PARAJANOV’S MYTHIC QUEST FOR LOVE
By Nicolas Rapold

New York Sun, NY

Oct 31 2007

For much of the 1970s, the legendary director Sergei Parajanov
(1924-90) was imprisoned as a punishment for the crime of making
mind-blowing movies. That’s the impression you get, at any rate, after
experiencing "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," the filmmaker’s 1964
breakthrough, which begins a week-long run today at the BAMcinematek,
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This folk fever dream, seemingly
possessed by pagan magic and infused with nonstop native music, roils
with the all-consuming passion of its story about a shepherd, Ivan
(Ivan Mikolajchuk), whose beloved Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova) dies.

In the decade that followed the release of the film, Soviet
apparatchiks harassed the Ukrainian-born Armenian director endlessly,
accusing Parajanov of provincial nationalism, torpedoing his
subsequent films, and eventually jailing him in 1973, five years
after his magnificent 1968 imagining of the Armenian artist Sayat
Nova, "The Color of Pomegranates," which many consider his crowning
achievement. Possessing both empathetic dedication to each movie’s
terrain and a vigor of expression to match, the flamboyant, fearless
director posed a threat by unleashing an artistic and spiritual force
that was more basic and potent than ideology.

Filmed among the Gutsuls in Ukraine’s Carpathian mountains, "Shadows
of Forgotten Ancestors" has the pith and immediacy of so many muscular
lines of folk poetry. Ivan’s childhood is a rough-and-tumble overture:
a tree in a snowy forest that lays low a man; a lunging village idiot
amid peasants resplendent in tunics; heady wanderings through an
Orthodox church mid-ritual. Ivan’s joyous courtship with Marichka
despite a family feud is a bucolic apotheosis: As they spin each
other around in a field, the low camera angle makes a single daisy
flit in and out of eclipsing the sun.

The season comes for Ivan to summer with the shepherds, but lovelorn
Marichka seeks him out and tragically slips down a rockface. To this
point, the film’s earthy and ruddy tones and bristling mobile camera
are startlingly alive, like a color photograph of a time before time.

But with Marichka’s death, Parajanov plunges the film – and Ivan –
into dolorous grays and heavy action that bursts into mania and
devolves into daze.

The colors return when Ivan rehitches with a buxom, heavily sensuous
peasant girl, Palagna (Tatyana Bestayeva), but when the babies
don’t come, the heavy-lidded eroticism shifts to a literally haunted
vacancy. Parajanov’s sense for the culture’s magic becomes palpable
when Palagna consults a grabby sorcerer. The supernatural element that
thrums throughout the film, drawing on pagan and orthodox energies
and bewitching song and dance, feels unified with daily life until
it falls unhinged in these moments of disorder and desperation.

>From the first otherworldly moans of peasant alpine horns, music keeps
"Shadows" grounded and mythic at the same time. There’s more singing,
twanging, keening, clattering, and stomping than dialogue.

Like makers of other ethnic cine-portraits, Parajanov knew to find
the heartbeat of a people in its sound and music, and even in the
restive crackling of a rangy fire.

Besides the power of his art, his empathy for native Ukrainian culture
was what irked Soviet authorities, who envisioned one monolithic
Soviet people. "Shadows" renders Carpathian custom, costume, and
music as fully and richly as a documentary, without ever feeling
like one. Like Pasolini eliciting grace from the masses, Parajanov is
never an observer gathering material. He took a different tack from
even his Ukrainian predecessor, the legendary silent-film director
Alexander Dovzhenko, who shot waving grain and sturdy peasants with
pistonlike montage and framing, and a worker-friendly ethos.

Parajanov had in fact studied under Dovzhenko at VGIK, the renowned
Moscow film school. Bracketing his influences was his avowed object
of admiration, the director Andrei Tarkovsky, who was younger by
10 years. You can see an affinity between the one-two pairs of
Tarkovsky’s ruralist "Ivan’s Childhood" and artist epic "Andrei
Rublev," and Parajanov’s "Shadows" and "Color of Pomegranates."

A coda to the passion of "Shadows" is the violent echo of its
family-feud rumblings in Parajanov’s early life: His first wife was
murdered for marrying a foreigner. And Soviet life was obviously
a struggle; even his release from the gulags came only after
international pressure, with blacklisting constant. But two more films
followed, and Parajanov spoke of going to America to adapt Longfellow’s
"Song of Hiawatha." In that resilience, and in "Shadows of Forgotten
Ancestors," you get the sense of the filmmaker’s spirit in every shot.