Parajanov, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1965

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1965
(image source: IMDB)
no copyright infringement intended

notice how the colors are full in the first, happy part of the film, and how they get faded more and more to an almost black and white teint along with grief of Ivan, the male lead... at the end it turns to a blood red fury and then there is nothing but the dead (zoondijkstra, the most beautifullest thing i´ve ever seen)

you feel the ghosts are everywhere; that man is not a single unit but consists of multiple entities, permeating the forests, rivers and air... all this is beyond Christianity, but the last scenes are even beyond primitive ritual (Boris-57, Images, those images!)

yet the real romance here is between director Parajanov and the camera, which swoons and runs and bounds as ardently as any young lover... he veers from silent-film subtitles to new-wave editing gimmicks to Russian iconography within seconds, and yet the tricks never feel anachronistic... the movie exudes a pagan wildness... this is a movie that makes you laugh not from comedy but from sheer pleasure; it is as warm, bold, tragic, profoundly silly, and above all human, as a Shakespeare romance (miloc, a glorious oddity)

knowing all in once that the universe, the cosmic dance, is not random but has inexplicable agency (chaos-rampant, two-worlds (invisible axe))

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1965
(video by Igor Kozorog)

Parajanov was inspired by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's Тіні забутих предків, a Ukrainian classic novella telling a Hutsul story placed (like all Hutsul stories) in a world apart, with certitudes slippering toward a universe of dreams and tales becoming now and then certitudes (to turn then back, as flash ghosts do). A strange world revealing at every turn long forgotten meanings, sometimes reassuring, some other times nightmarish.

(source: Amazon)
no copyright infringement intended

There is an English translation (published for the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies by Ukrainian Academic Press), maybe there are also some others. As I have a particular interest for the Hutsul ways, I read several books with short stories written by a Romanian author, Casian Balabasciuc, and I warmly reccomend them: his stories paint a fantastic world, and they do it with deep knowldege.

Coming now back to the movie, the title describes very well, I think, Parajanov's credo: if we want to understand our true identity, we need to access the world of our ancestors; that world is hidden beneath the traditions, that act like shadows; thus we arrive at our inner truth only by crossing the layers of tales and legends, croyances and superstitions.

Is this world of ancestors the Paradise Lost? Not at all. Like in today's world, you find there the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. It doesn't matter: it's essentially your world, your reality, your true meaning of life.

And it's the same regardless of the region where you are from, for the Hutsuls of the Carpathians, as well as for the Georgians, Armenians or Azeris of the Caucasus.



(Parajanov)

(Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky)

(Casian Balabasciuc)