How individuals change history: The Color of Pomegranates U.S. Premiere
The below story was originally published as part of FACETS Founder, Milos Stehlik’s From the Videotheque newsletter on April 3, 2017. Text has been lightly edited for clarity.
I am writing this only because I received a “friend” request on LinkedIn from Teddy Follenfant (an app the usefulness of which I simply cannot understand, other than as an aid for companies to use in vetting potential employees). “Teddy Follenfant” is a name I have not heard in 40 years. It was good to know that Teddy Follenfant is alive, working as a journalist, and now a painter.
I knew him in the early 1980s, when FACETS, together with Gary Wood, Hans Wahl, and Anne Gelman of Amnesty International organized the first Festival of Film and Human Rights.
Curated by Gene Walsh, it was something pretty incredible. The late Alberto Cavalcanti, Jan Nemec, and a number of other filmmakers came. Films were programmed to examine and illustrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on issues like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the rights of labor, the right of freedom of expression — read it if you have a moment. It reads today like a revolutionary document, but one that all humanity should have the courage to embrace.
The film-to-get was The Color of Pomegranates, a masterpiece by the great soviet filmmaker and genius Sergei Paradjanov. The film was banned in the Soviet Union and Paradjanov had been sentenced to five years at hard labor on trumped-up charges (no, Putin didn’t invent this). The film focuses on the 18th century Armenian poet, Sayat Nova. Shot in a series of extraordinary tableaux, the film is by no means directly political. One of its moving moments is a shot of vats of textile dyes, which turn out to be in the national colors of Armenia. As we all know, the Soviet Union did not tolerate nationalism of the individual republics.
Here comes Teddy Follenfant. He worked at the time, I think, in the Department of Agriculture in Paris. Doing, I am not sure what (undoubtedly, he pushed some papers). Teddy also volunteered for Amnesty International, and the resourceful guy that he was (or is), found out that a copy of The Color of Pomegranates had been smuggled to France through Iran by an Armenian resistance organization.
Even more resourcefully, he got the Armenian group to agree that they would lend the 16mm copy to FACETS for the festival, if Teddy guaranteed it. This meant hand-carrying it to Chicago and back to Paris.
There was one additional problem: the copy which Teddy brought to Chicago had no subtitles. Luckily, Herbert Marshall, a British-born film historian, filmmaker, and critic, who had written quite a bit on Paradjanov and Soviet cinema for the British Film Institute’s magazine, Sight and Sound, was teaching at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. With his help, we made a copy of The Color of Pomegranates, inserted new English inter-titles, and The Color of Pomegranates had its American premiere in Chicago.
This is how Teddy Follenfant, agriculture worker, made a difference in film history, a history that continues to this day. Thanks to more people being introduced to Paradjanov’s work, some of whom petitioned for Paradjanov’s release, he did not have to serve his full re-sentence, and though when released to poverty, he managed to continue to work as an artist, and to make several more films.
The beauty of Paradjanov lies not only in his films, but in him as a person. While in jail, he taught other prisoners to make collages (as he did) from found materials. His films, starting with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors left behind the era of socialist realism (which also marked the style of Paradjanov’s earliest films), for a bold, experimental, visually-driven, dynamic cinema in which the beauty of the image conveyed its power, revealed its meaning – close to being in a dimly lit church (not having coins to pay for the lights) in Rome, and facing a Caravaggio painting.
An article in The Guardian called Paradjanov a “filmmaker of outrageous imagination.” That’s as good a characterization as any.
The Color of Pomegranates returns to FACETS on Friday, May 13 at 7 pm. The film is part of the Milos’s Picks films series, part of the FACETS 47th Anniversary Celebration taking place throughout May 2022.
