The Color of Pomegranates · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Three pomegranates lie on white cloth, and a stain spreads beneath them in the rough shape of a kingdom. A dagger is laid across the linen. Nobody acts; nobody explains. The fruit is already broken, the red already soaking outward, and Parajanov simply holds the frame until you stop waiting for a story and start reading the picture. That stain is the whole film in miniature — meaning carried not by what happens but by what is arranged, frontally, for your eye.

Most cinema runs on a simple motor: a character sees a situation and acts to change it. Deleuze called that the movement-image, and it governs almost everything from a chase to a melodrama. The Color of Pomegranates unplugs the motor. There is no scene-level cause and effect, almost no dialogue, no dramatized conflict — only a succession of near-static tableaux of bodies, textiles, censers, looms, slaughtered and living animals. What replaces action is what Deleuze named the pure optical and sound situation, the opsign: an image so emptied of available action that the character, and you, can only look and listen. The young Sayat-Nova kneels among books left open to dry on a monastery roof, their pages lifting in the wind. He does nothing. He receives. Deleuze's word for this figure is the seer (voyant) — not an agent who changes a world but a watcher who endures and absorbs it. Parajanov makes an entire life out of seers: the poet is less a man who lived than a sensibility through which textures, words, and rituals passed.

Freed from action, the bodies become something stranger. Sofiko Chiaureli faces the lens square-on, immobile, playing both the boy poet and his muse — the same frontal, reflecting face given to two souls. Deleuze would call that face a qualisign: a contour-face holding a single quality — wonder, contemplation — rather than reacting to anything. And the poses themselves, the ritualized repeated gestures, the hands arranged as in a fresco, are what he called the gest: a posture that exposes a relation instead of advancing a plot. This is cinema-of-the-body in its most ceremonial form. The actors don't embody psychology; they hold attitudes, the way a saint in an icon holds a gesture forever. Performance here is closer to liturgical pantomime than to acting, and that is the point — Parajanov reprises the isolated, anti-naturalistic faces of Dreyer's Joan of Arc and the frozen hieratic poses of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, but drains them of dramatic crisis until only the icon remains.

Because nothing moves it for us, the frame asks to be deciphered. Deleuze called this the lectosign: the image that loses its self-evidence and becomes legible, something you read rather than simply watch. Parajanov's planimetric compositions — shallow, depth suppressed, layered with carpet pattern and manuscript color — are built exactly like an illuminated page. The objects are not props but fetishes in the precise sense: part-objects charged with compulsive force. The shell, the dagger, the dyed wool, the pomegranate recur and accrete meaning across chapters the way a poem's images rhyme. You learn to read them.

Then there is the sound, and here the film does something radical. The track is non-synchronous: liturgical chant, folk instruments, looped ritual noise, and recited verse laid over silent posed images. Voice and body never lock. Deleuze, writing on Straub and Duras, called this heautonomy — sound and image as two self-standing wholes that touch only across a gap. The recited Sayat-Nova is not dialogue but a speech-act, a legending voice testifying to a life it never quite synchronizes with. The film becomes a page read aloud while a different page is shown.

Its lineage is a quiet act of sabotage. Parajanov inherits the dialectical montage of Eisenstein's October, where colliding emblematic objects strike a third meaning. But where Eisenstein's cuts are kinetic, hurling forward, Parajanov freezes the collision into juxtaposed stills. He takes Dovzhenko's Earth — agrarian images strung paratactically so plastic rhythm overrides plot — and pushes it past lyricism into pure iconography. Soviet montage was an engine of revolutionary energy; he turns it contemplative, devotional, still. Beside Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, made the same decade, the screen stops being a window onto action and becomes a devotional surface, an icon you contemplate.

What did this do to film as an art? It proved that a feature could abandon narrative causality entirely and still hold an audience for ninety minutes — that cinema could be a sequence of charged still images, a reliquary rather than a told story, and lose none of its force. It is fitting that the film survives mainly in Yutkevich's re-edit, reordered and labeled with chapter cards by a second hand: a film this anti-narrative could be reshuffled and still mean, because its meaning never lived in the order of events. Watch it once more and try not to follow it. Read it. Let each frame be a page that has been waiting, patiently, for your eye to slow down enough to turn it.