Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
1965 · Sergei Parajanov · Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors on Sightlines
A man dies and the picture bleeds.
That is the moment everyone carries out of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Ivan's father goes down, the frame reels as if it had taken the blow too, and then red floods the image — not a red thing inside the shot, the whole shot red. No reaction close-up follows. None is needed. The screen has stopped showing us a death and become one.
Deleuze has a name for that kind of image: the colour-image, colour that absorbs a scene rather than describing anything in it. A red coat is information. A red frame is a feeling with nowhere else to live. Parajanov and his cinematographer Yuri Ilyenko run the register in both directions across the film: when Marichka drowns and Ivan goes into mourning, the palette drains toward near-monochrome, so grief reaches us as a subtraction of colour instead of a performance of weeping. This is 1965, on Soviet colour stock whose saturated, faintly unstable rendering everyone else was trying to tame. They used the flaw as pigment.
Now the invention, which is larger than any one sequence. Parajanov discovered that a film could be built out of poses. Deleuze, following Bergson, draws a hard line here. Ancient and classical art rendered movement by choosing the noble attitude — the discus-thrower at the top of his swing, the decisive instant that stands in for the whole action. Deleuze calls these privileged-instants. Cinema broke with all that, because the camera samples motion mechanically, at any-instant-whatever, no moment more favoured than its neighbour, which is why film could finally show how a horse actually runs. That break, for Deleuze, is what made cinema modern. Parajanov goes back for the pose and refuses to give up the sampling. Figures stand frontally against textiles and crosses, arranged like folk woodcuts, holding absolutely still. Then Ilyenko's camera takes off — galloping with the horses, racing the forest floor, plunging, whirling with dancers, finding vantage points no witness could occupy. Hieratic stillness, then delirium, then stillness. Without this pairing you come away calling the film beautiful and incoherent. With it you see the argument the film is actually making: two conceptions of the image are fighting inside it, and the fight is the film's way of asking whether a life is an event or one turn of a wheel.
Hold on the still frames a moment, because they are strange. Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set, a system whose every element has been counted. Most films use the frame as a window. Parajanov uses it more like a page or an icon: embroidered garments, woven blankets, carved wood, brass, ritual bread, candles, all placed, the whole surface loaded. Human figures become elements of that surface. That is why the film feels as though it is about a people rather than about a man — the composition levels persons and objects into one pattern. And note what the material is. These are real Hutsul artifacts, real customs, learned on location. Bazin's realism asked filmmakers to let the world speak for itself through duration and depth. Parajanov goes out and collects the world with an ethnographer's rigour, then stylises it to the pitch of myth. Authenticity as raw material for an anti-realist art. The soundtrack does the same job: the trembita's long call, folk chant, dialect, sudden silence, layered so that you are inside an archaic acoustic rather than being told how to feel.
A closed set always opens onto something, and Deleuze separates two ways it can. The out-of-field-relative is the next room, the road leaving the shot, anything a pan could reach. The out-of-field-absolute is a presence outside that no camera movement could ever arrive at. The title says which one this film runs on. The ancestors are not offscreen-left. And when Ivan is finally destroyed by the pull of the dead beloved, that pull comes from an out-of-field with no address — Marichka, drowned, still acting on the visible world. The frame is crowded to bursting and haunted by the one thing it cannot contain.
The racing camera works on a different principle again. Ilyenko's camera does not observe Ivan; it takes on his state. Deleuze calls this a dicisign — a perception of perception, where the camera frames someone who is perceiving and we feel the camera itself as a presence in the scene, neither inside the character's eyes nor safely outside them. The craft debt is specific and traceable. Sergei Urusevsky had bonded a whirling handheld camera to a character's emotion in The Cranes Are Flying, and pushed the camera into fire, water and forest in Letter Never Sent until the landscape became an agent; I Am Cuba, almost contemporary, made the roaming take into an autonomous consciousness. Ilyenko takes that instrument up into the Carpathians and gives it to the dead.
Between the seizures, the film gives itself over to rite: births, weddings, funerals, Christmas, folk magic, each enacted at length. Deleuze's late writing on the cinema of the body calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest, and ritual is gest by the wagonload. This is where the film's narrative revolution sits. Performance is pitched toward the archetypal, so Ivan's marriage to Palahna is not a decision he arrives at; it is a rite performed upon him. Psychology has been replaced by custom, and causal scene-building by chaptered episodes that move like liturgical movements.
Which leaves Ivan, whose face — Ivan Mykolaichuk's open, iconic face — works as what Deleuze calls a qualisign: an almost immobile face holding a single quality, ecstasy or desolation, registered and never discharged into action. After the drowning he stops acting altogether. He endures. The old machinery of the action-image, where a character reads a situation and acts to change it, has nothing left to offer him; the wheel of rite keeps turning around a man who has fallen out of it. He has become a seer, Deleuze's watcher who can only look. That matters for how we tell the history. Deleuze routes the arrival of the time-image through Italian rubble and French modernism. Here a Ukrainian highland tragedy reaches the same condition by another road entirely, out of folklore and the seasonal calendar, in a state studio, under cover of adapting a canonised classic.
The lineage runs clean in both directions. Dovzhenko's Earth had already built meaning by pictorial rhyme — faces, fruit, sky — instead of causation, and Zvenyhora had folded oral myth into rural matter; Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part II supplied both the expressionist colour register and the frozen painterly tableau. What Parajanov inherits from Soviet montage is its organic logic, the accumulating spiral, and what he does is bend the spiral into a wheel: the same associative cutting of gesture, face, object and landscape, no longer building a dialectical argument, building a cycle. Downstream, the film founded Ukrainian poetic cinema as a school, sent Ilyenko off to direct, and set Parajanov on the path to The Color of Pomegranates, where the pose wins outright and the story leaves.
So which is true, the pose or the plunge? The film will not say. Its compositions answer that a person is a figure in a pattern older than them; its colour answers that a person is an event violent enough to turn the world red. Watch the saturation next time, the way it rises and dies with Ivan. The film keeps its ledger there.
Concepts in play
- privileged-instants — Dense frontal, iconographic tableaux — figures arranged against textiles, crosses and Carpathian landscape 'as if in folk woodcuts', with human figures held as elements of a decorative-symbolic surface.
- any-instant-whatever — Ilyenko's radically kinetic camera: it spins, tilts, races through forests, plunges, gallops with horses and whirls with dancers, delivering motion as continuous flux rather than posed climax — the film oscillates between this and the hieratic tableau.
- affective colour — The father's death sends the frame reeling with a red wash flooding the image; grief and death passages drain toward desaturation and near-monochrome while desire returns violent colour, making Soviet colour stock a dramaturgical instrument.
- the closed set (cadre) — The frame saturated with Hutsul material culture — embroidered garments, woven blankets, carved wood, brass, icons, ritual bread, candles — arranged with a collagist's eye so that figures become elements of a composed surface.
- out-of-field-absolute — The title's 'forgotten ancestors' and Ivan's destruction by the pull of the dead, drowned Marichka: a force acting on the visible world from outside any locatable adjacent space.
- dicisign — A camera that adopts impossible vantage points and 'frequently identif[ies] with a character's psychic state rather than any neutral observer' — a felt camera-presence descended from Urusevsky's subjective handheld in The Cranes Are Flying.
- the-gest — Births, weddings, funerals, Christmas and folk-magic ceremonies enacted at length with ethnographic specificity, so that Ivan's marriage to Palahna arrives as a rite performed on him rather than a psychological decision.
- icon of quality — Ivan Mykolaichuk's 'open, iconic face', stylized toward the archetypal, anchoring the film's shifts between ecstasy and desolation without discharging into action.
- voyant — After Marichka drowns, Ivan sinks into grief amid a desaturated palette, enters a loveless marriage that changes nothing, and is finally destroyed by the dead — enduring rather than acting while the ritual cycle continues around him.
- montage-organic — Editing that generates rhythm by rapid association of ritual gestures, faces, objects and landscape, 'consciously descended from the Soviet montage tradition but redirected toward lyric and ethnographic ends rather than dialectical argument', organized into titled chapters that move like liturgical movements around a seasonal cycle.