SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (1965)
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Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
08:45 PM
Saturday May 03
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
09:10 PM
Saturday May 10
Rating: M
Duration: 97 minutes
Country: Ukraine
Language: Ukrainian with English subtitles
Cast: Ivan Mykolajčuk, Larysa Kadočnikova
Director: Sergei Parajanov
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
08:45 PM
Saturday May 03
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
09:10 PM
Saturday May 10
Rating: M
Duration: 97 minutes
Country: Ukraine
Language: Ukrainian with English subtitles
Cast: Ivan Mykolajčuk, Larysa Kadočnikova
Director: Sergei Parajanov
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
“In the temple of cinema, there are images, light, and reality. Sergei Parajanov is the master of that temple.” – Jean-Luc Godard.
“Sergei Parajanov’s extraordinary merging of myth, history, poetry, ethnography, dance and ritual remains one of the supreme works of the Soviet sound cinema, and even subsequent Parajanov features have failed to dim its intoxicating splendours.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
A masterpiece of Ukrainian cinema that bursts with life and colour, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) is a subtly subversive ode to folk culture characteristic of its visionary director, Sergei Parajanov.
Set in the Carpathian Mountains, amongst the Hutsul ethnic group and in their dialect, this outwardly simple tale of star-crossed lovers Ivan and Marichka belies a resistance to Soviet hegemony in both its style and in its efforts to lovingly preserve the distinctive cultural heritage of this region.
Shadows’ resplendent fusion of folk tradition and boldly expressive avant-garde formalism represents a radical departure from Socialist Realism and a vital precursor to this great director’s later oeuvre.
Introduced by Nicky Hannan at Ritz Cinemas and by Amiel Courtin-Wilson at Lido Cinemas
“In the temple of cinema, there are images, light, and reality. Sergei Parajanov is the master of that temple.” – Jean-Luc Godard.
“Sergei Parajanov’s extraordinary merging of myth, history, poetry, ethnography, dance and ritual remains one of the supreme works of the Soviet sound cinema, and even subsequent Parajanov features have failed to dim its intoxicating splendours.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
A masterpiece of Ukrainian cinema that bursts with life and colour, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) is a subtly subversive ode to folk culture characteristic of its visionary director, Sergei Parajanov.
Set in the Carpathian Mountains, amongst the Hutsul ethnic group and in their dialect, this outwardly simple tale of star-crossed lovers Ivan and Marichka belies a resistance to Soviet hegemony in both its style and in its efforts to lovingly preserve the distinctive cultural heritage of this region.
Shadows’ resplendent fusion of folk tradition and boldly expressive avant-garde formalism represents a radical departure from Socialist Realism and a vital precursor to this great director’s later oeuvre.
Introduced by Nicky Hannan at Ritz Cinemas and by Amiel Courtin-Wilson at Lido Cinemas
FILM NOTES
By Laleen Jayammanne
By Laleen Jayammanne
Laleen Jayamanne taught Cinema Studies at the University of Sydney.
SERGEI PARAJANOV
Parajanov was born in 1924 in Georgia to parents of Armenian ethnicity. He has said that, in his childhood in the multicultural city Tbilisi, the city’s rich craft milieu nurtured his perceptions. Through his father’s work he came into intimate contact with antique objects and furniture, which play unusual roles in his films. He inherited his mother’s feel for theatricality and high drama.
He was educated in Russian and from 1944 to 1945 studied singing, dancing and violin at the Tbilisi Conservatory, which no doubt informed his self-dramatising theatrical persona both in public and in private with friends at home. From 1945 to 1952 he studied at VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography) in Moscow. After graduation in 1952, he was assigned to the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv and made several films as assistant director and then director. It is with Shadows that he discovered for himself what he wanted to do in cinema.
Parajanov served three prison terms: the first in 1948, while he was a film student in Moscow, was on charges of homosexuality. The most onerous term, in a hard labour prison, was between 1974 and 1977, for the support of Ukrainian nationalism and again charges of homosexuality, which meant that his trial could be held in camera. It was widely believed that the homosexuality charges were politically motivated. There was a Europe-wide petition for his release, as he was a celebrated filmmaker, especially for The Colour of Pomegranates (Tset granata aka Sayat Nova, 1969). During this second prison term, Parajanov began making collages with whatever material at hand – beads and bits of shiny stuff, including plastic dolls – and this work is exhibited in the Parajanov Museum in Yerevan, Armenia. He also drew some of the hardened prisoners with criminal records and wrote down their “confessions” with the intent of using them in a future film. The last arrest and short imprisonment was in 1982, just as Glasnost was emerging in the Soviet Union.
The Colour of Pomegranates is about the national poet of Armenia, Sayat Nova, who wrote in the three languages of the Transcaucasus: Armenian, Azeri and Georgian. Parajanov’s last film, Ashik Kerib (1988) is about a Sufi minstrel and his journey of initiation across a mythical Caucasus. The film is based on a tale by Mikhail Lermontov, which his mother had read to him as a child, and which in turn was based on an old Turkish tale.
Parajanov likened his composition of shots to a Persian jewellery box, and drew ideas from Armenian miniatures to compose the frontal tableaux in The Colour of Pomegranates. The all-pervasive influence of Pre-Islamic Imperial Persian courtly high culture in Georgia is a seedbed for this film’s ornamentation and use of fabric. What we also see here is the profound influence that the Apostolic church ritual and Islamic ornamentation had on Parajanov’s conception of cinematic mise en scène, as well as on acting. In bringing into dialogue aspects of the Apostolic Christain faith and Islam (two great West Asian religions of the Book) in the very conception of The Colour of Pomegrantates and Ashik Kerib, one can say that Parjanov contributed something vital to contemporary culture.
Parajanov may now be thought of as a “Eurasian” film director who deepened cinema by drawing from the civilizational archives of the pagan world, the ancient Apostolic church and Sufi Islam (via Armenia, Turkiye, Azerbaijan and Persia). ‘Eurasia’ was materialised through the vast ancient networks of land and sea trade routes which now we know as the Silk Routes; the Caucasus formed a vital crossroads on these trade routes for the exchange of goods, ideas, arts and crafts, and religions.
Parajanov’s exuberant creative life, despite being marked by bloody times, could not be broken. At the 1988 Rotterdam Film Festival, his Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani received the ‘Twenty Directors of the Future’ award. He died soon after in 1990. Parajanov is a rare director of and for the emerging multipolar world.
He was educated in Russian and from 1944 to 1945 studied singing, dancing and violin at the Tbilisi Conservatory, which no doubt informed his self-dramatising theatrical persona both in public and in private with friends at home. From 1945 to 1952 he studied at VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography) in Moscow. After graduation in 1952, he was assigned to the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv and made several films as assistant director and then director. It is with Shadows that he discovered for himself what he wanted to do in cinema.
Parajanov served three prison terms: the first in 1948, while he was a film student in Moscow, was on charges of homosexuality. The most onerous term, in a hard labour prison, was between 1974 and 1977, for the support of Ukrainian nationalism and again charges of homosexuality, which meant that his trial could be held in camera. It was widely believed that the homosexuality charges were politically motivated. There was a Europe-wide petition for his release, as he was a celebrated filmmaker, especially for The Colour of Pomegranates (Tset granata aka Sayat Nova, 1969). During this second prison term, Parajanov began making collages with whatever material at hand – beads and bits of shiny stuff, including plastic dolls – and this work is exhibited in the Parajanov Museum in Yerevan, Armenia. He also drew some of the hardened prisoners with criminal records and wrote down their “confessions” with the intent of using them in a future film. The last arrest and short imprisonment was in 1982, just as Glasnost was emerging in the Soviet Union.
The Colour of Pomegranates is about the national poet of Armenia, Sayat Nova, who wrote in the three languages of the Transcaucasus: Armenian, Azeri and Georgian. Parajanov’s last film, Ashik Kerib (1988) is about a Sufi minstrel and his journey of initiation across a mythical Caucasus. The film is based on a tale by Mikhail Lermontov, which his mother had read to him as a child, and which in turn was based on an old Turkish tale.
Parajanov likened his composition of shots to a Persian jewellery box, and drew ideas from Armenian miniatures to compose the frontal tableaux in The Colour of Pomegranates. The all-pervasive influence of Pre-Islamic Imperial Persian courtly high culture in Georgia is a seedbed for this film’s ornamentation and use of fabric. What we also see here is the profound influence that the Apostolic church ritual and Islamic ornamentation had on Parajanov’s conception of cinematic mise en scène, as well as on acting. In bringing into dialogue aspects of the Apostolic Christain faith and Islam (two great West Asian religions of the Book) in the very conception of The Colour of Pomegrantates and Ashik Kerib, one can say that Parjanov contributed something vital to contemporary culture.
Parajanov may now be thought of as a “Eurasian” film director who deepened cinema by drawing from the civilizational archives of the pagan world, the ancient Apostolic church and Sufi Islam (via Armenia, Turkiye, Azerbaijan and Persia). ‘Eurasia’ was materialised through the vast ancient networks of land and sea trade routes which now we know as the Silk Routes; the Caucasus formed a vital crossroads on these trade routes for the exchange of goods, ideas, arts and crafts, and religions.
Parajanov’s exuberant creative life, despite being marked by bloody times, could not be broken. At the 1988 Rotterdam Film Festival, his Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani received the ‘Twenty Directors of the Future’ award. He died soon after in 1990. Parajanov is a rare director of and for the emerging multipolar world.
THE FILM
‘… in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. […] By “estranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious.” The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity.’ Viktor Shklovsky (1)
Sergei Parajanov spent one year with the mountain tribe known as the Hutsul, in Ukraine’s Western Carpathian Mountains, to learn about their way of life, their arts and crafts, their rituals and legends, their belief systems, and their embeddedness in nature, so as to make Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964). The film was produced with the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the former USSR.
Shadows is not an ethnographic film of a tribe, though there are strong ethnographic elements in it, such as the use of the dialect spoken by the Hutsul folk, their music, and ancient instruments, rituals, legends and craft work, embroidered cloth and dress. The film is an adaptation of the celebrated modern novella by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, and I learn from a scholarly discussion of the novella itself that it also uses Russian and Ukrainian language but focuses on the dialect of the Hutsul, making the film’s sonic world multilingual, like Ukraine itself. The score (while using the sounds and images of the folk songs and unique instruments of the Hutsul), is not ethno-musicological in orientation. The soundtrack, in its relative autonomy from the images, is in the long classical Soviet tradition of montage, playing with modernist sonic dissonance with gusto.
The film was created by a strong creative team working collectively, and Yuri Ilyenko’s cinematography in its sweeping movements imparts an élan to this tragic tale. This kind of camera mobility is something Parjanov later abandons for a relatively stationary camera and frontal tableau framing of the mise en scène.
The title itself suggests that the film is engaged in a reclamation of a lost or ‘forgotten’ something: ‘ancestors’, yes, but really their ‘shadows’. The melancholy semantic density of the novella’s title is affectively textured, because Parajanov’s medium is itself shadow-like. Unlike a photograph, cinematographic images ceaselessly appear and disappear and these evanescent images are but the shadow of the corporeal figures and the material world which sustains cinema as a medium. It is a medium (as Maxim Gorky exclaimed on first encountering projected film in 1895), ‘freighted with emptiness’.
The film is based on a tale of legendary star-crossed lovers, and their lost love sets the tone and framework for presenting the everyday life and key rituals of the tribe, such as a wedding, a funeral and Christmas with pagan overtones in the use of grotesque masks. These events are performed in unusual ways presented in disjunct non-chronological sequencing, an aspect of Parajanov’s poetic idiom. Later, this fascination with masks and the idea of the puppet (in popular folk theatre and in the Soviet avant-garde), influenced how he directed his actors who also danced in his major films. It’s best to relax into the rhythms of the film and ritualised gestures, instead of trying to “grasp” at meaning, and in that relaxed state the film may speak to you in unexpected ways, as Parajanov’s films are wont to do.
The American film historian, James Steffen (in his indispensable book The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov), says that Shadows was the first film that gave Parajanov a clear understanding of what he wanted to do with this shadowy medium and the material cultures of his several zones of contact within the USSR. (2) He was interested in the rich cultural diversity of several of the Soviet Republics and studied their cultural and artistic distinctiveness with absolute devotion.
The Soviet ‘Nationality Policy’ created the necessary institutional film production infrastructure that enabled Parajanov to delve deep into the cultures of the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) in The Colour of Pomegranates and Ashik Kerib (1988), and Ukraine, especially through the regional film studios in Armenia and Ukraine.
The relative decentralisation of the various film studios of the Soviet Republics meant that filmmakers could focus on local histories, stories and visual traditions that have pre-communist deep civilization histories and, in the case of Parajanov, even create a new cinematic idiom that violated the orthodox aesthetics of Socialist Realism. However, the Moscow-based Goskino film production bureaucracy with direct links to the Communist party, still had the power to censor work. The original title for the film on the Armenian national poet was changed from his name, Sayat Nova, to The Colour of Pomegranates. But more egregiously it was entirely re-edited in Moscow and new intertitles added, ostensibly for clarity, and sexually “explicit” scenes were deleted.
Steffen also makes an interesting contrast with Hollywood studio bureaucracy: he says that, whatever grievous hardship Parajanov suffered at the hands of the State, there is no way that the Hollywood Mode of Production and its studio system could have enabled the kinds of films that made him a singular figure in world cinema, especially with The Colour of Pomegranates and Ashik Kerib.
Shadows was the first of Parajanov’s films to be screened widely within Russia and also become an international success. European and Latin American cinephiles and critics recognised that Parajanov had created something singular; even the critics of Variety agreed! The highly sophisticated Ukrainian artists, poets, filmmakers and political activists hailed it as a ‘poetic film’, in that it created a new cinematic idiom that provided the seedbed for the creation of the modern ‘archaic’ poetic school of filmmaking in Ukraine, through the revival of its folklore and culture. This revival in turn became part of Ukraine’s nationalist politics. To be able to do this at a time in Europe when the rich oral epic traditions had long disappeared was quite a feat. But startlingly, some of that tradition appears to have survived with the Hutsul, in memory at least, if not in the totality of their wholistic cultural practices. What art historian Peter Brown says of Armenia (one of the former Soviet Republics) is, I think, also applicable to what Parajanov and others encountered among the Hutsul folk of Ukraine: ‘Armenian culture drew strange vigour from existing side by side with a continuing epic world of pre-Christian customs and oral tradition.’ (3)
I believe that it is the singular education Parajanov received at VGIK, the Russian Film School (the first in the world), that nurtured his profound ability to harness his wild imagination to compose and weave the forces of nature – earth, water, wind and fire – with the extant material cultures of ancient peoples to create a cosmos-centric cinema where humans are set adrift, as on the amazing rafts made of logs in the swift current of a mighty river, in Shadows.
The Ukranian poetic filmmaker of the Classical Soviet era, Alexander Dovzhenko (after whom the film studio in Kyiv is named), was one of the judges of Parajanov’s student film at VGIK. One of the other judges accused the young Parajanov of plagiarising Dovzhenko (Zvenigora [1928] or Earth [1930]). Dovzhenko, instead, asked to re-see the student film, a rare gesture, and concluded that he had not done so. When asked, Parajanov said that he had not seen any of Dovzhenko’s films. It took a great guru of poetic cinema, like Dovzhenko, to recognise the potential of another in the making.
After seeing the young Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Parajanov exclaimed that all that he himself had made up to then was worthless and he considered this younger filmmaker his guru. (4)
Parajanov said that, at the film school, they were first asked to draw their script before consigning it into words on a page. Consider the implications of this profound pedagogy as you enjoy this film and perhaps feel a bit baffled by its wildness, as I did.
Words and images all use the idea of a moving line which forms something. One can say that, when you and I write with a pen, we know where the line begins and ends; it’s one of the first things we learn in school. But I imagine that, for artists like Eisenstein and Parajanov who loved drawing, the idea of the line has no telos or end. The artist's hand is animated by a free-play of a variety of impulses (childlike but also highly skilled) that eludes linguistic capture; therein lies the power of first imagining a film as a plastic form rather than formed of ready-made words.
What the Soviet filmmakers thought of as the intergenerational ‘transmission of the secret’ from guru to shishay (mentor to mentee) in Soviet cinema thereby also included nurturing the fragile subjectivity of the poetic filmmaker to journey through their own darkness and to identify their singularity, so as to create, in a totalitarian state, a cinema without maps (as Carlos Muguiro suggests). I think Parajanov's child-like sense of play and sense of the comic and the cosmic makes him very different from his guru Tarkovsky.
Parajanov was a beneficiary of this profound intergenerational ‘transmission of the secret’ by the masters of Soviet film and film pedagogy. This is also a radiant gift that Soviet cinema offers to the world in the darkest of times. (5)
Notes
1. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Poetry and Prose in Cinematography’, in Russian Formalism, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1973.
2. James Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, University of Madison, Wisconsin, 2013.
3. Peter Brown, ‘Between Two Empires,’ a review of Armenia! An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. New York Review of Books, 66:1, 2019.
4. Ron Holloway, Parajanov: A Requiem, (film) 1994.
5. Carlos Muguiro, ‘The Transmission of the Secret: Mikhail Romm in the VGIK’. Comparative Cinema, 2, no. 5, winter 2014, pp. 41-49.
These notes draw strongly on research completed for Laleen Jayamanne, ‘Fabric of Thought: Sergei Parajanov,’ in Jayamanne, Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz, Amsterdam UP, 2021.
Sergei Parajanov spent one year with the mountain tribe known as the Hutsul, in Ukraine’s Western Carpathian Mountains, to learn about their way of life, their arts and crafts, their rituals and legends, their belief systems, and their embeddedness in nature, so as to make Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964). The film was produced with the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the former USSR.
Shadows is not an ethnographic film of a tribe, though there are strong ethnographic elements in it, such as the use of the dialect spoken by the Hutsul folk, their music, and ancient instruments, rituals, legends and craft work, embroidered cloth and dress. The film is an adaptation of the celebrated modern novella by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, and I learn from a scholarly discussion of the novella itself that it also uses Russian and Ukrainian language but focuses on the dialect of the Hutsul, making the film’s sonic world multilingual, like Ukraine itself. The score (while using the sounds and images of the folk songs and unique instruments of the Hutsul), is not ethno-musicological in orientation. The soundtrack, in its relative autonomy from the images, is in the long classical Soviet tradition of montage, playing with modernist sonic dissonance with gusto.
The film was created by a strong creative team working collectively, and Yuri Ilyenko’s cinematography in its sweeping movements imparts an élan to this tragic tale. This kind of camera mobility is something Parjanov later abandons for a relatively stationary camera and frontal tableau framing of the mise en scène.
The title itself suggests that the film is engaged in a reclamation of a lost or ‘forgotten’ something: ‘ancestors’, yes, but really their ‘shadows’. The melancholy semantic density of the novella’s title is affectively textured, because Parajanov’s medium is itself shadow-like. Unlike a photograph, cinematographic images ceaselessly appear and disappear and these evanescent images are but the shadow of the corporeal figures and the material world which sustains cinema as a medium. It is a medium (as Maxim Gorky exclaimed on first encountering projected film in 1895), ‘freighted with emptiness’.
The film is based on a tale of legendary star-crossed lovers, and their lost love sets the tone and framework for presenting the everyday life and key rituals of the tribe, such as a wedding, a funeral and Christmas with pagan overtones in the use of grotesque masks. These events are performed in unusual ways presented in disjunct non-chronological sequencing, an aspect of Parajanov’s poetic idiom. Later, this fascination with masks and the idea of the puppet (in popular folk theatre and in the Soviet avant-garde), influenced how he directed his actors who also danced in his major films. It’s best to relax into the rhythms of the film and ritualised gestures, instead of trying to “grasp” at meaning, and in that relaxed state the film may speak to you in unexpected ways, as Parajanov’s films are wont to do.
The American film historian, James Steffen (in his indispensable book The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov), says that Shadows was the first film that gave Parajanov a clear understanding of what he wanted to do with this shadowy medium and the material cultures of his several zones of contact within the USSR. (2) He was interested in the rich cultural diversity of several of the Soviet Republics and studied their cultural and artistic distinctiveness with absolute devotion.
The Soviet ‘Nationality Policy’ created the necessary institutional film production infrastructure that enabled Parajanov to delve deep into the cultures of the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) in The Colour of Pomegranates and Ashik Kerib (1988), and Ukraine, especially through the regional film studios in Armenia and Ukraine.
The relative decentralisation of the various film studios of the Soviet Republics meant that filmmakers could focus on local histories, stories and visual traditions that have pre-communist deep civilization histories and, in the case of Parajanov, even create a new cinematic idiom that violated the orthodox aesthetics of Socialist Realism. However, the Moscow-based Goskino film production bureaucracy with direct links to the Communist party, still had the power to censor work. The original title for the film on the Armenian national poet was changed from his name, Sayat Nova, to The Colour of Pomegranates. But more egregiously it was entirely re-edited in Moscow and new intertitles added, ostensibly for clarity, and sexually “explicit” scenes were deleted.
Steffen also makes an interesting contrast with Hollywood studio bureaucracy: he says that, whatever grievous hardship Parajanov suffered at the hands of the State, there is no way that the Hollywood Mode of Production and its studio system could have enabled the kinds of films that made him a singular figure in world cinema, especially with The Colour of Pomegranates and Ashik Kerib.
Shadows was the first of Parajanov’s films to be screened widely within Russia and also become an international success. European and Latin American cinephiles and critics recognised that Parajanov had created something singular; even the critics of Variety agreed! The highly sophisticated Ukrainian artists, poets, filmmakers and political activists hailed it as a ‘poetic film’, in that it created a new cinematic idiom that provided the seedbed for the creation of the modern ‘archaic’ poetic school of filmmaking in Ukraine, through the revival of its folklore and culture. This revival in turn became part of Ukraine’s nationalist politics. To be able to do this at a time in Europe when the rich oral epic traditions had long disappeared was quite a feat. But startlingly, some of that tradition appears to have survived with the Hutsul, in memory at least, if not in the totality of their wholistic cultural practices. What art historian Peter Brown says of Armenia (one of the former Soviet Republics) is, I think, also applicable to what Parajanov and others encountered among the Hutsul folk of Ukraine: ‘Armenian culture drew strange vigour from existing side by side with a continuing epic world of pre-Christian customs and oral tradition.’ (3)
I believe that it is the singular education Parajanov received at VGIK, the Russian Film School (the first in the world), that nurtured his profound ability to harness his wild imagination to compose and weave the forces of nature – earth, water, wind and fire – with the extant material cultures of ancient peoples to create a cosmos-centric cinema where humans are set adrift, as on the amazing rafts made of logs in the swift current of a mighty river, in Shadows.
The Ukranian poetic filmmaker of the Classical Soviet era, Alexander Dovzhenko (after whom the film studio in Kyiv is named), was one of the judges of Parajanov’s student film at VGIK. One of the other judges accused the young Parajanov of plagiarising Dovzhenko (Zvenigora [1928] or Earth [1930]). Dovzhenko, instead, asked to re-see the student film, a rare gesture, and concluded that he had not done so. When asked, Parajanov said that he had not seen any of Dovzhenko’s films. It took a great guru of poetic cinema, like Dovzhenko, to recognise the potential of another in the making.
After seeing the young Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Parajanov exclaimed that all that he himself had made up to then was worthless and he considered this younger filmmaker his guru. (4)
Parajanov said that, at the film school, they were first asked to draw their script before consigning it into words on a page. Consider the implications of this profound pedagogy as you enjoy this film and perhaps feel a bit baffled by its wildness, as I did.
Words and images all use the idea of a moving line which forms something. One can say that, when you and I write with a pen, we know where the line begins and ends; it’s one of the first things we learn in school. But I imagine that, for artists like Eisenstein and Parajanov who loved drawing, the idea of the line has no telos or end. The artist's hand is animated by a free-play of a variety of impulses (childlike but also highly skilled) that eludes linguistic capture; therein lies the power of first imagining a film as a plastic form rather than formed of ready-made words.
What the Soviet filmmakers thought of as the intergenerational ‘transmission of the secret’ from guru to shishay (mentor to mentee) in Soviet cinema thereby also included nurturing the fragile subjectivity of the poetic filmmaker to journey through their own darkness and to identify their singularity, so as to create, in a totalitarian state, a cinema without maps (as Carlos Muguiro suggests). I think Parajanov's child-like sense of play and sense of the comic and the cosmic makes him very different from his guru Tarkovsky.
Parajanov was a beneficiary of this profound intergenerational ‘transmission of the secret’ by the masters of Soviet film and film pedagogy. This is also a radiant gift that Soviet cinema offers to the world in the darkest of times. (5)
Notes
1. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Poetry and Prose in Cinematography’, in Russian Formalism, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1973.
2. James Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, University of Madison, Wisconsin, 2013.
3. Peter Brown, ‘Between Two Empires,’ a review of Armenia! An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. New York Review of Books, 66:1, 2019.
4. Ron Holloway, Parajanov: A Requiem, (film) 1994.
5. Carlos Muguiro, ‘The Transmission of the Secret: Mikhail Romm in the VGIK’. Comparative Cinema, 2, no. 5, winter 2014, pp. 41-49.
These notes draw strongly on research completed for Laleen Jayamanne, ‘Fabric of Thought: Sergei Parajanov,’ in Jayamanne, Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz, Amsterdam UP, 2021.
THE RESTORATION
Source: DCP Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna
Restored in 4K by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in collaboration with the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre and in association with the Dovzhenko Film Studio. Special thanks to Daniel Bird and Łukasz Ceranka. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
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Director: Sergei Parajanov; Production Company: Dovzhenko Film Studios; Producer: N.Yureva; Script: Ivan Chendej and Sergei Parajanov, from the novel by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky; Photography: Yuri Ilyenko and Viktor Bestayev; Editor: Marfa Ponomarenko; Production Design: Mikhail Rakovskiy and Georgiy Yakutovich; Music: Miroslav Skorik
Cast: Ivan Mykolajčuk (Ivan), Ihor Dzjura (Young Ivan), Larysa Kadočnikova (Marička), Valentyna Hlynko ( Young Marička), Tat’jana Bestaeva (Palahna), Spartak Bagašvili (Jura the sorcerer), Mykola Hryn’ko (Batag the priest), Leonid Engibarov (Miko)
USSR | 1965 | 97 Mins | 4K DCP | Colour | Ukrainian with English subtitles | UC 15+
Restored in 4K by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in collaboration with the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre and in association with the Dovzhenko Film Studio. Special thanks to Daniel Bird and Łukasz Ceranka. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Director: Sergei Parajanov; Production Company: Dovzhenko Film Studios; Producer: N.Yureva; Script: Ivan Chendej and Sergei Parajanov, from the novel by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky; Photography: Yuri Ilyenko and Viktor Bestayev; Editor: Marfa Ponomarenko; Production Design: Mikhail Rakovskiy and Georgiy Yakutovich; Music: Miroslav Skorik
Cast: Ivan Mykolajčuk (Ivan), Ihor Dzjura (Young Ivan), Larysa Kadočnikova (Marička), Valentyna Hlynko ( Young Marička), Tat’jana Bestaeva (Palahna), Spartak Bagašvili (Jura the sorcerer), Mykola Hryn’ko (Batag the priest), Leonid Engibarov (Miko)
USSR | 1965 | 97 Mins | 4K DCP | Colour | Ukrainian with English subtitles | UC 15+