Resumo

This paper proposes a re-reading of The Colour of Pomegranates (Parajanov, 1969) that shifts the usual analytical axis—political resistance to socialist realism, ethnographic value, semiotics of the symbol—towards a phenomenological question: what kind of perceptual relationship does this film establish between the spectator and matter? Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chair du monde (The Visible and the Invisible, 1968), we argue that the aesthetics of the illuminated manuscript is not, in Parajanov, a formal device or a cultural citation, but the technical condition for producing flesh-images: surfaces where seeing and being seen, touching and being touched, become indistinguishable. This perceptual reversibility operates through three interconnected devices: the flatness of the frame—heir to Pavel Florensky’s inverted perspective—, the haptic visuality described by Laura U. Marks, and the material agency (thing-power) theorised by Jane Bennett. The analysis is articulated around the Water–Dye–Stone cycle in three key sequences: the baptism of the books, the dyers sequence, and the apotheosis of the roosters. The main contribution is to show that Parajanov’s singularity does not consist in bridging cultural traditions but in inhabiting the stratum transversal to cultural codifications—understood as the pre-reflective layer where perception occurs before being fixed by any tradition—where aesthetics, symbol and resistance are three names for a single phenomenon of irreducible physical presence.