Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors - CLASSICS

Original title: Tini zabutykh predkiv

Directed by: Sergei Parajanov

Length: 97 min.

Year: 1965

Country; Ukraine, USSR

Availability: Klassiki Online (UK and USA), Takflix (not all countries)

A 4K restoration of the film is in the works. A work-in-progress of the 4K scan has been screened at Venice Film Festival in 2023.

Synopsis: childhood sweethearts Marichka and Ivan are divided by fate and life, and long to reunite. Adapted from Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's novel.

PART OF THE EAST EUROPEAN ESSENTIALS

RATING: 5/5

A SEPARATE LEGACY

Both Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors and Sergei Parajanov have acquired an outstanding status in the history of cinema, but arguably somewhat separately one from the other: Parajanov is remembered as the great cinematic poet, lauded by Tarkovsky, the strongest cinematic voice of Armenia, suppressed by Soviet authorities, known mainly through his film Sayat Nova (also named The Colour of Pomegranates); on the other side, Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors has become a film that, within the oppressive frame of the Soviet Union, managed to express a specifically ukrainan identity, something very relevant still today. Parajanov and his film almost seem two very distant entities, even if they are obviously interlinked.

 

AN ARMENIAN IN UKRAINE

To understand how an armenian ended up directing a film that is one of the cornerstones of the cultural identity of an entirely different country, we must look back at his education: Parajanov's connection to Ukraine started already at VGIK film school in Moscow, where he studied under Igor Savchenko and Oleksandr Dovzhenko - the filmmaker that first introduced an idea of poetry to Soviet cinema in his film Earth. It is no wonder that Parajanov then moved in the film industry of the Ukrainan Soviet State. There is virtually no film criticism study surrounding his first two films, Ukrainan Rhapsody and Flower of the Stone, simply because they are very much films in line with the Soviet estabilishment, conformist and uninteresting.

THE EPIPHANY OF PARAJANOV

Then, as Parajanov himself pointed, Ivan's Childhood by Andrei Tarkovsky caused in him an epiphany: cinema suddenly could move out of the realist soviet canons, they could be poetic, spiritual even. The timing was excellent: Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's centennary of birth was near, and his works are the perfect framework to allow Parajanov to delve into something more metaphysical, because they could be easily sold to the soviet authorities as a depiction of folklore traditions (something often seen positively by the Soviet propaganda machine, as it could fit in the ideology of the centrality of the working class man), but are also filled with references to the complex mythology of the cultural group they represented: the Hutsul.

THE HUTSUL

A whole book might be written about the representation fo the Hutsul in cinema, both Soviet and Ukrainan. One of the most characteristic cultural groups of Ukraine, the carpathians-based group has been used as a symbol of countryside workers' folklore by the Soviet Union - strumentalised to the finalities of the propaganda - and later on, after the indipendence of Ukraine in 1991, has often been depicted both as a curiosity and as a source of self-determination, as a demonstration of a specific separate ukrainan identity, or better, of one of the msot distinct of its multicultural identities. Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors was a milestone in this self-determination: instead of being redubbed in russian for the russian speaking areas, it was released in its original ukrainan dubbing, in an entirely rare occurrence.

In Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors, the etnographic tendencies of Kostiubynsky remain intact: the film portrays several Hutsul traditions, rituals, its sincretic pagan-christian reality. The trembita's sound is a recurring leitmotif, and the score often employs traditional folklore songs. The film itself is continously dancing, in circles, closing up on the peculiar extras playing instruments, the unique outfits. The Hutsuls are no longer a stereotypical soviet propaganda poster subject but a rich cultural reality.

VISUAL POETRY IN SHADOWS OF THE FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS

Poetic cinema in Parajanov is something that has been traditionally associated to the codes he employed in Sayat Nova. It is a hermeticist view of looking at poetry, in which metaphors and meaning is hidden from the viewer in a visual form that requires to be decodified. A recurring motif for example is the repeated gesture. The frame in Parajanov's most well known poetic cinema is flat, almost painting-like (Parajanov did study paint before cinema). While seeing Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors it is hard to perceive that exact same form of hermeticist poetry. There are a few seeds of what is to come, such as the reliance on gestures, but Parajanov's first film with artistic freedom is very different from what came later.

DEPTH OF FIELD

A depth of field, a rotating, always-in-movement camera: if Sayat Nova and the following films can be visually identified through "flat" frames, with highly artificial performances and blocking, in Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors an emblematic scene could be when the adult Marichka and Ivan meet in the forest, with the camera rotating around them, the light filtering through the trees to add a sense of spatial depth. If in Sayat Nova repeated gestures hold the poetic meaning, most of times Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors relies on literar visual metaphors more related to a folkloristic-tale tradition: the glimmering star of hope seen in the night sky by both Ivan and Marichka, or the squirt of blood that turns into rampaging horses. Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors has a completely specific poetic language that Parajanov will abandon for his following films.

COMPARISONS

An interesting discourse would be a comparatism between Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors and a whole series of East european films that it might have not inspired but that somehow feel connected: in recent years, Pamfir by Dmyttro Sukholytky-Sobchuk returned to the Hutsul region with a film set in modern days that builds on folklore to build a sort of a modern heroic myth, and the film's cinematography by Nikita Kuzmenko often employs long takes, orbiting shots, simialrly to how Parajanov did; The Peasants, by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, adapts a book written in the same years as the source of Parajanov's film, in a folkloristic setting in Poland, and seems almost to conceptually marry Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors: if Parajanov largely centers on an old husband figure who is lost in a past relationship, The Peasants centers on a young bride; in the metaphysical-spiritual aspects of the film, it is hard not to perceive a similarity in some thematic aspects of János vitéz, the hungarian animation film by Marcell Jankovics adapted from the ballad by Petöfi Sándor.

Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors is a fundamental masterpiece of East european cinema, a film that may speak to viewers who were unsatisfied with Parajanov's better known works and that inserts itself in a large universe of films.