On this occasion, an anniversary premiere of the restored version of the film will take place at the same movie theater, “Ukraine” (Kyiv). The anniversary organization committee, led by Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Culture Viacheslav Kyrylenko, has planned other events as well. Among them screenings of the film in Ukraine’s big cities and on television, an exhibit at the National Art Museum, and an illustrated leaflet. Besides, anniversary events will be held in Verkhovyna and other locations in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast, where the film was shot. The traditional Ukrainian Film Day at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Studio will also be dedicated to the anniversary of the Shadows... And there are more things to come.
WHOSE ANNIVERSARY YOU SAY?
Some will grin ironically: again an anniversary, that is a shameless waste of money. No, it is not. It was high time to restore the film, upgrading it to the up-to-date technical parameters (color, sound, etc.). Likewise, it was necessary to set up a modern exhibition, which will later be invited to a number of the most prestigious film festivals and to other cultural centers. One of the ideas driving the tight circle of mostly young people (mainly staff members of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center, i.e. the film archive) is to show that the Shadows... is an example of Ukraine’s modern, innovative film, the forerunner of a new society, which was actually taking shape in Ukraine back then, in the early 1960s.
Yes, this is one of the paradoxes of Parajanov’s film. At the first glance, it was based on apparently archaic material: Hutsuls, age-old rites, and the community’s total control over each member’s behavior. Yet the Shadows... followed avant-garde-like quests, typical for Ukraine’s artistic elite also known as the Sixtiers. Searching for new vocabulary of the artistic message and at the same time glimpsing the primordial images was actually their spirit and their strategy. They had to feel (exactly in that way) the beginnings and ends of the chain of history. They were renewing the quest for the grand national style, that is what was brutally crushed by Stalin’s regime in the 1930s. Parajanov found himself next to people whose intuitions and reflections actually enabled such a quest. Was it accidental that he now and again manifested his affinity with Dovzhenko, who embodied much of that national style?
The early 1960s were overshadowed by a certain crisis of ideas. The Khrushchev Thaw was drawing to a close, but it was not clear which way to go and what to do. There was nothing to be found in the real contemporary society (that is, no foothold from where one could move further on), except for the man who preserved natural response to the world, natural reflections over his own behavior (the so-called “natural man,” much relied on by Russian “village writers” and Ukrainian writers and artists alike; the idea was, although it was not declared, that it is necessary to scrape the ugly outer husk off such a person and let him be himself; it was assumed that this was exactly what the “natural hero” longed for).
However, it changed little in the principle. They widely stuck to the templates of Italian neorealism and the Soviet film of the 1930s and 1940s (Italians themselves acknowledged Dovzhenko and Donskoy as their precursors). Yet Federico Fellini made a sharp turn towards carnival and circus, while Michelangelo Antonioni kept leaving the beaten track for a quest for the fundamental, profound sources of human behavior, both in society and face to face with oneself. Everything led to the realization of a simple truth: it is impossible to change life only by changing social surroundings and daily reality. And then there came Pier Paolo Pasolini with his The Gospel According to St. Matthew, which was privately screened in Kyiv in the early 1960s, and it already was realism, of an almost photographic kind, but it told the story of a man of astonishing strength and beauty, who grew on real earthly ground to rise to God. “Fantastic realism,” as Fyodor Dostoevsky once defined similar phenomena.
Photo by Ruslan KANIUKA, The Day
These and other layers eventually produced the Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, for a long while overshadowing other phenomena and personalities. Maybe, because Shadows... showed where to look for the beginning of social transformations. Moreover, how to look for it. After which movie “gold diggers” kept coming to Western Ukraine for a decade, hoping to discover new gold mines in the people’s soul.
Why did the Shadows... create a furore (not in the masses, of course, but among intellectuals and mere movie enthusiasts, which were quite numerous back in the day)? Maybe, due to the diminished enthusiasm about going back to the mythological October night in 1917 to the deck of the Aurora. Okay, we can fire that cannon once more, and so what? How can we get rid of Comrade Stalin and other demons? And they will come, by all means. Isn’t it more engaging and productive to see what preceded them? Otherwise, Stalin becomes the be-all and end-all. It was then that Nadezhda Mandelshtam, widow of the outstanding Russian poet, remarked: “It is us that matter,” not the great leaders. Demonizing Stalin and Stalinism is, of course, a nice and attractive thing, but it is counterproductive. Let us look into the mirror and search for our inner demons.
The Shadows... visualized those demons. A true revelation was the discovery in the film of that vivid reality which was dismissed as the archaic layer of consciousness. What was long given up for dead, turned out alive and kicking, an active participant of life, in particular, of a separate individual who struggles to shake off the power of collectivist matrices. And, all obvious differences apart, it turned out that the structure of life remains the same, and individual is an outlaw. There is nothing left for Ivan and Marichka except listening to the voice of the Axe, which is about to put an end to their lives that have wandered off the collectivist track.
Shadows... cameraman Yurii Illienko’s viewfinder succeeded in penetrating an individual’s subconscious. In such episodes, for the first time since Dovzhenko’s films, we find traits of surrealist poetics. Most often it is the capturing of how the subconscious works in borderline states, on the brink of life and death. Ivan’s father dies from a blow to the head, and his inner eye sees flashing outlines of red horses which fly slowly by. After a similar blow, in the end of the movie, his son begins to agonize, and in this horrendous half-reverie he slowly sinks into the kingdom of the dead, where he sees his sweetheart, Marichka.
Actually, it is already after Marichka’s death that Ivan sinks into a sort of nirvana. The entire patriarchal community is desperately trying to pull him out of it, but he keeps floating in this leaden drowsiness. He, a man made of a collectivist soul and body, drops out and into his individual space, all the way to the bottom. A polyphony of his fellow villagers rings in the foreground and behind the stages, like a choir trying to find the lost recipe for a cure for loneliness. Getting married is the simplest way out. Return the man back to the circle of cyclic, agrarian life. Yet again and again Ivan’s consciousness finds gaps and holes through which his soul leaks out. It rebels, it cannot exist any longer in this collectivist, sound body.
The typical social realism hero is someone who breaks away from his own imperfection, dumbness, and darkness to finally see the light and hear the word. In the Shadows... we see something opposite: a man is returning to the pre-oral darkness to rediscover himself and some fundamental values. Too much ugliness and horror happens in the light, in the sunshine, under the collectivist control. The utopia of a world built on intelligent, controlled, rational principles is discredited. The rebellion against it is largely surrealistic. An orientation towards another psychic, philosophical, and ideological reality arises. A reality which is not controllable by rational means, with no strings attached which would enable the puppet masters to try and manipulate us.
WHO WAS NEARBY?
The filmmaker mentioned the names of the people who largely influenced the film’s peculiar philosophy. “At that time I was surrounded by Ivan Dziuba, Ivan Drach, Heorhii Yakutovych, and Hryhorii Havrylenko, who was a sort of spiritual litmus. There was also Luhovsky [second director, who would later make a film about shooting the Shadows... – Author] and Semykina, I remember her works in Hutsul style. The movie was prepared by all of them. Later I got in contact with costume designer Lidia Baikova. She did not create costumes, but lovingly picked them out in ancient chests. And there were also the talented Larysa Kadochnykova and Tetiana Bestaieva. And the felicitous contact with composer Myroslav Skoryk.”
Yes, the influence of artists was obvious. First of all, that of Hryhorii Havrylenko, whose work amazingly combined the freshness of avant-garde and the primordial imagery. Transcarpathian painter Fedir Manailo, not mentioned by Parajanov: his works from two Kyiv-based exhibits in 1957-58 made a deep impression on the filmmaker, stunning him with their photographic precision and decorative beauty. Manailo had studied in Europe and brought back with him the tendency to interpret national images and icons as part of the universe. After all, he is mentioned in the credits as a consultant of the movie. Hryhorii Yakutovych, in his turn, was also an important link, since he was influenced by the Boichukists, with their monumentalism and ornate details, and quest for the ancient roots of Ukrainian culture. Moreover, he was an expert on Hutsul everyday life.
Composer Myroslav Skoryk comes from Western Ukraine. Like Leonid Hrabovsky or Valentyn Sylvestrov, he is not only an excellent melodist, but also a fanatic champion of authentic performance of folk music or, to put it more precisely, of those sound flows, which create an adequate image of traditional environment.
On September 4, 1965, the film premiered in Kyiv, at “Ukraine” movie theater. Literary critic Ivan Dziuba on the podium, and journalist Viacheslav Chornovil and postgrad student Vasyl Stus in the audience, urged the spectators to raise in protest against arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals. Not everyone rose, but people did stand up. Then someone turned on a siren to muffle the voices. Illienko told me once that he left the movie theater when the film began, only to see how in no time the building was encircled by the police and military (symbolic, isn’t it? Encircled Ukraine). But it was too late: Parajanov’s film had already started working. And it still is.
Apparently, it was the first public Maidan protest in Ukraine’s contemporary history. Later, others followed. The pre-natal period is drawing to a close, birthing time is coming. This was the sentiment at the dawn of the 20th century (“Either we will make you into a nation, or we will fall,” wrote Vasyl Stefanyk in despair), the same feeling was shared 50 years ago, and so it is now as well. The labor is in progress. It turned out to be a hard one, took a whole century. It is worth wondering why it is so.
So, do not call it just a movie’s anniversary. This is another anniversary of unrequited dreams. Yet let us not despair, there will be no wind blowing beside the one born of the Shadows... film crew.
