I wanted to see Pajaranov's The Colour of Pomegranates. Mainly, because I knew it's respected - critics voted it the 84th best film ever in the last BFI poll - and a quick wikipedia check told me to expect an "art" film, told "visually and poetically rather than literally". Interesting!
So I trudge along to the cinema, and read their write-up of the masterpiece. They had this to say:
A breath-taking fusion of poetry, ethnography, and cinema, Sergei Parajanov’s masterwork overflows with unforgettable images and sounds. In a series of tableaux that blend the tactile with the abstract, The Colour of Pomegranates revives the splendours of Armenian culture through the story of the eighteenth-century troubadour Sayat-Nova, charting his intellectual, artistic, and spiritual growth through iconographic compositions rather than traditional narrative. The film’s tapestry of folklore and metaphor departed from the realism that dominated the Soviet cinema of its era, leading authorities to block its distribution, with rare underground screenings presenting it in a restructured form.
Sounds exciting! Waiting for the film to start, I hopped on Google to see what the 'great minds' of cinema have to say about it. With eerie consistency, all their comments do exactly the same things:
1) stress the purely visual aspect of the film,
2) mention next-to-nothing about the content of the film other than the protagonist's name, job and nationality
3) inevitability veer off into some insinuations and sweeping statements wherein the phrases "Soviet" and "Authorities" are placed as close as possible to each other. [These don't always feel meticulously well-researched and mostly come off as a cheap attempt to titillate by portraying the film as "controversial", just as so many marketing campaigns for Clockwork Orange, Realm of The Senses, etc. so tediously do - but with the added bonus that in this case the "controversial" label will conjure up - in a liberalism-sodden mind - dramatic images of gulags and Stalin personally strangling his 100 zillion victims or however many they say it is now]
Some examples: Criterion say it's a "feast for the eyes". It's "entrancing" and "surreal". "Dazzling", in fact. Full of "fantastical imagery". "Dreamlike" and "painterly", says Time Out. Antononioi says it's filled with "stunningly perfect beauty". Martin Scorsese tells me I'm about to "witness images and visions “pretty much unlike anything in cinema history”."
Wow. Sounds great. Images and visions of what, though? Images denoting what?
Because.... er... at risk of sounding like the nerd here, that's what an image is, isn't it? A visual representation of something? So what do these amazing images represent? Surely one of you film brainiacs is about to tell me what all these stunning images are about? Or are they just amazing?
Sure enough, as I wander through the online information, scholars are falling over each other to tell me that the film "draws upon “Ukrainian, Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijani visual and musical culture", that it's full of "stylistic flourishes" and that the "imagery flows out of the tradition of Persian miniature painting". But where is the scholar who will tell me something about the content? Nowhere, apparently.
I don't find one article discussing anything about Sayat-Nova's life, the life which Pajaranov chose to immortalise in this film.
Which seems strange, perhaps? Or maybe not. Because, what all Western cinephiles seem to agree on is that the content of this film are irrelevant to appreciating or understanding it. This is not just implied (by the constant repetition of words like "dazzling" and the conspicuous absence of any discussion of the content): it's actually acknowledged and advocated!
The Guardian admits, without a shred of shame:
"The Colour of Pomegranates can be a bewildering experience for western viewers or, indeed, for anyone not steeped in the history of the region in which it is set, but the magnitude of Parajanov’s cinematic achievement is clear to see."
In perfect agreement was Time Out, saying:
"Much of its meaning must remain essentially specific to the culture from which the film springs, and no one could pretend that it's all readily accessible".
While the New York Times tells me the film is "eye-catching, hynoptic and almost wholly obscure" and agrees that "the film is elusive in any circumstances. However, anything this purely mysterious has its magic."
In perfect agreement was Time Out, saying:
"Much of its meaning must remain essentially specific to the culture from which the film springs, and no one could pretend that it's all readily accessible".
While the New York Times tells me the film is "eye-catching, hynoptic and almost wholly obscure" and agrees that "the film is elusive in any circumstances. However, anything this purely mysterious has its magic."
So that's put my mind at rest. There's a complete consensus on 2 things:
A) I'm going to be bewildered by this strange foreign film.
B) but it's still amazing, pretty much because of how it won't make sense!
In fact, here's Scorsese, the patron saint of foreign-film enthusiasts, to put us at ease even more:
"I didn’t know any more about Sayat Nova at the end of the picture than I knew at the beginning, but instead what Parajanov did was he opened a door into a timeless cinematic experience.”
A) I'm going to be bewildered by this strange foreign film.
B) but it's still amazing, pretty much because of how it won't make sense!
In fact, here's Scorsese, the patron saint of foreign-film enthusiasts, to put us at ease even more:
"I didn’t know any more about Sayat Nova at the end of the picture than I knew at the beginning, but instead what Parajanov did was he opened a door into a timeless cinematic experience.”
So that's fine then. I don't have to get what the director's trying to say! I don't have to think about such tedious things as what it might mean to its makers and intended audience. That would be stupid!
I'm supposed to just sit back, unplug my brain and enjoy the experience. Like a dog wagging along to the bright colours on the TV screen.
Finally, just before the film starts, there are several slides of information that come up on the screen. Lots of white text on a black background telling me the stuff I need to know just before we get into it. Honestly, I've never seen so much information before the film before.
And what did this tell me? Nothing. All it did was discuss at length the intricacies of some 'tussle' between Pajaranov and the censors over the name of this film. Apparently the "Soviet censors" thought the title inappropriate and changed it to the Colour of Pomegranates, although, the screen now defiantly tell us, the original title "Sayat-Nova" is "how the film is known across the world". Except it's not, though, is it, because I just bought a ticket to see something called "The Colour of Pomegranates"?
But more importantly, I don't care who titled it what at which stage of it's life! How incredibly tedious! Imagine if the Fast and the Furious franchise thought we wanted to read 500 words of text about the debates they had between the names "2 Fast 2 Furious" or "Paul Walker In a Car Again".
But anyway, for some reason, the words "Soviet" and "authorities" parade around in front of us on screen for a few minutes, hoping for some applause and someone in a MAGA hat to shout "down with commies". Nobody does, so it all feels a bit pointless. Nobody there was as angry at the USSR as the screen assumed we all were?
I'm supposed to just sit back, unplug my brain and enjoy the experience. Like a dog wagging along to the bright colours on the TV screen.
Finally, just before the film starts, there are several slides of information that come up on the screen. Lots of white text on a black background telling me the stuff I need to know just before we get into it. Honestly, I've never seen so much information before the film before.
And what did this tell me? Nothing. All it did was discuss at length the intricacies of some 'tussle' between Pajaranov and the censors over the name of this film. Apparently the "Soviet censors" thought the title inappropriate and changed it to the Colour of Pomegranates, although, the screen now defiantly tell us, the original title "Sayat-Nova" is "how the film is known across the world". Except it's not, though, is it, because I just bought a ticket to see something called "The Colour of Pomegranates"?
But more importantly, I don't care who titled it what at which stage of it's life! How incredibly tedious! Imagine if the Fast and the Furious franchise thought we wanted to read 500 words of text about the debates they had between the names "2 Fast 2 Furious" or "Paul Walker In a Car Again".
But anyway, for some reason, the words "Soviet" and "authorities" parade around in front of us on screen for a few minutes, hoping for some applause and someone in a MAGA hat to shout "down with commies". Nobody does, so it all feels a bit pointless. Nobody there was as angry at the USSR as the screen assumed we all were?
But eventually, the film starts. And guess what? It is quite clearly telling the story, in chronological order, of this poor poet's life. This real poet's real life which Pajaranov researched and brought to the screen. A troubled, tragic, romantic, religious and violent life, by the way. But a life that the Western film establishment have decided is completely irrelevant because they'd rather look at the bright red colour on screen and think about how great it would look on a scatter cushion.
The film tells Sayat-Nova's life story from his birth to his death! It's divided into chapter headings called things like "Meeting the Angel of Death (Poet Buries His Love)"!
And yet still none of you cinephiles thought this was maybe a clue as to what was going in that particular sequence? And a clue that -contrary to Mr. Scorsese's approach - we actually are intended to follow the film!
None of you thought that these hand-holding explanations might be there to help make it less "bewildering", or at least hint that it's not supposed to be "bewildering"? You really, Scorsese, you really are sticking with your of the whole thing as essentially random images, their meaning unimportant?
But it's not an unfamiliar pattern of behaviour from the West.
One of the key things at work here is the fact it's a 'foreign' film, and not just a Bergman or a Godard: this is from Armenia! And full of 'traditional' dress, song and culture! Therefore, for Western cinephiles, it's the product of an alien world, and this cannot help but be a influence on why it's received how it is.
And yet still none of you cinephiles thought this was maybe a clue as to what was going in that particular sequence? And a clue that -contrary to Mr. Scorsese's approach - we actually are intended to follow the film!
None of you thought that these hand-holding explanations might be there to help make it less "bewildering", or at least hint that it's not supposed to be "bewildering"? You really, Scorsese, you really are sticking with your of the whole thing as essentially random images, their meaning unimportant?
When watching it, it's immediately obvious that Pajaranov doesn't want his audience to be confused and baffled and left behind by his artistic decisions. He is of course aware that this isn't the cinematic language we are used to (he's not an alien), and creates signposts so that we can follow. For example, before one sequence we are shown a title card with the title "Poet's Dream", and even has the subtitle: "He Returns To His Childhood And Mourns For His Parents".
I mean, why would Pajaranov include this if he was intending his audience to be "baffled"? It is so helpful, so clearly part of an effort to transport the viewer into the head of the Sayat-Nova character and understand something of how he feels.
But what really makes you despair at the Western film establishment's refusal to engage is the final sequence, which is prefaced with a title card announcing:
After this we see an arm stabbing a dagger into a cloth, and red liquid running down it. Hmm, red liquid? Could it be that Pajaranov is trying to tell us something, trying to ... perhaps ... narrate something? No, it's just a dazzling image, stupid! I'm probably overthinking it!
Next up, we move to another Visual Feast!
Sayat-Nova, the man who's life we've been watching throughout its ups and downs for the last 2 hours, is kneeling down, in what looks like maybe underwear? Or maybe those are pyjamas? Either way, it's not an outfit that screams 'powerful', is it? It's way more Christ at Golgotha than Britney at the VMAs when she had that snake. And what's that other 'dazzling image' alongside him? It's ghostly female figure (who, by the way, was holding a dagger in the shot before), pouring gallons of red liquid over his neck and torso?! Fascinating!
Now, considering this is happening in a sequence entitled "the poet's death", do we think that maybe Pajaranov is trying to represent something here? Is there any way that copious red liquid, all over a person's body and white clothes, can sometimes mean something?
Could it possibly be... say this quietly so you don't disturb Mr. Scorsese over there, he's having a lovely time grinning at all the bright colours!... but could this red liquid possibly be blood?!
Don't be stupid. No, that red liquid could be anything! Pajaranov just made it red so it would be a visual feast for the viewers! It could've just been cranberry juice! Maybe Sayat-Nova had cystisis and that pouring-of-red-liquid thing represented the gallons of cranberry juice he had to down to keep it under control! We'll just never know cos it's a Foreign Art Film, and therefore it's bewildering and we'll never know the artist's intention.
And is there any way that this shot, immediately following the red liquid one, could be construed as hinting towards something to do with martyrdom? Just because like...we know Sayat-Nova's been living in a Christian monastery for all his life, and worship has been a big part of the film, and now he's lying there with his arms outstretched, cruxifixion style, looking like every white Jesus ever painted? Could that be what's happened here?
Don't be silly! It's just a "dazzling" image! Who cares what it's saying! Scorsese, meanwhile, is busy counting the number of candles in the shot, because it'll send him off to sleep nicely.
Of course, though, Pajaranov was telling a story here. In fact, Sayat-Nova was murdered, aged 83, in 1795, in the monastery where he lived. An invading army, led by the Shah of Iran, captured the area and demanded he convert from Christianity to Islam. He refused and was beheaded.
Once you appreciate this simple biographical detail, readily available to anyone with the internet, then the death sequence becomes very much more poignant and dramatic. And, moreover, the allusions to matrydom and the life of Christ become even more obvious.
And, once you know this, you see how true it was when a close friend of the director said Pajaranov's cinema is actually "simple and only appears to be complex".
In other words, yeah some surreal things happen involving chickens and candles which make it all more dramatic, but that scene where it looks like a guy is covered in blood and dies? Yeah that's supposed to be about a guy covered in blood and dying.
But you would never realise this, because you would never be given simple biographical facts, if you approach the film through the Western cinephile establishment. They don't tell you this. The cinema showing it, the articles about it, the BFI, the slides shown immediately before the film - none of them saw any merit in telling us about what Pajaranov was saying in this film. They all just write something effusive about how Pajaranov says it - specifically, how unusual and different is the way Pajaranov says it.
And I'm fascinated by this.
Next up, we move to another Visual Feast!
Sayat-Nova, the man who's life we've been watching throughout its ups and downs for the last 2 hours, is kneeling down, in what looks like maybe underwear? Or maybe those are pyjamas? Either way, it's not an outfit that screams 'powerful', is it? It's way more Christ at Golgotha than Britney at the VMAs when she had that snake. And what's that other 'dazzling image' alongside him? It's ghostly female figure (who, by the way, was holding a dagger in the shot before), pouring gallons of red liquid over his neck and torso?! Fascinating!
Now, considering this is happening in a sequence entitled "the poet's death", do we think that maybe Pajaranov is trying to represent something here? Is there any way that copious red liquid, all over a person's body and white clothes, can sometimes mean something?
Could it possibly be... say this quietly so you don't disturb Mr. Scorsese over there, he's having a lovely time grinning at all the bright colours!... but could this red liquid possibly be blood?!
Don't be stupid. No, that red liquid could be anything! Pajaranov just made it red so it would be a visual feast for the viewers! It could've just been cranberry juice! Maybe Sayat-Nova had cystisis and that pouring-of-red-liquid thing represented the gallons of cranberry juice he had to down to keep it under control! We'll just never know cos it's a Foreign Art Film, and therefore it's bewildering and we'll never know the artist's intention.
And is there any way that this shot, immediately following the red liquid one, could be construed as hinting towards something to do with martyrdom? Just because like...we know Sayat-Nova's been living in a Christian monastery for all his life, and worship has been a big part of the film, and now he's lying there with his arms outstretched, cruxifixion style, looking like every white Jesus ever painted? Could that be what's happened here?
Don't be silly! It's just a "dazzling" image! Who cares what it's saying! Scorsese, meanwhile, is busy counting the number of candles in the shot, because it'll send him off to sleep nicely.
Of course, though, Pajaranov was telling a story here. In fact, Sayat-Nova was murdered, aged 83, in 1795, in the monastery where he lived. An invading army, led by the Shah of Iran, captured the area and demanded he convert from Christianity to Islam. He refused and was beheaded.
Once you appreciate this simple biographical detail, readily available to anyone with the internet, then the death sequence becomes very much more poignant and dramatic. And, moreover, the allusions to matrydom and the life of Christ become even more obvious.
And, once you know this, you see how true it was when a close friend of the director said Pajaranov's cinema is actually "simple and only appears to be complex".
In other words, yeah some surreal things happen involving chickens and candles which make it all more dramatic, but that scene where it looks like a guy is covered in blood and dies? Yeah that's supposed to be about a guy covered in blood and dying.
But you would never realise this, because you would never be given simple biographical facts, if you approach the film through the Western cinephile establishment. They don't tell you this. The cinema showing it, the articles about it, the BFI, the slides shown immediately before the film - none of them saw any merit in telling us about what Pajaranov was saying in this film. They all just write something effusive about how Pajaranov says it - specifically, how unusual and different is the way Pajaranov says it.
And I'm fascinated by this.
Ooh look, a Foreign Film!
The way the Western film establishment venerates this film, adores it, but then pays no attention to its content, is strange.But it's not an unfamiliar pattern of behaviour from the West.
One of the key things at work here is the fact it's a 'foreign' film, and not just a Bergman or a Godard: this is from Armenia! And full of 'traditional' dress, song and culture! Therefore, for Western cinephiles, it's the product of an alien world, and this cannot help but be a influence on why it's received how it is.
Orientalism? Definitely. Orientalism and 'bafflement' have always been closely intertwined. As Fanon records in A Dying Colonialism, the French in Algeria were obsessed with the Algerian women's veils, to the point where it was assumed that all Algerian women were veiled because they were hiding some rare beauty. Pajaranov's "unusual cinematic language" - along with the unfamiliarity of the culture depicted in the film - is absolutely the veil here. The Westerner is convinced that what's behind it is absolutely amazing, stunning, exceptional - the 84th best film ever made - even though he's never really seen it. He's never even done the cursory Google required to actually follow the film's narrative - never thought that it could have a voice thoughts and words with which to speak for itself, but its inscrutability excites him.
There's also, more prosaically, the colonial obsession with the unfamiliar. There's something zoological in this non-watching of Pomegranates by Western cinephiles, something a bit unpleasantly colonial-anthropological, something a bit Sarah Baartman. They all come along, see Pomegranates do its thing, and comment on how different it is. Then, after all that excitement, they go back to more normal 'things'. an object of exotic curiosity, to inspire open-mouthed excitement and awe. And then moved on from.
It feels all a bit similar to when, at the Oscars this year, a white woman told Jason Momoa to perform for her "one haka move".
The retention of Pomegranates in the canon, the excitable praises sung in its name, at the same time as the total non-engagement with its content, seems to be driven by the same impulse as this. The same impulse as wanting to have a black person on your diversity panel at the office. Once you've appointed them, they are there, visibly. No one can say we haven't been adventurous! But we're not particularly interested in what they have to say.
Cinema always needs exciting images to fill the screen - the majority of which are just there as decoration. Often these decorative elements are made up of human bodies, which are not there to focus your attention on and listen to, but to just to make an impression. And of course, there tend to be some predictable biases in the kinds of people who end up as merely an image on film, rather than a character. As Haile Gerima puts it, Africans are "put in the background" of Western films, "they are part of the landscape and used for a function -like to bring orange juice to the master - and they walk out of the scene. We are underdeveloped characters. Our sex life, our feelings of love and hatred are not explored because they don't see us as a part of society".
With Pomegranates, the Western cinephile establishment is doing with a whole film exactly what Western film directors do with non-white actors! Pomegranates has been placed "as part of the landscape" of the canon; the landscape of Western cinephilia. It has to be there, registering on your consciousness, otherwise you don't know enough about films. But it doesn't have to be engaged with. Because, even though Pomegranates contains a love story, bereavement, mountains of sadness and a violent martyrdom, the film is not treated as "part of society", as a human story we can relate to.
There is another possible element as well, pointed out by the strange words of critic Gilbert Adair, who says that Pomegranates "gives us the impression, somehow, of predating the invention of the cinema". Does it? Because they're in unfamiliar costumes, and you don't see anyone on smartphones? But that's the same as in Lord of the Rings?
Adair's words are a classic piece of Emperor's New Clothes criticism: say something completely meaningless, based on a half-arsed thought you haven't even been bothered to think through, and then insert the word "somehow" in the sentence in place of of any actual explanation for this 'opinion'. Thousands of Western cinephiles then read it, nod, and agree, because at least Adair's saying something about the film, while the rest of us were just silently gawping at the colours wondering what we're supposed to make of it.
Adair's feeling that Pomegranates is almost pre-historical (sandwiched between, as usual, the highest of praises), is very telling. I think what Adair is saying is that really, in his heart of hearts, he didn't enjoy it, and he would have preferred something with a bit more pace, plot and characterisation, and maybe some more meaning. Really, he thinks it is inferior to the films he's used to in all these four respects. But, his better nature tells him, it is only inferior because it comes from a different place and time, where things were not as developed (here is where his feeling that it predates cinema - rather than just existing outside normal cinema, is particularly revealing). And that difference makes it exciting and interesting to him - even if he didn't enjoy it per se.
This reminds me of a strange story Walter Rodney tells in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa:
"there were many colonialists who wished to preserve in perpetuity everything that was African, if it appeared quaint or intriguing to them. Albert Schweitzer, who was in charge of a dirty unhygienic hospital with dogs, cats, goats and chickens running around, under the guise of fitting into the African culture and environment...[a friend of the doctor said this arrangement was] not always defenisbile on hygienic grounds [but] the mixture adds considerably to the charm of the place".
I believe Scorsese and Adair's enthusiastm with it is genuine, but the really fascinating weird thing here is that they actually think Pomegranates is shit! Part of the 'charm' of Pomegranates for these guys is that they think it's shit!
Pomegranates is a film which, in their minds, lacks/predates things like plot and character and pace and ability to get a message across! It's like a cave painting by an early man. Obviously it is shit, but that's not the point! It's exciting because of how shit it is!
This suggests another way to read Scorsese's comment that "I didn’t know any more about Sayat Nova at the end of the picture than I knew at the beginning".
This joke is actually quite a profound insight into how Scorsese processes the picture. He sees the film as not having much educational merit, not very good and effectively saying things. Scorsese is really tousling the hair of little Pajaranov, mocking him affectionately, saying "you're not very good at actually getting your point across, are ya? But we love you all the same!"
In 1892, the anarchist Kropotkin had a grumble about art in the 'modern' world. For the ancient Greeks, he said, an artist's work "was connected with the life itself of the city". An artist "endeavoured to express the spirit and the heart of the city" and "spoke to his fellow citizens, and in return he received inspiration; he appealed to the multitude in the same way as he did the nave." Those were the days!
In contrast, Kropotkin was appalled that "Greek statues lived in the Acropolis of their cities, and are now stifled beneath the red cloth hangings of the Louvre!" Until this is corrected, "art can only vegetate"!
The key word here is lived. Kropotkin's right: some art really lives, and some doesn't. A child can detect this. A football chant being picked up and sung by thousands - living art. A meme, recently finished on MS Paint and posted to Twitter to be liked and customised by hundreds of others - living art. A Basquiat, bought for millions and sat in some millionaire's house - that's not alive. That's vegetating art. That's art that's been castrated, captured and overpowered by capital. Visit the British Museum if you want to see art that is so far out of context that it's lost all its original meaning and now signifies nothing so much as British naval superiority.
Being an anarchist, Kropotkin misses the fact that this development hasn't just happened as some punishment from god, or because time has elapsed. Works of art have become commodities under capitalism, and are treated as such. Even if they weren't originally intended to be commodities (and are thus fictitious commodities like land or labour, to use Polanyi's term), they have become commodities.
And, once commoditised, this is how colonialism/capitalism treats art: it plucks it from its context, from the real relationship between artist and audience, and removes it to somewhere else, where it can be stared at by people who have no idea what it means.
And those people, staring at things they have no idea about, instead of doing it to communicate with an artist and with the rest of the artist's audience, for the sense of belonging among a community and all the other quasi-magical things an artwork can do for people, they are doing it as bourgeouis art-consumers. And the psychology of the bourgeois art-consumer is the same as the psychology of the bourgeouis in every other respect: an obsession with posession, a grasping, competitive individualism.
As Marx noted, "Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., [you could add "seen"] – in short, when it is used by us. In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having."
I think this is exactly what happens with a lot of bourgeouis art consumption: they are not feeling anything when looking, not being moved by it, or caring much, they are just having the artwork. This might not mean literally buying it for themselves - it could mean buying a ticket to see it in an exhibition or cinema. But this purchase makes the bourgeouis art-consumer feel that they have possession of the artwork, and that brings them satisfaction. That artwork is done now, seen, off the list. Mine.
And, living in the ongoing era of conspicuous consumption as we do, what you posess needs to be compared to what everyone else posesses. We are jealous of our movie tastes, proud of our sophistication, "guilty" of our "pleasures", we invent categories like low-brow and high-brow so we can differentiate between people we want to possess the same things as and people we definitely don't want to posess the same things as.
Is the cinephile's obsession with lists a symptom of this? Why else compile lists all the time if you're not wanting to complete them, conquer them, to have all the films, to know you've got them under your belt.
Again, let's return to Adair's comments on Pomegranates. Although it's clear to everyone he didn't enjoy the experience, he notes "no historian of the medium who ignores The Color of Pomegranates can ever be taken seriously".
So there you have it. In this imaginary competition to not be the dumbest film critic in the room, Adair can console himself with the fact he has not "ignored" Pomegranates. He's been there, done that, places the flag pole in the ground, claimed it for himself! (The irony being, of course, that he's not really seen any of Pomegranates)
All this helps illuminate another reason Pomegranates is both adored and ignored: because that's what bourgeouis art-consumers do with all art!
Kropotkin was partly wrong, though, because he didn't understand class and history. It's not the case that all art is "vegetating". Kropotkin sees all art as having gone down the pan now we're in the modern world, and only capable of being revived after an imagined anarchist revolution, when communities will be recreated. But that's not the case, is it?
We all live in communities of various kinds, even under capitalism. The bourgeouisie have not dissolved everything in cold, calculating egotism, we all still do millions of things for free and for fun which have no relation to capital.
And even if, as Kropotkin laments, we don't not all belong to a homogenous Greek city state (because slave-owning societies, famously, are good at homogeneity), most of us today do belong to something. A class? A race? A profession? An generation?
And within those groupings, art - without the interference of capital - can achieve its function of creating communion among an audience and between an audience and artist. That's why there does exist living art, that really lives and speaks to its audience.
This is why the art under capitalism that has has the most impact, that most excites people, is that which speaks to them as a member of a particular group with particular characteristics! There are no films that speak to all of us, because we belong to different classes and, as Kropotkin points out, as a whole we have "no common interest save the enriching of [our]selves at the expense of one another".
But there is Superbad, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Anchorman - a triad which speak directly to the young horny/angry man demographic, and were therefore watched, rewatched, quoted and loved to ridiculous extents when I was a teenage boy, taking up a big place in the lives of people and their friendship groups.
There's Kidulthood, doing the same thing for UK teenage city life. There's It's a Wonderful Life, speaking to the petty bourgeouis and their simple-but-satisfying suburban lives. And there's a new generation Marvel and DC movies giving certain young kids cinema they can live.
Every demographic has their own living art. Except cinephiles. They don't like the living stuff. They like museum cinema.
Things Have Content As Well As Form! A Contemporary Pandemic
As discussed above, the reactions to Pomegranates are as old as whiteness itself. But perhaps there is a something else layered on top, more peculiar to the postmodern age?
After all, when Scorsese says has no idea what the film's about but he still loves it, is this not exactly the same as when people look at Damian Hirst's fucking stupid shark in a tank and say "brave!". Is it not the same as when people looked at Andy Warhol, openly taking the piss out of them all, and just say "yes, a tin of soup, I get it!".
Alternatively, is Scorsese not the same as the people who look at the Brexit question and decide they would give up their right arm and their villa in Tuscany just to remain in the EU because the EU "represents togetherness" or some vague symbolic shit, without paying the slightest attention to the EU's politics, history or racism.
Is Scorsese not just the same as the people who turn to politics and like the look of Beto O'Rourke, Macron, Blair, David Miliband or whoever the latest liberal darling is? That is, they see Beto O'Rourke, with his his shirt sleeves carefully rolled up to a focus-group-tested extent, doing his best "I'm a regular guy" squat, and they genuinely like it, because "this is what our leaders should look like".
People like Jess Phillips, Anna Soubry, Boris Johnson, Jacob-Rees Mogg have carved whole careers out because people like their attitude more than anything particular they say or do. "Oh that Anna Soubry/Jess Phillips doesn't take any nonsense does she? I like her, she seems gobby."
I guess in politics you have a double effect of image-fetishisation, because the bourgeois political commentator both loves how how the image looks themselves and, secondly, imagines that the image will "go down well with" the Ordinary Person In The Street (which, they seem to forget, is a projection created by their own brains (and that's why these imaginary ordinaries are all so racist!)). Hence we get a deluge of meaningless chat about how "this will play well in Doncaster" or "this won't play well with the base", all based on absolutely nothing but the bourgeouisie's lazy assumptions about what people in different constituencies think.
It seems endemic, in contemporary culture, to forget that politics has form as well as content.
This, I believe, is a symptom of the postmodern condition - meaning that since the apparent triumph of the Washington Consensus, the fall of the Really Existing Socialism and the spread of globalised neoliberalism we now imagine ourselves at the end of history, with no alternatives possible or necessary. We have stopped believing in any grand narratives (Lyotard's definition of postmodernism) and "forgotten how to think historically" and have no "perception of the present as history" (Jameson), that is, a story which is ongoing and will develop change.
This has a profound effect on how we think about everything. Politics becomes a question of having the best technocrat to manage the economy, which explains the ecstasies people get themselves into over whoever the latest Obamalike messiah is; struggle and disagreement starts to be read as an unpleasant intrusion on political life rather than its nature - because all problems and contradictions are assumed to be solved. This is why all the liberals are complaining about politics being "shoutier" whenever someone expresses an opinion.
Class disappears, and you get politicians declaring that we're "all middle class now" because, with no ongoing history, you don't need any classes to be the protagonists in it. The critic Jean-Louis Comolli says that this collapse of the old narrative of emancipation, in which the working class were the protagonists, is the reason why films, novels, song and politics don't seem to have any need for working class people any more!
We also have an "omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for dead styles and fashions" (Jameson) because we aren't creating anything new, aren't moving forward.
And this tendency bleeds tragically into Western cinephile's misunderstanding of cinema. This is the fate of Pomegranates: it tries to tell a Fanonian story about cultural survival in the face of domination, martyrdom and resistance to subordination, but no Western cinephile was listening to that. Honestly, I found out after watching that the 3 different colours that you see used as dye are the national colours of Armenia! You couldn't have a much more painfully obvious political message! And yet all the politics goes straight over the head of Western cinephiles because they're the kind of people who judge Barack Obama on his "tan suit" rather than his bloodthirst.
But if Pomegranates gets a raw deal because contemporary bourgeouis liberals can't see history, there are plenty of films that get an even worse deal from Western cinephiles.
Earth (Zemlya) is a 1930 Soviet film by Dovzhenko about collectivisation, the arrival of tractors on farms and the struggle against kulaks in Stalin's USSR.
The way it's treated by the cinephile establishment is hilarious.
The BFI's one-line summary is this:
You hear that, yeah? Instead of making any propaganda, he made a nice, neutral "hymn to nature". In place of politics, he made a film about nature! How cute! A bit like Attenborough! He showed that mean baddie Stalin, didn't he! No politics in our films, thank you very much!
Except Earth is the most political film it is possible to make. And it shows Stalin's policy of collectivisation as something very helpful and uplifting to everyone except a parasitic class of selfish kulaks (who say they won't part with "their" land). The final line of the whole film, spoken to a whole crowd of sympathetic villagers, is "the glory of [our farm's produce] will fly all around the world! Like that communist airplane of ours up there!"
It's hilarious that people from the BFI just ignore this and talk about how nice the apples look.
Finally, yes, Pomegranates is 'surreal', I guess, in the sense that not everything on screen looks like how normal life looks.
But, as Zadie Smith once pointed out, and Boots Riley so capably demonstrated in Sorry To Bother You, making your art 'surreal' is sometimes the best way to convey realistically how it feels from the protagonist's perspective. Smith once took issue with an interviewer asking about the "experimental aspects" of her writing, and asking if they are imported and borrowed from writers such Foster Wallace, and Smith patiently ignored the shallowness of the question and explained:
But crucially, Pajaranov's surreal shot perhaps represents the authentic experience of being "surrounded by literature" much better than a more literalist, realist montage from conventional cinema could. After all, this is how the human mind works: it collects a series of images and recalls them, not in any logical order, or with any care for physics or geography - but in the order our brain connects them! How many of us say that our childhood felt like "one long stream of..." one thing or another: family arguments? Family meals? Disney films? Football? New Labour politicians doing war crimes?
There's also, more prosaically, the colonial obsession with the unfamiliar. There's something zoological in this non-watching of Pomegranates by Western cinephiles, something a bit unpleasantly colonial-anthropological, something a bit Sarah Baartman. They all come along, see Pomegranates do its thing, and comment on how different it is. Then, after all that excitement, they go back to more normal 'things'. an object of exotic curiosity, to inspire open-mouthed excitement and awe. And then moved on from.
It feels all a bit similar to when, at the Oscars this year, a white woman told Jason Momoa to perform for her "one haka move".
If Momoa had done it, would this have meant anything to the white woman? Of course not! But it would look cool and different! And that's exciting!
Cinema always needs exciting images to fill the screen - the majority of which are just there as decoration. Often these decorative elements are made up of human bodies, which are not there to focus your attention on and listen to, but to just to make an impression. And of course, there tend to be some predictable biases in the kinds of people who end up as merely an image on film, rather than a character. As Haile Gerima puts it, Africans are "put in the background" of Western films, "they are part of the landscape and used for a function -like to bring orange juice to the master - and they walk out of the scene. We are underdeveloped characters. Our sex life, our feelings of love and hatred are not explored because they don't see us as a part of society".
With Pomegranates, the Western cinephile establishment is doing with a whole film exactly what Western film directors do with non-white actors! Pomegranates has been placed "as part of the landscape" of the canon; the landscape of Western cinephilia. It has to be there, registering on your consciousness, otherwise you don't know enough about films. But it doesn't have to be engaged with. Because, even though Pomegranates contains a love story, bereavement, mountains of sadness and a violent martyrdom, the film is not treated as "part of society", as a human story we can relate to.
There is another possible element as well, pointed out by the strange words of critic Gilbert Adair, who says that Pomegranates "gives us the impression, somehow, of predating the invention of the cinema". Does it? Because they're in unfamiliar costumes, and you don't see anyone on smartphones? But that's the same as in Lord of the Rings?
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| A film which seems to "somehow predate cinema"? Yeah, or just a film set in the past? |
Adair's feeling that Pomegranates is almost pre-historical (sandwiched between, as usual, the highest of praises), is very telling. I think what Adair is saying is that really, in his heart of hearts, he didn't enjoy it, and he would have preferred something with a bit more pace, plot and characterisation, and maybe some more meaning. Really, he thinks it is inferior to the films he's used to in all these four respects. But, his better nature tells him, it is only inferior because it comes from a different place and time, where things were not as developed (here is where his feeling that it predates cinema - rather than just existing outside normal cinema, is particularly revealing). And that difference makes it exciting and interesting to him - even if he didn't enjoy it per se.
This reminds me of a strange story Walter Rodney tells in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa:
"there were many colonialists who wished to preserve in perpetuity everything that was African, if it appeared quaint or intriguing to them. Albert Schweitzer, who was in charge of a dirty unhygienic hospital with dogs, cats, goats and chickens running around, under the guise of fitting into the African culture and environment...[a friend of the doctor said this arrangement was] not always defenisbile on hygienic grounds [but] the mixture adds considerably to the charm of the place".
I believe Scorsese and Adair's enthusiastm with it is genuine, but the really fascinating weird thing here is that they actually think Pomegranates is shit! Part of the 'charm' of Pomegranates for these guys is that they think it's shit!
Pomegranates is a film which, in their minds, lacks/predates things like plot and character and pace and ability to get a message across! It's like a cave painting by an early man. Obviously it is shit, but that's not the point! It's exciting because of how shit it is!
This suggests another way to read Scorsese's comment that "I didn’t know any more about Sayat Nova at the end of the picture than I knew at the beginning".
This joke is actually quite a profound insight into how Scorsese processes the picture. He sees the film as not having much educational merit, not very good and effectively saying things. Scorsese is really tousling the hair of little Pajaranov, mocking him affectionately, saying "you're not very good at actually getting your point across, are ya? But we love you all the same!"
Art Will Vegetate
In 1892, the anarchist Kropotkin had a grumble about art in the 'modern' world. For the ancient Greeks, he said, an artist's work "was connected with the life itself of the city". An artist "endeavoured to express the spirit and the heart of the city" and "spoke to his fellow citizens, and in return he received inspiration; he appealed to the multitude in the same way as he did the nave." Those were the days!
In contrast, Kropotkin was appalled that "Greek statues lived in the Acropolis of their cities, and are now stifled beneath the red cloth hangings of the Louvre!" Until this is corrected, "art can only vegetate"!
The key word here is lived. Kropotkin's right: some art really lives, and some doesn't. A child can detect this. A football chant being picked up and sung by thousands - living art. A meme, recently finished on MS Paint and posted to Twitter to be liked and customised by hundreds of others - living art. A Basquiat, bought for millions and sat in some millionaire's house - that's not alive. That's vegetating art. That's art that's been castrated, captured and overpowered by capital. Visit the British Museum if you want to see art that is so far out of context that it's lost all its original meaning and now signifies nothing so much as British naval superiority.
Being an anarchist, Kropotkin misses the fact that this development hasn't just happened as some punishment from god, or because time has elapsed. Works of art have become commodities under capitalism, and are treated as such. Even if they weren't originally intended to be commodities (and are thus fictitious commodities like land or labour, to use Polanyi's term), they have become commodities.
And, once commoditised, this is how colonialism/capitalism treats art: it plucks it from its context, from the real relationship between artist and audience, and removes it to somewhere else, where it can be stared at by people who have no idea what it means.
And those people, staring at things they have no idea about, instead of doing it to communicate with an artist and with the rest of the artist's audience, for the sense of belonging among a community and all the other quasi-magical things an artwork can do for people, they are doing it as bourgeouis art-consumers. And the psychology of the bourgeois art-consumer is the same as the psychology of the bourgeouis in every other respect: an obsession with posession, a grasping, competitive individualism.
As Marx noted, "Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., [you could add "seen"] – in short, when it is used by us. In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having."
I think this is exactly what happens with a lot of bourgeouis art consumption: they are not feeling anything when looking, not being moved by it, or caring much, they are just having the artwork. This might not mean literally buying it for themselves - it could mean buying a ticket to see it in an exhibition or cinema. But this purchase makes the bourgeouis art-consumer feel that they have possession of the artwork, and that brings them satisfaction. That artwork is done now, seen, off the list. Mine.
And, living in the ongoing era of conspicuous consumption as we do, what you posess needs to be compared to what everyone else posesses. We are jealous of our movie tastes, proud of our sophistication, "guilty" of our "pleasures", we invent categories like low-brow and high-brow so we can differentiate between people we want to possess the same things as and people we definitely don't want to posess the same things as.
Is the cinephile's obsession with lists a symptom of this? Why else compile lists all the time if you're not wanting to complete them, conquer them, to have all the films, to know you've got them under your belt.
Again, let's return to Adair's comments on Pomegranates. Although it's clear to everyone he didn't enjoy the experience, he notes "no historian of the medium who ignores The Color of Pomegranates can ever be taken seriously".
So there you have it. In this imaginary competition to not be the dumbest film critic in the room, Adair can console himself with the fact he has not "ignored" Pomegranates. He's been there, done that, places the flag pole in the ground, claimed it for himself! (The irony being, of course, that he's not really seen any of Pomegranates)
All this helps illuminate another reason Pomegranates is both adored and ignored: because that's what bourgeouis art-consumers do with all art!
Kropotkin was partly wrong, though, because he didn't understand class and history. It's not the case that all art is "vegetating". Kropotkin sees all art as having gone down the pan now we're in the modern world, and only capable of being revived after an imagined anarchist revolution, when communities will be recreated. But that's not the case, is it?
We all live in communities of various kinds, even under capitalism. The bourgeouisie have not dissolved everything in cold, calculating egotism, we all still do millions of things for free and for fun which have no relation to capital.
And even if, as Kropotkin laments, we don't not all belong to a homogenous Greek city state (because slave-owning societies, famously, are good at homogeneity), most of us today do belong to something. A class? A race? A profession? An generation?
And within those groupings, art - without the interference of capital - can achieve its function of creating communion among an audience and between an audience and artist. That's why there does exist living art, that really lives and speaks to its audience.
This is why the art under capitalism that has has the most impact, that most excites people, is that which speaks to them as a member of a particular group with particular characteristics! There are no films that speak to all of us, because we belong to different classes and, as Kropotkin points out, as a whole we have "no common interest save the enriching of [our]selves at the expense of one another".
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| A group of dysfunctional, proud, competitive men, confused and betrayed by the changing world, limited social skills, loyal to each other but suspicious of everyone else, especially the women they're trying to sleep with (but not listen to). No, I'm not talking about an alt-right messageboard, but it's obvious precursor, lad-cinema! (see also: Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, and the comically inferior British effort, The Inbetweeners) |
But there is Superbad, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Anchorman - a triad which speak directly to the young horny/angry man demographic, and were therefore watched, rewatched, quoted and loved to ridiculous extents when I was a teenage boy, taking up a big place in the lives of people and their friendship groups.
There's Kidulthood, doing the same thing for UK teenage city life. There's It's a Wonderful Life, speaking to the petty bourgeouis and their simple-but-satisfying suburban lives. And there's a new generation Marvel and DC movies giving certain young kids cinema they can live.
Every demographic has their own living art. Except cinephiles. They don't like the living stuff. They like museum cinema.
Things Have Content As Well As Form! A Contemporary Pandemic
As discussed above, the reactions to Pomegranates are as old as whiteness itself. But perhaps there is a something else layered on top, more peculiar to the postmodern age?
After all, when Scorsese says has no idea what the film's about but he still loves it, is this not exactly the same as when people look at Damian Hirst's fucking stupid shark in a tank and say "brave!". Is it not the same as when people looked at Andy Warhol, openly taking the piss out of them all, and just say "yes, a tin of soup, I get it!".
Alternatively, is Scorsese not the same as the people who look at the Brexit question and decide they would give up their right arm and their villa in Tuscany just to remain in the EU because the EU "represents togetherness" or some vague symbolic shit, without paying the slightest attention to the EU's politics, history or racism.
Is Scorsese not just the same as the people who turn to politics and like the look of Beto O'Rourke, Macron, Blair, David Miliband or whoever the latest liberal darling is? That is, they see Beto O'Rourke, with his his shirt sleeves carefully rolled up to a focus-group-tested extent, doing his best "I'm a regular guy" squat, and they genuinely like it, because "this is what our leaders should look like".People like Jess Phillips, Anna Soubry, Boris Johnson, Jacob-Rees Mogg have carved whole careers out because people like their attitude more than anything particular they say or do. "Oh that Anna Soubry/Jess Phillips doesn't take any nonsense does she? I like her, she seems gobby."
I guess in politics you have a double effect of image-fetishisation, because the bourgeois political commentator both loves how how the image looks themselves and, secondly, imagines that the image will "go down well with" the Ordinary Person In The Street (which, they seem to forget, is a projection created by their own brains (and that's why these imaginary ordinaries are all so racist!)). Hence we get a deluge of meaningless chat about how "this will play well in Doncaster" or "this won't play well with the base", all based on absolutely nothing but the bourgeouisie's lazy assumptions about what people in different constituencies think.It seems endemic, in contemporary culture, to forget that politics has form as well as content.
This, I believe, is a symptom of the postmodern condition - meaning that since the apparent triumph of the Washington Consensus, the fall of the Really Existing Socialism and the spread of globalised neoliberalism we now imagine ourselves at the end of history, with no alternatives possible or necessary. We have stopped believing in any grand narratives (Lyotard's definition of postmodernism) and "forgotten how to think historically" and have no "perception of the present as history" (Jameson), that is, a story which is ongoing and will develop change.
This has a profound effect on how we think about everything. Politics becomes a question of having the best technocrat to manage the economy, which explains the ecstasies people get themselves into over whoever the latest Obamalike messiah is; struggle and disagreement starts to be read as an unpleasant intrusion on political life rather than its nature - because all problems and contradictions are assumed to be solved. This is why all the liberals are complaining about politics being "shoutier" whenever someone expresses an opinion.Class disappears, and you get politicians declaring that we're "all middle class now" because, with no ongoing history, you don't need any classes to be the protagonists in it. The critic Jean-Louis Comolli says that this collapse of the old narrative of emancipation, in which the working class were the protagonists, is the reason why films, novels, song and politics don't seem to have any need for working class people any more!
We also have an "omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for dead styles and fashions" (Jameson) because we aren't creating anything new, aren't moving forward.
All news therefore becomes a case of saying "oh dear" at sad events, because there's no bigger story which could explain these sad events and make them appear as part of a history (and also because they are not what we expected to see at after the utopian ending of history in 1991!).
Therefore we're particularly bad at seeing the history, the struggle, the disagreement - in other words, the content - in anything where it's not blindingly obvious. We 'don't see struggle' just like, and for the same reasons, that the standard white liberal "doesn't see colour". Because we have consigned all the struggles to the museum where we expect them to stay.
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| Red, Blue and Orange - in that order - are the national colours of Armenia, as seen in the flag below. Apparently Scorsese didn't even wonder if there was some meaning when he saw these three colours being conspicuously presented in a definite order in the film. He just thought "ooh that's a nice blue, we should get a sofa like that" and then fell back to sleep. |
But if Pomegranates gets a raw deal because contemporary bourgeouis liberals can't see history, there are plenty of films that get an even worse deal from Western cinephiles.
Earth (Zemlya) is a 1930 Soviet film by Dovzhenko about collectivisation, the arrival of tractors on farms and the struggle against kulaks in Stalin's USSR.
The way it's treated by the cinephile establishment is hilarious.
The BFI's one-line summary is this:
You hear that, yeah? Instead of making any propaganda, he made a nice, neutral "hymn to nature". In place of politics, he made a film about nature! How cute! A bit like Attenborough! He showed that mean baddie Stalin, didn't he! No politics in our films, thank you very much!
Except Earth is the most political film it is possible to make. And it shows Stalin's policy of collectivisation as something very helpful and uplifting to everyone except a parasitic class of selfish kulaks (who say they won't part with "their" land). The final line of the whole film, spoken to a whole crowd of sympathetic villagers, is "the glory of [our farm's produce] will fly all around the world! Like that communist airplane of ours up there!"
It's hilarious that people from the BFI just ignore this and talk about how nice the apples look.
'Experimental' Techniques Are Not Just For Attention
Finally, yes, Pomegranates is 'surreal', I guess, in the sense that not everything on screen looks like how normal life looks.
But, as Zadie Smith once pointed out, and Boots Riley so capably demonstrated in Sorry To Bother You, making your art 'surreal' is sometimes the best way to convey realistically how it feels from the protagonist's perspective. Smith once took issue with an interviewer asking about the "experimental aspects" of her writing, and asking if they are imported and borrowed from writers such Foster Wallace, and Smith patiently ignored the shallowness of the question and explained:
"We should be a bit wary of labelling certain techniques 'experimental' as if it's just a set of tools one picks up to lend whatever you're writing a trace of hipster cool... Everything I do is an attempt to get close to the real, as I experience it, and the closer you get to the reality of experience the more bizarre it SHOULD look on the page and sound in the mouth because our real experience doesn't come packaged in a neat three act structure. For me, Joyce is the ultimate realist because he is trying to convey how experience really feels. And he found it to be so idiosyncratic he needed to invent a new language for it.
Pajaranov evidently had similar intentions in mind. This is why he includes a lot of clearly allegorical depictions of how life 'felt' for his Sayat-Nova character, rather than how it literally 'looked'. For example, shots such as this -
...clearly convey the idea that Sayat-Nova grew up "surrounded by literature" - as the succeeding scenes confirm.
But Pajaranov's shot conveys this simple idea do in a far more creative and succinct way than the more literal cinematic alternative would - where, for example, you might see an Einsteinian montage of furious, ceaseless reading with a fast-paced backing track. Or, if you're the makers of Harry Potter, you could forego even that use of cinema's narrative potential and just have your character repeatedly say she reads a lot.
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| See! There's a big book in her hands, and in case you didn't notice it, the character says she's been reading it! That's how you know she reads a lot! This is what Martin Scorsese would consider a "comprehensible film", in which it actually is worth listening to what they're saying, rather than just nodding along to the moving images like a cow. |
Pajaranov's rooftop festooned with open books performs not just a more visually interesting job than the conventional cinematic equivalent, but also a more accurate one.
This is what I think Western cinephiles are missing when they work themselves up into hysterics about how it "looks" different. Yes, it does look different, but Pajaranov is an artist trying to tell a man's life, he wasn't just trying to give you some moving wallpaper for the evening. There was a reason it looked different.
