A completely strange film that's worth watching - once

To put it mildly, Sergei Parajanov's 1969 film, The Color of Pomegranate, ostensibly a cinematic protrayal of the life of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova (I'd never heard of him, either) is an acquired taste and is not a film for all viewers. That said, there is no other film like it before or since, so for viewers interested in the extremes of cinema this is worth a look at least. Parajanov, a Soviet director, says at the outset that this is not a conventional biopic about the events in the life of a poet; rather, it's an attempt to examine the mind and the emotions of the writer in a completely unconventional manner. Every shot in the film is a like a small tableaux staged in front of a stable camera; the camera, in fact, never moves during any shot and most of the scenes consist of a single shot with a duration of about 30 seconds to a minute. The characters posed in each shot move slowly and ritualistically, as in Noh theater or Balinese dance, and there's often a musical accompaniment of monkish chanting and the tuning of ancient instruments. Loosely, we follow the life of the poet, who ages over the course of the film, from childhood interest in the beautiful colors of dyed fabrics (hence the title), to fascination w/ books, to falling in love, the some kind of religious immersion in a monastery, to bringing his work and ideas to the world, to tiredness and death. Each of the many tableaux scenes in the film is visually interesting; more are entirely weird - somewhat in the tradition of Dada and the Surreal: the poet digging a grave inside the nave of a church as the church gradually fills with a massive herd of sheep; a woman dancing holding a live chicken on an outstretched arm; a row of hooded monks in silhouette bowing before a black horse and rider; the slaughter of three lambs; and so on. Clearly this film is a gift to graduate students and scholars, who can debate and dissect forever the system of imagery that drives the film. I'm not sure I'd ever watch it again, but the amazing thing is that it was made at all, especially in the USSR: There is nothing that I can see in this film that would remotely support the Soviet ideologies, nothing about workers or the working classes, and it's about as far from realism as cinema can get - and about as far from comprehensible as well.