Film

One of the sadder casualties of Soviet censorship, director Sergei Parajanov spent a sizable chunk of the 1970s in a gulag breaking rocks. Before then, he was drinking aperitifs with Fellini at international film festivals. The reasons for such detentions were never fully clear. (Charges against Parajanov included “homosexuality and illegal trafficking in religious icons”; he was also strongly pro-Ukrainian, a big no-no in the USSR.) Incontestably, they reveal a boldness out of step with the prevailing aesthetic. Can there be a better definition of an artist?

Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors depicts that artistry in its most accessible form. It takes the shape of a romantic myth, set in rough, mountainous terrain during an unspecified part of the 19th century. Here live Carpathian shepherds and farmers. When they marry—as Ivan (Mikolajchuk) and Palagna (Bestayeva) do—they are blindfolded and literally yoked together for the ceremony, thus producing the earliest example of couple’s therapy on film. Elsewhere, as Parajanov’s camera swirls vertiginously to capture harvest festivals and celebrations, you sense a linkage of past and present that’s astounding.

The harshness of the land catches up with its young lovers, and after tragedy strikes, Parajanov drains all of that color and vitality away as the movie kind of starts over—an enormously sympathetic gesture. The latter half becomes a ghost story, with pale, outstretched arms reaching past the white stalks of birch-tree forests. Parajanov knew the lure of simple imagery, the rush of nature and fate. His only crime was to celebrate these things—and to hope that audiences would too.