The Cinema of the Cryptic

Understanding is not synonymous with enjoying. The visual language of some movies is so personal and hermetic that interpreting it could be compared to reading a novel written in hieroglyphics. “The Color of Pomegranates,” also known as “Sayat Nova,” made by Soviet director Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990) is one.

Completed in 1968 but not seen abroad for more than a decade thereafter, the film is newly available in a 4K digital restoration on Blu-ray from Criterion that can also be streamed on FilmStruck. The color is richer and the gradation considerably subtler, and, since the restoration is Parajanov’s original cut, the running time is 10 minutes shorter than the Kino version released in 2001.

“The Color of Pomegranates” is most simply described as a series of tableaus that recount the life of the 18th-century poet and troubadour turned monk who was known as Sayat Nova (a Persian sobriquet that means “King of Songs”). Born, like Parajanov, in Soviet Georgia to Armenian parents, Sayat Nova was enough of a hero to have the 250th anniversary of his birth commemorated in 1962 with a postage stamp.

In “The Color of Pomegranates,” Sayat Nova’s poems are seen rather than heard. There is some voice-over but little dialogue in an ebb-and-flow soundtrack that alternates wailing folk melodies with choral chanting. The film draws on Sayat Nova’s imagery: angels with flat halos and wooden wings, a pasteboard cloud descending as a vision, the constant repetition of key props including books, silver balls and ornate rugs. Fruits seem to bleed and books to weep. Animals, particularly goats and sheep, are ubiquitous. Impassive actors engage in dancelike gestures while staring straight into the camera.

As much ritual as movie, “The Color of Pomegranates” was staged amid ancient ruins, using religious relics as props. Indeed, looting museums was one of the charges that the authorities leveled against Parajanov, a nonconformist who was persecuted and imprisoned on suspicions of homosexuality and became a cause célèbre among Western cinephiles.

Around the time Parajanov was released from prison, “The Color of Pomegranates” was smuggled to Western Europe in a bootlegged version. “This already-old film by Parajanov is, quite simply, unlike anything known before,” wrote French critic Serge Daney, after seeing it at the 1980 Rotterdam Film Festival. “You have to imagine a previously unknown genre of cinema: filmed hagiography.”

Still, “The Color of Pomegranates” was not without its antecedents in Soviet cinema. Parajanov’s immersion in folk culture recalls that of his teacher, the Ukrainian director Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and his stylized performances suggest those in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible.” Parajanov’s choice of subject matter might have been a response to Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev,” about the Russian religious iconographer; more startling is his kinship to American avant-garde filmmakers like Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Gregory Markopoulos and Jack Smith, or the theater artists Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman.

While these affinities testify to Parajanov’s centrality as a 20th-century visual artist, “The Color of Pomegranates” is in no way derivative. The movie is one of a kind — an exotic pageant executed with grace, gravity and a breathtaking modesty of means.

Although quite different from “The Color of Pomegranates,” “ORG," by the Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri (1925-2017) is an even more personal and impenetrable exercise in developing a singular film language.

Nearly three hours long and over a decade in the making, “ORG” was shot in 16 millimeters and first shown, in a 35-millimeter blowup, at the 1979 Venice Film Festival. Subsequent screenings were rare until a digital restoration debuted last year in Berlin. “ORG” has since been made available, in all its confounding splendor, on a PAL region-free DVD from Arsenal, the German film museum.

Birri, who has been called the founder of the New Latin American Cinema, was influenced by Italian neorealism and British social documentaries, and made hybrid, politically charged movies that employed nonactors in actual circumstances. After establishing Argentina’s first film school, he went into exile first in Brazil, then Italy and, finally, after completing “ORG,” in Cuba.

With a title meant to evoke Wilhelm Reich’s orgone theory of “cosmic life energy” (as well as “organ,” “orgasm” and “orgy”), “ORG” is unlike any of Birri’s previous films. The movie is a science-fiction adaptation of the Indian myth that inspired Thomas Mann’s novel “Transposed Heads” and a self-declared “Cosmunist” (Cosmic Communist) manifesto. It’s also an intermittent exercise in pure abstraction, a rapid-fire, cacophonous assault on the senses.

According to Birri, “ORG” is composed of 26,625 separate shots. The cascade of flickering, sometimes unreadable images is so unremitting, despite long stretches of an utterly blank screen, as to be nearly ungraspable. The visual material is culled from comic strips, street demonstrations, Cuban movie posters and filmed be-ins; the technique encompasses collages, stick figure animations, shadow plays and kaleidoscopic special effects. The soundtrack is a mélange of grunted sound poems, inexplicable beeps, muttered New Left slogans, (“our homeland is the whole world; our law is liberty”), opera, free-form jazz, “The Internationale,” and what the subtitles term “untranslatable Neapolitan cursing.” The spaghetti Western star Terence Hill is a principal actor (and the film’s producer); Gautama Buddha and Salvador Allende are among several historical figures who make cameo appearances.

According to Birri, who described “ORG” as “a nightmare with closed eyes,” the film was originally intended as an installation. It is crude, relentless and combative — less “a slap in the face of public taste,” as the Russian Futurists would say, than everything but the kitchen sink hurled at viewers’ heads.

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