DVD REVIEW: SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS
By Richard von Busack
Silicon Valley’s Metro
d-forgotten-0805.html
Jan 30 2008
CA
Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov’s 1964 masterpiece of
life in the Carpathian Mountains, "forgotten by God and people,"
tells the story, somewhere in the past, of the peasant Ivan (Ivan
Mikolajchuk), who loses the love of his life, wanders in exile and
participates in celebrations and lamentations. Eventually, Ivan marries
a bright-eyed, faithless villager (Tatiana Bestayeva) who cannot lure
him back from the ghostly appeal of the woman he lost. The Georgian
filmmaker’s extraordinary sensuality combines the dreaminess of Vigo
with the feeling for the natural world of Herzog. Yet this director
was alone in innovation and Jungian power. Fawns and lambs, horses
and fires, eggs and apples, storms and streams-all are contemplated
with a morning-of-creation awe. Some of the ideas here turn up in
the modern cinema: the mysterious log barge coursing down a river
in the fog as its crew looks for a dead woman is all over Apocalypse
Now; a tree bursting into flames to symbolize orgasm can be seen in
Pleasantville. Kino’s print of this much-mutilated film is very good,
if not visually restored, and includes scenes that didn’t make it
onto earlier video issues. The coming attractions include the good
news that Paradjanov’s The Legend of the Suram Fortress is also being
reissued by Kino. A slideshow of the director’s fine art is beautiful
as it is enlightening; less so is the underwhelming 2002 documentary
Islands, comparing the career of Paradjanov with that of his great
friend Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Andrei Rublev). Out-of-context
film clips try to illustrate both artists’ sufferings at the hands
of Soviet censors and judges. In Paradjanov’s case, they knew who
they were after-Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is perhaps the least
Soviet movie ever made in the U.S.S.R. (Richard von Busack)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
