Clearly preferring to tell his story abstractly rather than concretely, director Sergei Paradzhanov assails viewers' eyes with streaks of color and rushes of camera movement, and their ears with sounds best described as revolutionary and industrial.
A point-of-view shot, for example, has the camera swooping straight down as a tree falls on young Ivan’s father. Other shots zoom in and out of forests and barnyards and celebrations, and during violent scenes he sometimes interrupts shots with freeze frames and tints his film; during a death scene, blood-drenched horses leap across the screen. A few of these pyrotechnics can go a long way, and there were times in “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” when I thought they went too far. It has the most unique camera angles and shots that were made in most amazing proximity. The richness of its photography will take you to the Carpathian Mountains and leave you astonished.
History:
Sergei Paradjanov'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 Paradjanov features have failed to dim its intoxicating splendors.
And for anyone who’s interested in the Ukrainian culture and customs of perhaps a century ago, “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” is a treasure, a repository of costumes, masks, superstitions and beliefs, courtship customs and the sufferings of short lives with too much work in