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Color Of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova)
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Director:
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Sergei Paradjanov |
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Country:
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Genre:
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Type:
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Color
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Year:
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1969
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Language:
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Amenian w/English subt.
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Length:
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88 mins.
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Available Media:
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16mm, 35mm, DVD, VHS, Other
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| Description |
Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1990) has been acclaimed as the greatest Russian
filmmaker to appear since the golden age of Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. His
baroque masterpiece, The Color Of Pomegranates, was banned in the
Soviet Union for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to "Socialist
realism"; its director, a tirelessly outspoken campaigner for human
rights, was convicted on a number of trumped-up charges and sentenced to
five years of hard labor in the gulag. A wave of protest from the international
film community led to his release in 1978.
Aesthetically the most extreme film ever made in the U.S.S.R., Pomegranates,
his hallucinatory epic account of the life of the 18th Century Armenian
national poet, Sayat Nova, conveys the glory of what a cinema of high art
can be like. Conceived as an extraordinary complex series of painterly tableaux
that recall Byzantine mosaics, the film is a dreamlike icon come-to-life
of astonishing beauty and rigor. It evokes the poet's childhood and youth,
his days as a troubadour at the court of King Heraclius II of Georgia, his
retreat to a monastery and his old age and death.
There has never been a film like this magical work. It fully justifies critic
Alexei Korotyukov's remark: "Paradjanov made films not about how things
are, but how they would have been had he been God." |
| Critical Acclaim |
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"Eye-catching...hypnotic...sharply surreal...the wild card at this year's New York Film Festival" - Janet Maslin, The New York Times |
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