Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
1.
Throughout history, many nations have had empires.
Russia is the only empire to have had a nation.
This truism about Russia is often expressed. What does it mean?
England was a small country that, once, claimed colonial possession of much of the world. When the empire was stripped away, the United Kingdom remained. The same might be said of Spain, Belgium, or France. In each case, a smaller European nation claimed colonies in other parts of the world. As those colonies achieved independence, the home country became less prosperous but remained fundamentally the same.
By contrast, Russia has always been a federation. The Rus are a Slavic-Scandinavian people living around Novgorad in the 10th century. After raiding and wars, the Rus established their capital at Kiev. Thus, at the outset of Russian history, the Rus rule not from "Russia" but from the Ukraine. After the Russians were decimated by the Golden Horde (the Mongols) in the 13th century, the homeland shrunk to the Kingdom of Muscovy. Successive Russian kings established inroads into Siberian (Tatar) Khanates, re-asserted hegemony over the Ukraine, and, then, waged war on their borders ultimately clashing with the Ottomans in Crimea and the South and the Poles in the East. By the 17th century, Russia claimed parts of Poland, all of Siberia and, indeed, beyond to Alaska and had expanded in the south to the Black Sea. With each expansion, Russia absorbed existing people and polities. The empire of Russia was defined by the use of the Russian language and the territorial extent of the practice of the Russian Orthodox religion.
The point is that Russian, originally ruled from its colony in Ukrainian Kiev, has always defined itself as an empire. If the empire fails, or is stripped away, Mother Russia also fails, hence, Russia’s historical anxiety about the loss of its imperial territories.
The great filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov fell victim to this system of belief. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, Paradjanov was regarded with suspicion by the authorities in Moscow and Leningrad. He was an outsider or to use the term du jour – an "Other". And his films are not about Russia, but about people living in the parts of the Soviet Union who don’t speak Russian and, in fact, may be Muslim. The enthusiasm with which Paradjanov depicted these non-Russians led inescapably to the conviction that the director himself might not be wholly sympathetic to the Communist project of assimilating ethnic minorities. This had grave consequences for Paradjanov.
2.
There is another way to imagine Sergei Paradjanov’s tragic persecution by Soviet authorities. Authoritarian regimes instinctively fear great art and seek to suppress those artists capable of achieving greatness. The three greatest Soviet filmmakers in the post-Stalinist era, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexei German, and Sergei Paradjanov, all experienced severe censorship of their works. Even Eisenstein, the darling of the Bolshevik revolution, endured intimidation and, even, threats during the last decade of his life – Eisenstein’s final film, his two-part Ivan the Terrible, was considered as an oblique commentary on Stalin and the director feared that he might be purged on that basis. German’s films often were released five to ten years after their production on the basis of official censorship. Tarkovsky fled the Soviet Union, made his last two pictures in Italy and Sweden respectively, dying in exile. Paradjanov’s pictures were all suppressed – indeed, after Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was briefly shown in the Russia, none of his later films were released in the Soviet Union.
Great art subverts conventional narratives and perspectives. Authoritarian regimes find this disturbing and work to confound this sort of artistry.
3.
And there is another way to think about Paradjanov’s life. Russian artists often consider suffering to be prerequisite to the highest order of creativity. The artist must suffer for his art – the paradigm example in Russia is Dostoevsky, an epileptic and the survivor of Siberian labor camps. Paradjanov’s biography fits within this frame of reference.
4.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was released in 1964. The film was initially highly praised by Soviet authorities and the film critics beholding to them. Later, suspicions arose that the film was, perhaps, politically incorrect.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is based on a novel by the Ukrainian writer Mykhailovych Kotsiubynsky. This writer was born in 1864 and died in 1913. He was a progressive and his novels are considered examples of ethnographic realism. (Shadows documents the folkways of the Hutsuls, a tribe of Slavic mountain people residing the Carpathian Mountains on the border between Slovakia and the Ukraine.) The Soviets regarded Kotsiubynsky with some suspicion – in the early 1890's, he had been a member of the secret Society of Taras, a political organization that advocated for the independence of the Ukraine.
Even more problematic was the fate of Kotsiubynsky’s eldest son, Yuriy. Yuriy Kotsiubynsky was a swashbucking figure and the founder of the Red Cossacks of the Army of the Ukrainian Republic. The Red Cossacks battled the Whites and were Communists but there was some skepticism as to whether they were fighting for the Soviet Union or the independence of the Ukraine. Yuriy was a courageous cavalryman and rose to high level in the Soviet Federation, but he was denounced as a secret Trotskyite in 1937 and shot by one of Stalin’s firing squads. During the thaw in 1955, he was posthumously rehabilitated as a hero of the Soviet Union.
5.
There was another way in which Paradjanov was "other" or an outsider – he seems to have been either bisexual or homosexual. Homosexual acts were criminal in the Soviet Union. So the authorities had a basis for exerting intense pressure on him.
Paradjanov was born in Tbilisi, Georgia to Armenian parents in 1924. His parents are described as artistically inclined. In 1945, as the War was ending, Paradjanov traveled to Moscow where he enrolled Gerasimov School of Cinematography (VGIK). VGIK was one of the world’s greatest film schools – Paradjanov was taught by Dovzhenko (whose influence in apparent in Shadows) and Lev Kuleshov among others. Something went wrong in 1948. Under circumstances that remain unclear, Paradjanov was arrested and charged with committing a homosexual act – the other person involved in what seems to have been entrapment was MGB officer, that is, a member of the secret police. Paradjanov was sentenced to five years in prison, but, then, after three months, this term was commuted and he was released. (Presumably, he made some kind of agreement with the Secret Police.)
Perhaps to demonstrate that he was heterosexual, Paradjanov married a young woman who was of Muslim Tartar ethnicity. She converted from Islam to the Eastern Orthodox religion that was an important element of Paradjanov’s Armenian identity. ("Everyone knows that I have three homelands: I was born in Georgia, I have lived in the Ukraine, and I will die in Armenia.") This led to tragedy: her brothers murdered her in a so-called "honor slaying" in Moscow in 1950. Paradjanov re-married a Ukrainian woman by whom he had one son. That marriage occurred in 1956.
Returning to the film industry, Paradjanov made four or five documentaries and, then, directed a half-dozen feature films for Dovzhenko Film Studios (a State studio in Kiev helmed by the famous Alexander Dovzhenko). Paradjanov has termed these films "garbage" but some of them might be interesting. (Great directors tend to leave their fingerprints on the movies that they make: Scorsese’s juvenalia directed for Roger Corman, for instance, Boxcar Bertha, are largely meretricious trash but they still have glimmers of the brilliance that Scorsese would display a few years later in films over which he had more control.) One of these films adapts a Moldavian fairy tale and was made for children. Another is a so-called Kolkhaz musical – an all-singing and dancing musical replete with love stories and comic interludes set on a merry collective farm. Ukrainian Rhapsody is a melodrama about war-time lovers – it also features songs. Another film was rescued by Paradjanov when the leading lady was killed in an accident on-location – Flower on the Stone (1962) is about a love-affair between male and female comrades working in a mine. The leading lady apparently fell into the mine-shaft and died. The director up to the date of the accident was removed from the film (and, presumably, sent to Siberia). Paradjanov seems to have re-cut the movie into an anti-Christian propaganda film – the story was altered to involve a hero thwarting efforts by a Christian cult to infiltrate the mine-workers union. Paradjanov disdained the film calling it the "turd on the stone."
Paradjanov’s first fully developed and independently controlled film was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. The picture arose out of Paradjanov’s friendship with Andrei Tarkovsky. Paradjanov admired Tarkovsky’s poetic Ivan’s Childhood (1961) and was inspired by his friend’s example to attempt something more poetic and personal in character. Shadows was a world-wide sensation and won many prizes. Soviet critics were profuse in their praise of the film and, in fact, authorized the picture, made in a dialect of Ukrainian so obscure that most Ukrainians couldn’t understand it, to be shown without revision. (The censors initially demanded that Paradjanov dub the picture into Russian. But he refused and the censors withdrew their demand.) Within a few years, however, the film was re-evaluated and came to be regarded as implicitly subversive and self-indulgent.
Traveling to Armenia, Paradjanov made the picture often regarded as his most successful and personal achievement, Sayat-Nova released in the West as The Color of Pomegranates (1969). The film is non-narrative, comprising incidents in the life of the great medieval Armenian poet, Arutian, the "King of Song." Tarkovsky’s influence is evident in the film – clearly, Paradjanov has carefully studied the Russian filmmaker’s Andrei Rublev, a long and episodic film about a medieval painter of icons. Paradjanov’s approach is different and his budget was minuscule – in some ways, the picture, an unearthly combination of kitsch and surreal beauty, is more akin to one of Kenneth Anger’s underground films than a Hollywood bio-pic. Beyond any doubt, the The Color of Pomegranates contests Soviet norms as to socialist realism and implies a strongly nationalistic element in Paradjanov’s imagination. Soviet authorities repressed the film and, although it was shown internationally at film festivals, the picture was not premiered in the Soviet Union until 1979.
In 1973, Paradjanov gave a speech in Minsk decrying the lack of imagination in the Soviet film industry. The speech was apparently very funny. Three months later, Paradjanov was indicted for "art trafficking, pornography, homosexual rape, currency manipulation, and incitement to suicide." (At the time, he was working on a screenplay for a film based on some of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales.) He was duly convicted, notwithstanding the protest of many members of the Soviet intelligentsia, and sentenced to five years labor in prison. (Paradjanov, who was skilled in sewing and embroidery, was put in a prison shop sewing burlap bags. He excelled at this work and began to create small fabric dolls from loose ends of material in the factory. During periods when he was unable to make films, he made dolls, ceramics, sculpture as well as paintings and made collages.) Paradjanov served four years of his five year term – he was released in 1978 after the intervention of Francis Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Martin Scorsese, many Russian intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers (most notably Tarkovsky) and John Updike.
After his imprisonment, Paradjanov was impoverished. He lived homeless on the streets of Yerevan in Armenia for a while. Tarkovsky, distressed at his friend’s plight, gave him a ring to pawn – Paradjanov preferred to retain the ring as a symbol of his friendship with Tarkovsky. In 1982, he was in prison again, this time in Tbilisi where he served a nine month sentence again on obscure and, probably, politically motivated charges. By 1983, he was back in Kiev working at the Dovhenko Studios where he made The Legend of the Suram Fortress, another overtly nationalistic film – the movie concerns a fortress defending Georgia against Muslim Tartar invaders: the fortress can not stand unless a young warrior is buried alive in its huge walls. This movie is very remarkable, non-narrative, and disturbing – the motif of being buried alive probably refers, at least, obliquely to Paradjanov’s imprisonment. Of course, the film was suppressed by the authorities.
Paradjanov’s last feature was 1989, Ashik Karib. The movie is an adaptation of story by Mikhail Lermontov about a hero who must wander 1001 days, performing various labors, in order to win the right to marry his beloved. The film was shot in Azerbaijan, also was clearly nationalistic, and, therefore, suppressed – the picture was not shown in Russia until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The film is non-narrative, dedicated to the spirit of Andrei Tarkovsky, who had died, and ends with a dove descending – an image, Paradjanov explained, of Tarkovsky.
Seriously ill, Paradjanov’s began work on another film, The Confession. He shot three days of footage and, then, collapsed. His imprisonments under harsh conditions had damaged his health. He died in July 1990, age 66. His home in Yerevan, Armenia is now a museum and shrine displaying many of the dolls and other artworks he made while in prison.
6.
Some critics regard narrative, because sequential, as horizontal – one thing follows another. Vertical interpolations into the narrative may be either abysmal or supernatural – a demon can arise from the earth and an angel may visit from heaven. The horizontal or narrative plane insists upon causality. The vertical dimension interrupts causality.
Very early in Paradjanov’s Shadows, the camera appears high above the protagonists who are working as foresters. The camera dives toward the ground, swooping downward. This camera movement simulates the irruption into the narrative of forces that are arbitrary, unpredictable, and, possibly, supernatural. The camera’s motion signifies that the world of the forgotten ancestors is not imagined according to the dictates of realism. Here, anything can happen.
7.
There is a sequence in Andrei Rublev that is particularly haunting. It is Spring and peasants have lit bonfires in the woods and everyone seems to be drunk. The young women have all stripped off their clothes and they wander through the twilight offering themselves sexually to the men that they meet. With its leaping flames and shadowy forests filled with the gliding nude women, the landscape seems enchanted. The pagan gods have returned to earth and, for one night, from dawn to dusk, they walk among their people.
Paradjanov’s film acknowledges the fact that profoundly pagan currents of emotion and belief are very close to the surface in Russia and the Ukraine. In some respects, Paradjanov’s film falls within a mainstream of Russian art – the celebration of the pagan roots of the Russian soul. Stravinsky works this vein majestically in his 1913 The Rite of Spring, the score written for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. As in Petrushka and The Firebird ballets, Stravinsky uses old fairy tales and legends for his inspiration. In The Rite of Spring, girls and boys dance ecstatically and, then, a young woman, the Chosen One, is selected to dance herself to death in the center of a circle of Elders. This kind of material, bloody, ecstatic, and pagan, is central to Shadows. There is a veneer of Christianity – people kiss icons and there are Eastern Orthodox churches, but what seems to go on in those churches is not much like a Christian worhip service. Ultimately, the "blood" of the people is not Christian nor is it even really European – this is shown to us when a man strikes another down with his small-headed axe. The gush of snow from the dying man is shown as a scarlet horses galloping wildly away. The blood is unregulated and fierce; it can not be restrained by Christian sacraments. Sorcerers conjure the dead or bewitch with love potions. The world is full of wild, perilous, untrammeled forces.
8.
In the film’s final shot, we see a kind of mosaic – in this case a window with many mullions and panes of glass, each one containing a small blonde boy’s face. The little boys are looking out to where a man is building a casket for the hero, Ivanko. The procession of faces, each occupying a separate frame, is some kind of metaphor for film – a movie is made up of many frames, each containing a picture. Presumably, the little boys will be told the story of Ivanko’s life and it will become a legend to them and they will tell the legend and, in the end, Paradjanov will make it into a film. So the final shot embodies both the creation of a legend, the oblique way in which folklore forms, that is, by implication and indirection – we don’t actually see what the little boys are watching – and, finally, provides us with a form that is equivalent to the vessel that will later contain the legend, the frames of Paradjanov’s film.
9.
In some ways, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is so rich and self-indulgent that, it seems, the movie of movies, that is, a template of many other kinds of films. The wild camera movements and the lush colors and some elements of the editing seem to have influenced director’s like Baz Luhrman (Romeo and Juliet directed by Luhrman, of course, is a story kin to the one that Paradjanov shows in his film). Some of the luminous archaic images have the quality of frames from movies by Guy Madden – there is a wild, delirious silent film sensibility at work in the movie. Underground films like those made by Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren seem to be referenced in some sequences – the ornate and lurid colors as well as the bizarre and, even, campy costumes cause some scenes to be redolent of Anger’s homosexually-inflected films like Kustom Kar Kommandos and Scorpio Rising. This is in line with J. Hoberman’s argument that the movie the film most resembles of Stan Brakhage’s experimental picture Dog Star Man made in the same year that Shadows was produced. I think that many of the film’s more abstract sequences look very much like the film diaries of the Jonas and Adolphus Mekas, particularly their diary of visit to their native Lithuania. It is equally true that many compositions in the movie echo images in Eisenstein, particularly, the technicolor feast sequence in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (Part Two). And, of course, some shots, particularly those with figures standing amidst black and jagged spear-like ruins of huts, directly cite Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood. The influence of Dovhenko also lies heavily over parts of the film – in this regard, one might cite lyrical sequences in the great Ukrainian director’s film Earth (1930), including the scene where the young widow runs naked through her house upon hearing of her husband’s death or the concluding image of apples in the rain. But with all of these references and citations, the Shadows has its own bizarre identity – it is both all movies at once and the specific creation of specific artist.
10.
An influential book in political philosophy, Leo Strauss’ Persecution and Writing (1952), proposes that most ancient and early modern philosophers composed their works under regimes that were despotic. As a consequence, the writings made by these philosophers conceal their heterodox opinions under a veneer of surface piety. Many of these writings pay obeisance to the tyrant, but, in fact, contain concealed subtexts that undercut the tyrant’s authority.
A similar situation is manifest in films made in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes. The most successful and effective films made in East Germany were a series of highly imaginative and brilliantly designed fairy tale films – this cycle of films began with Wolfgang Staudt’s The Story of Little Mook and continued through the seventies with pictures such as Heart of Stone, Snow White, Turli’s Adventure (a version of Pinocchio), and the ineffably weird The Singing, Ringing Tree. These movies evaded political questions that would inevitably have been raised by so-called realistic films documenting daily life in the DDR. In the Soviet Union, serious filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Paradjanov made movies ostensibly remote from naturalistic concerns – Tarkovsky sought refuge in the remote past (Andrei Rublev) or outer space (Solaris) or science fiction (Stalker). Paradjanov made films about ancient legends and poems. His problem, however, was that the settings of these tales, Armenia, Carpathia, Azerbaijin and the Transcaucasus could be interpreted as subversive of the Soviet Union’s "great" or "noble lie" – namely, that Communism had created a seamless union of like-minded nations all striving for the same utopian future.
Paradjanov seems apolitical to me. But to be apolitical was also a betrayal of the regime. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors shows a world driven by ancient feuds, superstition, and various forms of demonism and the supernatural. The world that he imagines is certainly not one driven by economic or other factors susceptible to Marxist interpretation. This is Paradjanov’s double-bind, his dilemma – the more remote his films from daily life (and his later films are highly experimental and abstract), the more personal those films became. And he had the misfortune to be laboring under a regime of collectives, a regime that denied the authenticity of purely subjective and purely personal.
11.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was hailed as inaugurating a Soviet New Wave cinema. Critics have called it "the most plastic fantastic" of all Soviet era films and "not so much lyric as lysergic." There is no widely held consensus as to whatwhat the film exactly means. Indeed, there isn’t even any agreement as to whether the end of film is happy or sad.
Some critics argue that the film celebrates the indomitable vitality and life force in the Hutsul people. These critics argue that the movie shows us that life "will find a way" – that life goes on, although individuals are slaughtered. I don’t buy this analysis. Certainly, the official Soviet justification for the film would adopt this sort of sentimental interpretation. But I think it’s wrong.
Other critics believe that the film is fundamentally experimental and non-narrative – in this interpretation, the slender, obliquely presented narrative is just an excuse for a series of hallucinatory camera motions and surreal montage. Some critics have gone so far as to say that the camera is a character in the film and that it actually causes the events that it renders as pictures. I like this argument because it is as crazed as the film, but don’t think it holds water in the long run. Critics who assert this argument are, in effect, simply restating a variant of the argument that movie’s plot is merely a framework on which to hang various surreal sequences. These critics define the film as a "second person narrative" – "you", here the camera are doing various things and these things that "you" record form the film.
In my view, the film suggests that love is a powerful force that may defeat the grave. But this is the pure love of the children of the feuding families, love that exists before sexuality imposes its meaning on that emotion. Paradjanov seems to think love between adult men and women induces a sort of bondage – it requires a willingness to bear a yoke as well as self-imposed blindness. (Thus, the bizarre wedding sequence, a scene that has no ethnological basis at all.)
It’s hard to interpret a film that is so obscure in some ways that no one has yet developed a plausible theory as to the meaning of the title itself.
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