Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

A cinematic feast about seeing and hearing

Here is another film whose every frame is a painting. Before the screening of the gorgeous 35mm print of the film at NYC Metrograph, Dr. Yuri Shevchuk pointed out that the film creates a tension between static and dynamic shots and between old and new, that the film defamiliarizes by re-presenting. He’s right. But the film creates many more tensions too: the tension between tableau and movement is also along with the tension between staying in one place and moving, between being stuck and moving on, between calmness and madness. There are tensions between color and no color, between warm and cool colors, between hot and cold weather, between enemy and lover, between loyalty and betrayal, between home and away, between separation and union.

At heart, this is a film about these tensions and one can see that in the juxtaposition of opposing colors, camera movements, sounds, and rhythms. In the soundtrack, the repetition of music, sometimes with and sometimes without dance, sometimes diegetic and sometimes non-diegetic, sits opposite the more spare sounds in other moments.

There is also tension between on-screen and off-screen sounds, including the sometimes-emerging sounds with no visible physical source—what Michel Chion calls an “acousmatic” sound. In one self-reflective moment and a projection of cinema as a childlike dream, Marichka refers to the source of an ax sound as “an invisible ax.”

And yes, the film creates tension between what’s seen and what’s not seen beyond sounds. We never see Marichka’s face on “her corpse,” and without any open declaration of her death, she becomes immortalized until she comes back in the end. Ivan also repeatedly becomes visible and invisible to the people around him as he leaves and returns home. He also does not see anyone or anything after the departure of his lover, including his newly wedded wife, Palagna. And his final decision to “see” costs him his life while it also reunites him with his eternal lover. Palagna yearns for being seen so much that she sings and performs over both the joy she feels for Ivan’s death by the man that “sees her” and the mourning she has to show to her people over the death of her husband, because they’re “watching”—and we know that those people are watching and judging and gossiping…

In the end, the film creates tension between tragic and happy ending by repeating the trio dance of Ivan-Marichka-camera we had the pleasure of observing before. The film gives us a feast of colors, lights, and sounds and makes us see in new ways but it also paints a picture of what happens when people see and don’t see, when they see in new ways or old ways, when they want to be seen and when want to be invisible, when they want to imagine invisible things and when they decide to let go of what they don’t see.