conventional pacing entirely in favor of static, highly stylized images: people posing with fruit, slow-motion fabric unfurling, symbolic gestures repeated like religious ritual. Visually, sure, it's striking. Every frame looks like a Renaissance painting come to life, meticulously composed and drenched in saturated color. But without story, character, or emotional momentum, it becomes a museum exhibit you're forced to sit through for 75 minutes. The pacing is awfully slow, the symbolism opaque to the point of alienation, and the overall effect less transcendent than tedious. What some call "poetic," others (like me) experience as pretentious self-indulgence, art made for other artists to admire, not for the general watcher to connect with. It doesn't lack technical craft, but because as a film to watch, it's inert, inaccessible, and profoundly boring (to me). I respect that it's a landmark of experimental cinema. I just don't have to enjoy sitting through it. Some movies are important. That doesn't mean they're good to actually watch. This one isn't.
And honestly, I find it hard to argue with that reading. I came to this one with genuine goodwill and a reasonable amount of patience for slow, formally ambitious cinema, and I still found the experience more dutiful than enjoyable. There is a version of the conversation around films like this one where admitting boredom is treated as a kind of confession of inadequacy, as though the fault lies with the viewer for not being sufficiently attuned. I don't buy that. Cinema, even at its most experimental, has some obligation to give you something to hold onto, and for me this one never quite manages it. I've sat through other films that take their time and demand effort, including Winter Light and a few others reviewed on this very blog, and come out the other side feeling the effort was worth it. Here, I mostly just felt the 80 minutes. Important, yes. A pleasure to watch, not for me.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 1969 | Watched: 2026-03-11
Trailer
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Soviet Union: Viy (1967) · Earth (1930) · By the Bluest of Seas (1936) · Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More history: Apocalypto (2006) · Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury (2013) · Harakiri (1962) · Night and Fog (1956)
