Highlights of the week:

• The Color of Pomegranates
• CPP Inspirations

The Color of Pomegranates is a 1969 Soviet Armenian art film written and directed by Sergei Parajanov. The film is a poetic treatment of the life of 18th-century Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat-Nova.

The film is a biography of the Armenian ashug Sayat-Nova (King of Song) that attempts to reveal the poet’s life visually and poetically rather than literally. The film is presented with little dialogue using active tableaux which depict the poet’s life in chapters: Childhood, Youth, Prince’s Court (where he falls in love with a tsarina), The Monastery, The Dream, Old Age, The Angel of Death and Death.

There are sounds and music and occasional singing but dialogue is rare.[9] Each chapter is indicated by a title card and framed through both Sergei Parajanov’s imagination and Sayat Nova’s poems.

This visualisation of poetry is a form that I really enjoy, because when the memory is filtered by the brain, what remains is actually this image combined with strong personal colours. It is a combination of the literary, the aesthetic, the stylistic and the performative, and I hope to explore it in my future work.

I watched the CPP inspirations website video on Friday and flicked through some interesting booklets.

I went to the studio to finish gumming the stones and placing the lithography boards for next term’s creations.

Then it was Happy Christmas!