Sayat Nova or The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) is one of the great works of world cinema. Made by the Armenian-Georgian artist and film-maker, Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), the film is composed of imagined scenes inspired by the life of the medieval Armenian poet and minstrel, Sayat-Nova.

The exhibition comprises twenty-four film loops embedded in nine tables, that enable us to experience a film coming into being, connecting both ancient sights and sounds, with the people who worked on it, from the camera assistant to the director.

Parajanov’s film is dedicated to love, beauty, sorrow and hope and works on two levels. It engages with the biographical: the fate of the poet - conflict with the tsar, conflict at court, the banishing of the poet from the palace, the monastery. And expresses the nature and textures of this world: the colours, the objects, the activities, the details of the daily life that accompanied the poetry. For Parajanov, this approach was to reveal the visual nature of the poet’s life, to, “portray the art in life, rather than portray life in art.”

The film is a set of dream-like tableaux that draw upon the film-maker’s interest in the medieval world as represented by hand-painted miniatures within Armenian and Persian illuminated manuscripts. The tableaux fuse the cinematic (camera positioning, composition, editing and sound) with his understanding of art and history. They possess the stillness of painting and sculpture and the film has been likened to a ‘cinematographic carpet’ and a ‘mosaic window’.

The work has previously been exhibited as part of Art Directions at International Film Festival Rotterdam (2019), in the abandoned foyer of Yerevan's brutalist masterpiece Kino Ararat (2019) and at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris (2024).

For details of related talks and screenings please see www.cine-city.co.uk

With thanks to curator Daniel Bird and the Cinema Foundation of Armenia.