The Colour of Pomegranates + The House Is Black

This month’s PANTHEON screening is a double-bill, Sergei Parajanov’s extraordinary The Colour of Pomegranates (79 minutes), about the Armenian poet Sayat Nova, and, screening first, The House is Black (22 min), the only film directed by the great Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.

Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 20-minute introduction and talkback.

The Colour of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, Soviet Union, 1968, 79 min)
Parajanov was born to ethnically Armenian parents in Georgia, USSR, in 1924. Bisexual and out of step with Soviet policies towards regional states (he considered Armenia, Ukraine and Georgia as his three “motherlands”), he was persecuted by the authorities and spent almost as long in prison as he he did making films. Steeped in surrealism and folkloric symbolism, The Colour of Pomegranates was an affront to social realism. In the USSR it was reedited by another filmmaker and banned from export. A 16mm print was smuggled out of the country in 1977. It was not until the glasnost era that Parajanov’s work found official approval and he completed two more features before his death in 1990.

Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates is a poetic evocation of the life and work of 18th century Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova… Any one of its linked tableaux is a startling combination of Byzantine flatness, Quattrocento beatifics, and Islamic symmetry. It’s truly amazing how Parajanov coaxes this visionary mix of Fra Angelico and barnyard surrealism out of the most economical use imaginable of weather-beaten churches, casually tethered animals, and peasant grandmothers — punctuating his static compositions with deft jump cuts and Melies-style movie magic. The film has perhaps three lines of dialogue in an ebb-and-flow soundtrack that alternates wailing folk melodies and choral chanting. And nothing I know has ever used the faded green and orange tones of Soviet colour stock to greater effect—with its whitewashed backgrounds, The Colour of Pomegranates looks two hundred years old already… It’s a truly sublime and heartbreaking film.

J Hoberman, Village Voice

+

The House Is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, Iran, 1963, 22 min)
The only film directed by trailblazing feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzād finds unexpected grace where few would think to look: a leper colony where inhabitants live, worship, learn, play, and celebrate in a self-contained community cut off from the rest of the world. Through ruminative voiceover narration drawn from the Old Testament, the Koran, and the filmmaker’s own poetry and unflinching images that refuse to look away from physical difference, Farrokhzād creates a profoundly empathetic portrait of those cast off by society—an indelible face-to-face encounter with the humanity behind the disease. A key forerunner of the Iranian New Wave, The House Is Black is a triumph of transcendent lyricism from a visionary artist whose influence is only beginning to be fully appreciated.

The most powerful Iranian film I’ve seen — the most poetic as well as the most radically humanist.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die