Parajanov’s Mythic Quest for Love
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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 BAMcinématek, 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.
Through November 6 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).