In The Colour of Pomegranates (1968), Sergei Parajanov’s avant-garde film on the life of the eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, costume is never mere decoration. I explore some of the key characteristics and functions of costume design in the film—the avant-garde work by the Armenian director. I try to define how the costume, conceived in the context of the film as a set of clothes, accessories, embroidery, textiles and colours, plays an essential role in constructing the film’s narrative and forming its audio-visual language and style. The costume’s specific reference to Armenian cultural heritage and history, and its particular use in the construction of the cinematic image, make it become a generator of the film’s powerful synesthetic effect and highly symbolic yet enigmatic meaning. I attempt to show that the film’s costume design isn’t just an integral part of filmmaking, the essential constituent of cinematic image and language; in The Colour of Pomegranates, it is recognised as a core agent of our reconnection to history, seen as collective memory through the cinematic experience.
When it comes to analysing the complex presence and role of costume in The Colour of Pomegranates, it is important to mention that the film was first conceived as a biopic about the eighteenth-century Armenian poet and singer Sayat-Nova, who was considered a historical figure central to the formation of Armenian cultural identity as well as to the multicultural Transcaucasian heritage. Released within the context of the USSR political and cultural reality, the film was criticised and censored by the local cinema regulatory body for not being realistic enough to qualify as a biographical film and, more broadly, as a historical film. Consequently, all the references to Sayat-Nova had to be removed from the film, including the quotations from his songs in the intertitles (except those directly integrated into the film’s scenes through the words sewn on the pieces of cloth) — making the film even more abstract and non-conventional in relation to its historical source and original film genre.¹
Citing the films of Tarkovsky and Pasolini as his main sources of inspiration, Parajanov’s filmmaking was marked by an attempt to escape the classical Soviet cinema realism, its rationalist and modernist approach, by infusing the cinematic image with surrealist moments and creating a stream-of-consciousness effect.² This surrealist, non-realistic approach to representing a historical figure, and therefore a historical moment, through mainly visual and sonic qualities of the image takes up the centre stage in The Colour of Pomegranate. The film abandons the traditional fabula of the historical genre, substituting actual historical events with poetry, ethnography, songs, performance and archaeology—and thus it “transforms a narrative retracing of history into an affective event.”³
This is where the costume design plays the essential role, since “it functions as both realism and spectacle.” Sarah Street recognises it as a part of “complex codes of verisimilitude which films use in order to convince (…) their audience, which either accord with a notion of generic verisimilitude as part of genre iconography, or with a notion of social verisimilitude (…)—costumes that convince as being realistic to appropriate situation” (in this case, appropriate to the historical circumstances outlined by the biopic).⁴ We can say that Parajanov’s ‘visual poem’ overturns this standard conception of ‘verisimilitude’ hierarchy between costume and film genre. Since the film’s historical (sur)realism brings to the same level the non-objective, highly symbolical and carefully constructed images in a collage style with the historical factuality they refer to, the costume and other ‘fashion objects’ actually become the markers in the film for establishing our relation to the real world, that is, to the objective historical reality.
Through the complex use of ethnographic costumes, traditional clothes, accessories, cultural and religious artefacts, tapestry and different textiles representative of the Armenian national heritage, the costume design in the film evokes the Armenian cultural history (identity), which is conceived as collective memory and whose experience and continuity can be only obtained through the performance of those memories embodied in language, music, dance, secular or religious customs, architecture and, of course, clothes and ‘fashion objects’ (although we can’t properly talk of ‘fashion’ in this pre-industrial context). The Colour of Pomegranate inaugurates what Patricia Pisters outlined as “the shifted interest of cinema towards history [which,] told as past past, becomes memory, (…) a past which is problematised in the present.”⁵ The same shift has been noticed by Wortel and Smelik in postmodern costume films, which seek to “produce a different experience of memory rather than a ‘correct’ representation of the past; [they] turn to performance, texture and affect for its valuable function: cinematic performance of memory allows us to experience the lived past in our present.”⁶
In this light, Parajanov’s film represents a poetic and ethnographic reconstruction of Armenian history, cultural tradition and religious identity through synesthetic experience of colour, sound, materiality (clothes, textiles, fashion and other objects, but also landscape, animals, architecture and the materiality of the analogue film itself) and movement (performative gesture).⁷