Tini Zabutykh Predkiv

Director/Coscreenwriter: Sergei Paradjanov

By Roderick Heath

From amongst his too-few crop of marvels, Sergei Paradjanov’s best-known film alongside 1968’s Sayat Nova, was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and it was the one that made his name. Although rendered in a similar hallucinatory, totemistic, folk-myth design as Sayat Nova, Shadows is quite different in that it at least tells a concrete, discernible narrative, managing to conjure something like the immense, segmented sprawl of classical sagas in an hour and a half. Where the later film tackled the cultural landscape of Paradjanov’s native Armenia, Shadows, based on a novella by Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky, describes the culture of the Ukrainians of the Carpathian Mountains in the eighteenth century (as suggested by the flintlock pistols the men carry), but could, in truth, be of almost any time. Whilst Shadows offers up the dramatic and tragic life of Ivan (Ivan Mikolajchuk), and his Romeo-and-Juliet love affair with Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova), the story provides a mere framework for Paradjanov’s visuals fugues and ritualised evocations.

Nothing has meaning in Paradjanov’s films unless it linked to the totality of the natural world and the chains of tradition. Shadows unfolds in a series of linked, but segmented chapters that both extend Ivanko’s story and portray the world in which he lives, a world that is elemental even in its spirituality. In the first few minutes of the film, the young Ivan (I. Dzyura) loses most of his family. Ivan is almost crushed by a tree his older brother Olexa is felling: Olexa dashes to push Ivan out of the way, and is killed himself. At the church funeral, his father Petyik Paliychuk (Aleksandr Gaj) mocks the wealthier farmer Guteniuk (A. Raydanov) who, he says, “gives money to God but fleeces the poor.” Enraged, especially when Guteniuk’s wife calls him and his wife beggars, Paliychuk pursues him outside and spits insults, until Guteniuk strikes him dead with his axe. Ivan’s mother (Nina Alisova), who’s already lost all her other children and now her husband, and thus cheated of prosperity, maintains a bitter hate of the Guteniuks, but Ivanko’s one redeeming light in life is a daughter of the hated clan, Marichka (V. Glyanko as a girl), whom he first spied at his brother’s funeral. In the melee that followed his father’s murder, he slapped her, but then chased her down and made friends; by the time he had forgotten his father, he was welded to her like steel, sharing a nature-child love, playing in the woods together without clothes.

When the pair grows into young adults, they’re still perfectly in love. But Ivan’s mother’s resentments against the Guteniuks have not faded, so their love can still only manifest beyond the boundaries of the town, in the woods and fields. Ivan goes to earn some money as a shepherd in the mountain pastures above the town. One night, when the land is wreathed in a thick fog and the shepherds work to keep their flocks together, Marichka wanders out into the forest, drawn by the light of a strange star. She comes across a lost black lamb on a steep ledge, and, trying to rescue it, plummets to her death in the surging river below. Ivan joins search parties looking for her and comes across her beached, frigid body. He spends the next few years in a state of unproductive grief, increasingly tattered and slovenly, his looks lost behind a beard and filth. He slowly returns to a normal life helping the local church, and especially when he encounters Palagna (Tatyana Bestayeva), a young woman with an estate; they share a charged moment when he shoes her horse and she laps up the sight of him. They are soon married, but the past and the future for these two soon prove sadly tangled.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is an immersive experience in the best sense, demanding a reorientation of narrative priorities and outlook, but rewarding that attention with a vigorous sprawl of fantastic images and vividly envisioned metaphors. Many filmmakers, especially more contemporary ones, would try to capture a sense of the historic and the alien through a kind of minimalist preciousness, but that was as alien to the madly inventive Paradjanov as blockbuster action. He created images with physical force and expressive enthusiasm, with some visions, like his grand crane shots plunging through forests and swinging over gorges, that seem to defy all physics of film photography. It’s hard then to write about the electric quality of such images as Ivan and Marichka embracing in the woods as a sun shower pelts them with glittering bolts of rain, as if the very elements are blessing them.

The spiritual is innately physical here, and the film’s soul, like that of the society it portrays, is Christianised, but often still reflexively pagan, even pantheistic. This contradiction is lessened in an environment where nature is all-powerful. Emblems of religion and spirituality are hewn out of the raw materials provided by nature, wood and stone, and the vagaries of the elemental world are cruel and haphazard. “Beggars like them shouldn’t be allowed in here!” the Guteniuk matriarch screams in the church as the Paliychuks mock them, and the church, linchpin of social ritual in the mountain villages, fades into unimportance as magic and misfortune become governing lights: the narrative of Shadows seems to move further back into the mystic past rather than forward with the world, as characters, stripped of what they want, choose deeper, darker alternatives. Marichka’s death, not even halfway through the film, is a truly shocking one that leaves both Ivan and the story in tatters, and picking up the pieces becomes the most arduous of processes. Paradjanov here uses the most effective and simple of devices, bleaching all the colour out of the film, snatches of gossip on the soundtrack charting the village’s reactions to his ruined state as he goes through his labours and bathing with a dissociated disinterest.

Paradjanov’s animated, often first-person camera constantly invokes the experiential, sensual world, tethered to the corporeal and yet charged with spirits unseen and lurking: from Ivanko’s father being bashed on the head by Guteniuk, blood running down over the lens, or the camera seeming to fall with the tree that crushes Olexa, to the whirling camera in the very final scene, life is a disorientating cascade for Ivan. In the most intricately orchestrated sequence, when Marichka is lost and drowns, and as Ivan and the villagers search for her, a hand-held camera chases Ivan and others through the gloom of morning, faces and bodies appearing out of the fog, tumbling down slopes, torches burning in the haze. When Ivan eventually boards a great raft with others to ride down the river in search, Paradjanov’s camera flies overhead in a stunning crane shot, as the vessel emerges from the murk and disappears again like a momentarily substantive dream. Clear geography and visual order are blurred, even as the setting is explored in the most atmospheric of fashions, so that one practically feels Ivan’s adrenalin-stoked, frantic leap to action, resolving finally in a slightly askew shot as Ivan sits on a stone in silent grief, with only the lower half of Marichka’s beached body in the frame. His energetic search, the whole logic of his life, the giddy rush of adolescent love, and the bounty of nature, come to an abrupt, sickened, motiveless halt.

In the second half, Ivan’s marriage to Palagna seems motivated entirely by mutual attraction, and their union, which sees a ceremonial yoke placed over their shoulder whilst they’re blindfolded, a revivifying one for Ivan. On their wedding night, Ivan strips Palagna bare and tears off the last item—a bead necklace, which shatters in his grasp—leaving her breathlessly, silently expectant, and rigidly cautious: a scene that’s teeth-grindingly erotic even as Paradjanov cleverly avoids nudity. Their marriage soon proves to be a haunted disaster, for though they labour prosperously together in the fields, Marichka, desperate for Ivan’s physical love, finds him increasingly unresponsive, and in their first Christmas together, Ivan is struck by the sight of a deer grazing near Marichka’s grave as one did just after she was buried. Both husband and wife begin attempting to commune with the spirit world, unable to face the one immediately in front of them, the sterility of which is confirmed in a wide shot of the couple eating their Christmas feast in silence. Ivan makes offerings of food to attract spirits, and Marichka seems finally to appear to him, gazing forlornly through the window, but Palagna doesn’t see her and pins up a curtain. Later, Palagna strips off her clothes and walks into the night to play shamanka, begging the spirits to make Ivan love her and give her a child.

Paradjanov’s psychology, symbolism, and sorcery come together now, as Palagna is approached by the local magician, Yura (Spartak Bagashvili), stricken with fascination for this transgressive woman who, like himself, is obeisant to older gods. Yura is glimpsed, in the film’s second brilliantly orchestrated sequence, working magic to turn away a destructive storm by enchanting a pair of horses he then rides out into the fields to create a counteractive wind. Exhausted, he falls to the ground, and when Palagna approaches to congratulate him, he begs her to come soothe him. A tree close by explodes in flames as the pair screw on the ground: an image conjoining Yura’s mastery of magical power and his masculine force, as he gives Palagna, who’s been associated visually with dead and barren trees, the orgasm she hasn’t been getting from Ivan. Yura, although not pretty like Ivan, draws all the potency of the physical and spiritual worlds into his frame, and he soon proves the most fearsome of cuckold-makers.

This cruel ménage soon enough comes to a head when Palagna and Ivan go to a tavern and sit at the same table as Yura, and Palagna, when her husband’s not looking, cuddles up to the magus. A friend tells her off, and Ivan fronts up to Yura, but the sorcerer strikes Ivan with a hex. Ivan reels outside, dazed and shattered, and glimpses Yura and Palagna, having clearly claimed each other’s affections. He wanders off through felled woodland, the smoking, severed stumps of what had once been forest perfectly reflecting his now-denuded existence and wasted psyche. As he drinks from a spring, he glimpses Marichka’s spirit, and chases her into the forest, both of them strangely greyed and deathly-looking; when Marichka finally reaches out to touch Ivan, he dies with a scream.

The stinging paradox of this plot—that fulsome, seemingly naturally imbued love isn’t strong enough to hold off a chain of destructive events and the inevitable process of decay, and yet imbues these paltry lives with legendary greatness—defies potential sentimentality, even if the finale’s suggestion that Ivan and Marichka are reunited on another plane isn’t so far from, say, Titanic (1997). That they could only find their fulfillment as shades tied to the forest is a fine and fair solution to the impossibility of their lives and also to the violent brevity of this way of life, and yet it is certainly death, whilst in the film’s very final scene Ivan’s fellow villagers get on with life, turning his wake into a rollicking party. Ivan essentially dies in the same way as his own father, though Yura does not strike Ivan with his axe, instead merely slamming it on the table to work his hex. The reduction of Ivan’s life story to that of an unlucky fool who dies a cuckold after a bar fight seems to contrast the charged atmosphere of mystical meaning, but the immediate and the spiritual are still bound together here, for Ivan’s final failures are offenses to nature as well as mankind. The tree that is Palagna, the living essence, is something Ivan fails to bring to fruit, chasing instead the wispy remnant of eternal, sterile love into the forest.

Throughout the film, events and motives are tangential, especially emotion, extreme passions driving events on with organic but illogical force: Ivan’s father denouncing Guteniuk to expel his grief over Olexa; Ivan slapping Marichka to punish her for her father’s violence and then forgetting his father when being with Marichka; Ivan marrying Palagna to forget Marichka, whom he loses in a totally capricious accident; Palagna’s acts to make Ivan want her putting her in Yura’s orbit and then forgetting her husband. Even the accidents and idiocies of this world are inspired by some other, possibly noble, cause. There’s a coarse, realistic kind of psychology here, where people sublimate one need into another, and small twists of circumstance throw lives entirely off course. Tribal microeconomics are also described with terse import, as the prosperity of the Paliychuks is degraded as their labouring menfolk have been steadily decimated (Mother Paliychuk recites the names of her many lost sons and her husband) and the Guteniuks’ rapacity contrasted, an imbalance with long-reaching, murderous consequences. Ivan is the victim of a world out of equilibrium before he even arrives in it. What holds that world together is communal ritual, the reflexes of which are a refrain of the film’s texture: from Paliychuk’s funeral marchers, tramping in single file across the snow-caked land, to the villagers dancing in a long line, Marichka and other adolescent girls arrayed with sprigs in their hands in the church, blessed in their youthful fertility, and the curious binding motif of Ivan and Palagna’s wedding: universal customs described in specific terms, of course.

The faces and bodies of Paradjanov’s actors are more important than traditional acting abilities; Bagashvili’s fearsome visage suggests a human intermediary with Noh masks. The earthy realism of the cast is so convincing, it’s hard not to believe they weren’t simply recorded for documentary purposes. Which is, of course, very difficult acting, and Bestayeva is particularly compelling, with her blend of desirous disappointment and dismissive pith, snapping with force at Yura when he comes upon her making her naked invocations, “What’s wrong with you? Never seen a woman before?” The achievement of the film is to make the historic and the alien seem as vivid as the life around you, and though Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is a more conventional film than Sayat Nova, it is certainly no lesser.