Sergei Paradjanov

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Joshua First, Birgit Beumers, Richard Taylor, Birgit Beumers, Richard Taylor

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783207091
• eBook ISBN: 9781783207114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Released in 1965, Sergei Paradjanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is a landmark of Soviet-era cinema – yet, because its emphasis on folklore and mysticism in traditional Carpathian Hutsul culture broke with Soviet realism, it caused Paradjanov to be blacklisted soon after its release.

 

This book is the first full-length companion to the film. In addition to a synopsis of the plot and a close analysis of the many levels of symbolism in the film, it offers a history of the film's legendarily troubled production process (which included Paradjanov challenging a cinematographer to a duel). The book closes with an account of the film's reception by critics, ordinary viewers and Soviet officials, and the numerous controversies that have kept it a subject of heated debate for decades. An essential companion to a fascinating, complicated work of cinema art, this book will be invaluable to students, scholars and regular film buffs alike.

 

A list of all books in the series is here on the series page KinoSputnik
 

Chapter 1

Introduction

Unlike the majority of Soviet cinema’s classic works, Sergei Paradjanov’s Tini zabutykh predkiv/Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is not a Russian film. Its language, setting, subject matter and methods of narration are distant from the established canon of the 1920s avant-garde, the classics of socialist realism, and the more recently acknowledged masterpieces of the Thaw. Moreover, Paradjanov made Shadows far from the centre of the Soviet film industry in Moscow, at the Aleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kiev (now Kyiv, Ukraine). Among its many accomplishments, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is often credited with founding the ‘poetic school’ in Soviet cinema, a loose grouping of films and film-makers interested in visual association, literary metaphor, folklore and non-Russian, generally ethnographic, topics. In the late 1960s and 1970s, ‘poetic cinema’ became shorthand for the best of ‘national cinema’; that is to say, films made in the Soviet republics outside the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the Ukrainian Republic (Ukrainian SSR), Shadows heralded the birth of a Ukrainian dissident movement when its September 1965 premiere erupted in protest at recent arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals. The First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine himself rejected ‘poetic cinema’ in 1974 as anti-Soviet, but the decade after Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors represented a veritable golden age for Ukrainian and other non-Russian cinema, and it was largely based on the influence of this one film.

Moreover, Paradjanov became a film-maker of global significance, largely owing to Shadows, even though he was and remains a mysterious figure. After graduating from Moscow’s prestigious All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (Vsesoiuznyi gosudarstvennyi institut kinematografii, VGIK) in 1952, the Russian-speaking Armenian Paradjanov found work at the Ukrainian studio the following year. Forced to live in a Kiev dormitory for the next twelve years, Paradjanov worked on a number of mediocre projects at Dovzhenko Studios. During the production of Shadows, however, the director was catapulted to fame at the age of 40, both for his eccentric personal style and the film’s ability to speak to contemporary concerns about Ukrainian folk culture. Despite the media frenzy that accompanied Shadows for a full year before it was released on the big screen in the USSR, and its success at international film festivals, the film did not enjoy wide release in the Soviet Union, and only about eleven million tickets were sold throughout the Soviet period. Moreover, the audience for the film during its initial run was only seven million, with most of the rest seeing it during perestroika (Ivanov 1973: 235).² Communist Party officials and authorities in film distribution (who had to fulfil their own financial plans) complained that audiences would not understand the film’s complex imagery and opaque references to Ukrainian folklore.

In their standard textbook, Film History: An Introduction, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell (2003: 460) call Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors ‘a flurry of hysterically modernist techniques’. The line evokes the stylistically and generically eccentric nature of the film, which mixes static tableaux shots with a frantically mobile camera; a lyric love story situated securely in the Zeitgeist of the 1960s, but whose characters inhabit an isolated and ahistorical space of ancient myths and supernatural powers.

Apart from its ‘poetic’ techniques, what is it that made Shadows so exceptional for Soviet cinema that it continues to be celebrated with dozens of books and countless articles written in Ukrainian, Russian, Armenian, French and English? And what made the film so problematic for the authorities that it was eventually banned from screens in the country and contributed to its director’s imprisonment (albeit almost a decade after its initial release)? The answer to both questions can be found in the ways in which Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors presents a bounded and distinct culture, one that could be appropriated as uniquely and authentically Ukrainian, rather than as generically Soviet or conflated with Russian. At the same time, Paradjanov and his cast (most notably, cinematographer Iurii Illienko) revealed a space, ripe with nationalistic value through a cosmopolitan, modernist lens, which was conversant with West European film movements such as Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave. Thus, the film was implicated not only as a text that might provoke ‘bourgeois nationalism’, but also as one overly concerned with the formalistic and apolitical aesthetics of art in the capitalist West. In this book, I examine such a strange film both on its own terms, and in the dual contexts of the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s, along with the world of cinema during this exciting period. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is an interesting film for the simultaneously specific and global aesthetic and political spaces that it inhabited.

For these and other reasons, interest in Sergei Paradjanov’s work has grown in recent years. Most notably, James Steffen’s monograph The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (2013) is a broad assessment of the director’s filmography, methodically showing the development of his aesthetic sensibilities – from Ukraine in the 1950s and early 1960s, to Armenia in the late 1960s, and Georgia and Azerbaijan in the 1980s. Steffen (2013: 4) argues that Paradjanov’s ethnographic interest in the non-Russian republics and ‘old things’ wed the avant-garde traditions of the Soviet 1920s to trends in contemporary European cinema, alongside a renewed interest in surrealism. My own study, Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw (First 2014), places Paradjanov’s Ukrainian films within a broader cultural history of the 1960s more generally, and in Ukraine more specifically. In Ukraine, Paradjanov participated in, and created the conditions for, a contested national revival (First 2014). In a formal and theoretical analysis of Shadows, Robert Efird (2014) examines the distortion of perception and narrative alignment that lies at the heart of the film’s unsettling aesthetic scheme. Moreover, several doctoral and MA theses have explored Sergei Paradjanov’s contribution to world cinema (for example, see Gulyan 2013; Gurga 2012; Jakobsen 2014). The literature in Russian and Ukrainian on Paradjanov is extensive, ranging from serious scholarly analysis to memoir, and everything in between. Two figures, Kora Tsereteli and Larysa Briukhovets'ka, stand out for their dedication to studying the director and bringing his work to a wider audience in the former Soviet Union, even though they both continue to reproduce the myth of Sergei Paradjanov as a genius auteur.

To these ends, Chapter 2 explores the context and history of the film’s production, which involved a difficult journey deep into the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine. The crew went far over budget to maintain the authenticity of the surroundings (which involved building a road to one of the locations) and the inclusion of ‘real Hutsuls’, the local inhabitants, as extras in the production, who supposedly improvised many of their lines and actions in the film. The stress of shooting in those conditions led to heated confrontations between members of the crew. These stories became the stuff of popular legend among the Kiev intelligentsia, including one where Paradjanov’s cinematographer challenged him to a duel on the banks of the Cheremosh River using historic pistols common to Bukovina.³

Chapter 3 includes a sustained analysis of the film itself. First, I examine Paradjanov’s ideas about the cinema. While Soviet authorities only allowed him to publish one article on film theory during his fraught career, he nonetheless laid out further principles in speeches, interviews and in conversations with others. How and to what degree did the director apply those theories to the making of Shadows? Second, this chapter explores connections between the film and other film movements at the beginning of the 1960s, both within the Soviet Union (such as ‘poetic cinema’) and in Western Europe. Finally, the chapter examines the film’s claims to ethnographic authenticity, along with allusions to biblical, classical and Renaissance themes and visual art, and its relationship to socialist realism, the only officially sanctioned ‘method’ of artistic production.

The fourth and final chapter explores the reception and legacy of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. I examine the numerous controversies that followed Shadows from production to the screen. Paradjanov refused to allow a Russian dub of the film for general release, incurring the ire of the authorities. During its premiere in Kiev, Ukrainian dissidents disrupted the event by protesting the recent arrests of several Ukrainian intellectuals, which further pegged Shadows as a nationalist text. These controversies notwithstanding, the film received entirely favourable reviews in the Ukrainian and Russian press, made waves at film festivals around the world, and even saw a modest box-office return. After its initial run, Shadows returned to the screen for at least a few days every year until the end of the decade. The film was then shelved until perestroika, largely because of the influence it continued to have on other Soviet film-makers. In taking the story to the present, we find ever more insistent assertions of the significance of the film, especially in Ukraine, even as some critics and scholars complain of its unwieldy and overdetermined legacy for the nation (Briukhovets'ka 2012; Shevchuk 2005).

Chapter 2

Historical context and production history

The idea to make Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors came from a letter addressed to the director of Dovzhenko Studios in 1962. Iryna Kotsiubyns'ka asked that the studio adapt her father’s 1912 novella of the same title in honour of the centenary of his birth (Korol' 2001: 319). Mykhailo Kotsiubyns'kyi’s (1864–1913) original was an apolitical and Symbolist-inspired work, and might not have been the most likely choice for a Soviet film. Yet because of the Kotsiubyns'kyi family’s importance in Ukraine, the studio accepted the assignment without much discussion, although they gave the project to an undistinguished but experienced director. Soviet culture thrived on anniversaries – be they Lenin’s birthday, the anniversary of the October Revolution, the birth or death of a famous writer or artist, or the anniversary of a notable political tract, opera, novel, etc. The Dovzhenko Studios rarely had a year in which there were no anniversary films to make. Moreover, they were constantly fielding requests from the public to make such films, which, when released, were rarely successful at the box office. As 1964 drew near, film-makers in Kiev were significantly more preoccupied with the sesquicentennial of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814–61), than with the fairly minor Kotsiubyns'kyi event.

Iryna, the letter-writer, was the director of a small museum dedicated to her father’s life and work in the provincial city of Chernigov (now Chernihiv), just north-east of Kiev. Her older brother, killed during the Stalinist Terror in 1937, had been an important Old Bolshevik and member of the Soviet Ukrainian government. Recently rehabilitated as part of Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, Iurii Kotsiubyns'kyi became the Ukrainian face within the Russian Revolution. Iryna and Iurii’s father, Mykhailo, had vague left-wing leanings, and was friends with the writer and father of socialist realism, Maksim Gor'kii. In commemorating the Revolution, authorities and cultural producers had to grasp at straws to find its non-Russian agents. Consequently, Kotsiubyns'kyi the elder’s revolutionary credentials were often exaggerated.

Many of his books, most notably Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, were fixated on traditional folkways and the remnants of paganistic beliefs in the remote outposts of Ukrainian civilization in the East European borderlands. While certainly not an idyllic picture of the Ukrainian village, as social conflict was present in many of his works, the latter was not the point. After Stalin’s death in 1953, a few of his short stories were adapted for the screen before Paradjanov’s Shadows, most notably the acclaimed director Mark Donskoi’s Dorogoi tsenoi/At a High Price (1957). This renewed interest in Kotsiubyns'kyi’s work coincided with a critical repositioning of the writer’s interest in a uniquely Ukrainian folklore and ethnography (Zinych 1964: 3). That said, however, the film’s cinematographer, Iurii Illienko (2008b: 82), remembers that the Dovzhenko Studios’ authorities presented the idea of Shadows to him as ‘Socialist Realism about the class war among the Hutsuls’, which would have been very difficult to tease out of Kotsiubyns'kyi.

When Paradjanov started working on the film in 1963, Ukraine’s premiere film studio, Dovzhenko Studios, was peripheral to the broader currents in Soviet cinema during the Thaw. While some subsequently famous Soviet
film-makers cut their teeth in Kiev and Odessa, they always left when Moscow called. Sergei Paradjanov’s early work at the studio was typical of the studio during the late 1950s and early 1960s: he made a collective farm musical, Pervyi paren'/The Top Guy (1958); a World War II-themed melodrama called Ukrainskaia rapsodiia/Ukrainian Rhapsody (1961); and the anti-religious propaganda film Tsvetok na kamne/Flower on the Stone (1964). According to James Steffen (2013: 37–42, 45–55), Paradjanov’s early films in Ukraine reveal an unusual combination of the film-maker’s characteristic visual flair with the remnants of Stalin-era genre cinema. But because the former is only noteworthy in hindsight, such films did nothing to improve the Dovzhenko Studios’ reputation, nor establish Paradjanov’s. Despite his non-stellar career, Paradjanov had become quite the socialite in Kiev by the time he began his work on Shadows. Much of the city’s intelligentsia knew him personally and considered him interesting, talented and highly intelligent, even though he could often be quite the windbag.

Paradjanov himself seemed embarrassed by these earlier films. His assistant director on Shadows, Volodymyr Luhovs'kyi (1998: 29), remembers that when the two of them passed a poster of Flower on the Stone at a cinema in downtown Kiev, Paradjanov ‘waved his arm [and said,] “Oh… [that’s] shit on a stone”’. He had taken the latter project after the first director was fired for complicity in the death of the leading actress, making it a challenging film to complete. Paradjanov’s senior colleague Viktor Ivanov said during a 1962 studio meeting as everyone criticized him:

I would give him a medal for bravery for The Real Guy [Nastoiashchii paren', sic]. No one approached it at that time. No one wanted to make Ukrainian Rhapsody either. That was a difficult screenplay. He alone took on this project. You were the only person who came to the rescue on this picture [Flower on the Stone] and now it’s easy for us to joke and complain.

(TsDAMLMU 670/1/1536: 22)

Far from signifying a prestige project, Paradjanov’s assignment to direct Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors implied that the studio just wanted someone to get it done.

Significant changes were under way at the Dovzhenko Studios in 1963, however, which ultimately transformed a project that was supposed to check off a box to one that occupied the entire studio’s attention for more than two years. When authority for film production and distribution was transferred from the Ministry of Culture to a new State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) in 1963, the journalist and film critic Sviatoslav Ivanov became the Ukrainian branch’s (Derzhkino) first chairperson. Alongside this appointment, literary scholar Vasyl' Tsvirkunov replaced the unpopular and unqualified Volodymyr Nebera as the head of Dovzhenko Studios. Ivanov and Tsvirkunov were both professionals within literary and film criticism before serving in these positions, rather than merely watchdogs sent from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and their commitment to improving Ukrainian cinema’s reputation was evident from the beginning of their terms. They concentrated on attracting young talent from VGIK, which responded to a persistent critique of film-makers of the previous management. Paradjanov, for example, wrote a damning letter to industry and studio authorities in 1957, in which he condemned the studio for preventing young film-makers from working on independent projects, while continually favouring Muscovite directors or pre-war Ukrainian directors, most of whom were cribbed from the theatre. He claimed that the studio had lost all of its talented film-makers due to a ‘lack of trust in people’ (Paradzhanov 1990: 32–34). Ivanov and Tsvirkunov promised to trust young people at the studio, but they also insisted on the moral obligation of Ukrainians to stay in the Republic rather than leaving for the centre after a few years. They hoped to offer audiences both popular genre productions and prestige films, while remaining true to the studio’s Ukrainian brand. Even though box-office returns for Ukrainian films actually dropped during the decade when they controlled the industry, Ivanov and Tsvirkunov were influential within the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and managed to impress upon the party boss, Petro Shelest, in particular, the need for sophisticated, literary-minded cinema. Without their influence and Shelest’s blessing, Paradjanov’s project would have remained marginal. As leaders who understood the director’s potential, they gave Paradjanov an extraordinary amount of autonomy in its production. Moreover, his established reputation among the Kiev intelligentsia made Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors one of the most hyped films within the Ukrainian and, eventually, the Moscow press in 1964–65.

Paradjanov assembled a virtual ‘who’s who’ of established and up-and-coming Ukrainian writers, artists and intellectuals to serve in the crew and as advisors. Among the older generation, Carpathian folklorist Ivan Chendei wrote the screenplay, Modernist painter Fedir Manailo served as artistic advisor, and novelist Oleksandr Syzonenko edited the screenplay. Paradjanov went to Moscow to personally select...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• KinoSputniks general editors’ preface
• List of illustrations
• Production credits
• Plot summary
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Historical context and production history
• Chapter 3: Film analysis
• Chapter 4: Reception
• Chapter 5: Conclusion: Fifty years later
• References
• Notes
• Back Cover