chaos-rampant Thank god for this man. He could have given us this one film and still changed the medium twice as most filmmakers have done in a lifetime. It deserves to be studied by anyone working today in movies and looking for rich multilayered intuition. This man has centuries in him.The story is deceptively simple; young man loves, loses, and has to scramble on with life. But the way it burrows into you and speaks now, even though it's from another time, well, the way it's done is from another world.To Western viewers, it will seem quite literally like something from another world. It profoundly speaks to me because I was lucky that me and him share a part of that other world, the one closer to the steppe. The difference between worlds is simple; in the West, you had the luxury of painting and theater, and music melded into that with opera, so when cinema rolled around a few centuries later, there was already an established reservoir of ways to see and imagine. The first films were little more than filmed plays with the camera assuming the role of the audience, later renovated in France (partly) through the influence of impressionist painting. Parajanov was Armenian, which is to say from that world that ages ago was swept by invaders from the steppe. There was no lofty art allowed in the centuries of Ottoman blight, nowhere in the empire. There was no Rennaisance. Not there and not where I write this from. Our painting was religious icons. Our theater was song and dance. The collective soul had to pour that way, which is why they still persist and resonate in these parts; in the work of Kazantzakis, Bregovic, Kusturica and others, also why Western-influenced makers like Angelopoulos or Ceylan speak far less to the common folk.You have to appreciate the significance of this in terms of cinema. There was already an established Soviet tradition in film in those days, Parajanov was a student at the prestigious VGIK after all. But, he chose to go even beyond Dovzhenko, a teacher of his at VGIK, who framed his films, back when he was still allowed by censors, as poetic remembrance of ancient past.The memory of it was not enough, it had to have soul of its own now, what in the Spanish-speaking world is called the duende. It had to be a song that cuts deep and rises from bloody earth.But, this is the genius of Parajanov. So a memory that is sang and danced out by the camera, and because he is not constrained by a visual tradition, the world of the film is freeform and spontaneous waters, an absolute marvel to watch. But he doesn't just photograph the iconography of the dance from the outside, simple pageantry.That iconography is vivid and immediate in itself, you don't need special keys. Austere suffering saints look down at suffering. The mourning fire that burns in him and has to go out by itself. A lamb is caressed the way his soul needs it. Songs as hearsay overlain on scenes of life.That is all melody to the song, lyrical cadence in terms of images. We'd be lucky if most filmmakers saw that far, most just center on story or character and parse out what beats result. Parajanov does neither, in a similar way to his friend Tarkovsky.He provides deeply felt illogical machinery of that world to swim into, remember this is a world where sorcery is believed and wards off a storm, and prayer manifests as a lout from the woods looking for sex, in other words, we are not mere spectators to a gaudy visual dance from faraway times, the film is made so that we feel the urges and pulls of the world dancing around us. He pulls fabric to film from the ether around the edges of someome experiencing a story, the same deeply felt air that a singer cannot put to words and responds to with a song.Look for the amazing finale. The film is bookended by death, but it's death that none of the individual scenes reasonably explain, it can only maybe have allusive extra-logical sense in being pieced by you. It is something that specifically has meaning that you let go. The thing is that him confronting or being confronted at the tavern, is, in itself, knowing about the sorcerer and his wife, knowing at the same instant that his father's death was the result of a similarly veiled and bubbling causality, knowing all in once that the universe, the cosmic dance, is not random but has inexplicable agency.An invisible axe is spunning and cutting the tethers.The way Parajanov filmed has been taken up by many, sure enough, Malick included. But we just haven't found more eloquent solutions to narrative, not in Malick, not in Lynch. I'm not just waxing. On top of everything else, the way causalities are overlain here is as intricate as I've seen in a film.

Armand magic. search of sense. rituals. love story. sacrifice as beginning and heart of happiness far from earthy world. a fresco. a poem. basic testimony in which fragility is part of a way to define life. movie like a picture book, it is , in same time, fairy-tale and smell of childhood cook. but, in essence, only masterpiece of a director for who the political regime is more small in front with the light of profound truth. a truth as a tablecloth for Eastern Eve. crumbs of myth, soul of old story, force of tradition, delicate shadow of time. resistance to hypocrisy in a pure form. and web of nature as human skin. that is all. for East Europe - invitation to remember the roots. for the others - a letter. old, nice, with strange seductive letters of a ordinary hand.

timmy_501 Parajanov helpfully tells what he's up to in the epigraph of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors as he explains that the film is a dramatic poem meant to evoke the old fables of the Carpathians. To achieve this, he gives the narrative only perfunctory attention, focusing instead on imbuing his film with an otherworldly aura. The film is extremely stylized as the characters and sets are intentionally unnatural or even artificial. This is emphasized by Parajanov's unique direction which is as likely to focus on seemingly trivial details in close up as it is to take up a more comprehensive view of the action of such events as a village gathering or a religious ceremony. No angle is left unexplored by Parajanov's camera: if a shot isn't a close up, it's probably canted. The result is as visually dynamic and breathtaking as it is alienating. Part of the narrative here concerns a romance between members of two feuding families which has led (perhaps inevitably) to comparisons to Romeo and Juliet but where that relationship was obviously doomed from the start, this one feels much less predetermined. Instead, there's a sense of the fragility of the characters, whose problems seem to be more a result of arbitrary circumstance than design human or divine, being contrasted with the harsh, unchanging environment they inhabit.

manuel corbelli Well, i don't really think this movie is the masterpiece most critics say it is, first of all because, according to me, you can hardly feel a sort of empathy towards the two main characters, their acting is quite poor and they always seem pretty distant, like if they were images more than characters. Moreover, the extreme beauty of some images, the camera "overwork" compared to the poverty of the acting and the lack of in-depth of the characters, makes the film look magnificent but also formalist, "manieriste" at the same time. Very interesting to watch, but most of the time emotionally dull and boring.. As a consequence, even the "maestria" of the camera get sometimes annoying.. (i'm not a native English-speaker... i wish i could tell it in better words..)