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.
Comment
06/24/06
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)
100 %
Reviews Counted: 13 Fresh: 13 Rotten:0 Average Rating: 7.9/10
Runtime: 1 hr 39 mins
Synopsis: A love story set against the historical pageantry and epic legends of medieval Russia. In Ukrainian. AKA: "Tini Zabutykh Predkiv," "Shadows of Our Ancestors," "Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors." [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Ivan Mikolaichuk, Tatiana Bestaeva, Larisa Kadochnikova
Director: Sergei Paradjanov
Reviews
1 - 13 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Top Critic
A truly remarkable phantasmagoria from Parodzhanov that unsurprisingly fell foul of the Soviet authorities, if only because of its abiding sense of Ukrainian nationalism.
05/24/03
Top Critic
It’s one of the most unusual films I’ve seen, a barrage of images, music and noises, shot with such an active camera we almost need seatbelts.
03/07/08
Top Critic
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.
02/21/08
Watching [this] breakthrough feature... reveals an undeniable sense of joy -- and even release -- in every frame.
01/31/08
As Parajanov’s camera swirls vertiginously to capture harvest festivals and celebrations, you sense a linkage of past and present that’s astounding.
01/18/08
In this overwhelmingly beautiful movie, a sad, short, brutalized life is elevated to ecstatic myth.
10/30/07
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.
08/29/06
Top Critic
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.
05/20/03
Top Critic
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.
01/01/00
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.
01/01/00
1 - 13 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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