One of cinema's greatest masterpieces, Sergei Parajanov's "The Color of Pomegranates," a biography of the Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova (King of Song) reveals the poet's life more through his poetry than a conventional narration of important events in Sayat Nova's life. We see the poet grow up, fall in love, enter a monastery and die, but these incidents are depicted in the context of what are images from Sergei Parajanov's imagination and Sayat Nova's poems, poems that are seen and rarely heard. Sofiko Chiaureli plays 5 roles, both male and female, and Sergei Parajanov writes, directs, edits, choreographs, works on costumes, design and decor and virtually every aspect of this one-of-a-kind work hailed as revolutionary by Mikhail Vartanov.

Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for The Color of Pomegranates (1969) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Spartak Bagashvili, Sofiko Chiaureli, Medea Japaridze, Vilen Galstyan, Gogi Gegechkori, Melkon Alekyan DIRECTOR: Sergei Parajanov CINEMATOGRAPHY: Suren Shakhbazyan MUSIC: Tigran Mansuryan PRODUCTION: Armenia Studio

Box Office Performance

Theatrical box office data is not publicly available for The Color of Pomegranates (1969). This may indicate a limited release, direct-to-streaming, or a release predating modern box office tracking.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Summary: 1 win & 1 nomination

CRITICAL RECEPTION

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 94% based on 18 retrospectively collected reviews, with an average rating of 7.2/10. In 1980 Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that "the film is elusive in any circumstances. However, anything this purely mysterious has its magic." The Color of Pomegranates made the Top 10 list for 1982 in Cahiers du cinéma.

Filmmaker Mikhail Vartanov has said, "Besides the film language suggested by Griffith and Eisenstein, the world cinema has not discovered anything revolutionarily new until The Color of Pomegranates, not counting the generally unaccepted language of the Andalusian Dog by Buñuel". According to Michelangelo Antonioni, "Parajanov's Color of Pomegranates is of a stunningly perfect beauty. Parajanov, in my opinion, is one of the best film directors in the world."

French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard said, "In the temple of cinema there are images, light and reality. Sergei Paradjanov was the master of that temple."

Film critic Gilbert Adair argued that "although in both style and content it gives us the impression, somehow, of predating the invention of the cinema, no historian of the medium who ignores The Color of Pomegranates can ever be taken seriously." and appeared in another list of the greatest films by Time Out.