In a Carpathian village, Ivan falls in love with Marichka, the daughter of his father's killer. When tragedy befalls her, his grief lasts months; finally he rejoins the colorful life around him, marrying Palagna. She wants children but his mind stays on his lost love. To recapture his attention, Palagna tries sorcery, and in the process comes under the spell of the sorcerer, publicly humiliating Ivan, who then fights the sorcerer. The lively rhythms of village life, the work and the holidays,
the pageant and revelry of weddings and funerals, the change of seasons, and nature's beauty give proportion to Ivan's tragedy.
There are hallucinatory sequences in Sergei Paradzhanov's 1964 film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors when this eruptively colorful movie feels more like a folkloric tapestry sprung to life than a film about flesh-and-blood people.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is one of those rare films that look totally fresh and uncorrupted -- as if the director hadn't pilfered a thing from other film makers but had simply discovered the camera, and how best to use it, by himself.
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.
When Paradjanov made Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, he was experimenting with a new approach to filmmaking for the first time and the aesthetic achievement is spectacular.
Shadows was a leap in the dark like none other in Soviet film history, and a slap in the face of the officially sanctioned and artistically vacuous school of Socialist Realism.
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.
The athletic camerawork and the bizarre visual effects take their tone from the folk ballads that recur on the soundtrack, sometimes touching an authentically barbaric or tragic poetry.
A truly remarkable phantasmagoria from Parodzhanov that unsurprisingly fell foul of the Soviet authorities, if only because of its abiding sense of Ukrainian nationalism.
Weird, russian, read the description, you'll have the plot mostly figured out, except for the part where Ivan marries some other, less attractive woman, then some weird sorcery happens.
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