Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors To Come Out on DVD

It has been announced that the film “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” (1964), by director Sarkis Paradzhanian, better known under the Russian version of his name as Sergey Paradzhanov, cinematographer Yuri Illienko, starring Ivan Mykolaichuk and Larysa Kadochnikova will become available for purchase in a special DVD edition on February 5, 2008. So far this masterpiece of the Ukrainian poetic cinema could only be bought in North America on VHS of a very poor quality and with blatantly Russified English subtitles which presented the Hutsuls, Ukrainian highlanders of the Carpathian Mountains, as … Russians. The VHS edition distributed by Image Entertainment is riddles with errors, the cinematographer Yuri Illienko is Viktor Ilyenko. Ukraine and Ukrainian provenance of the film is not mentioned anywhere in the description on the box. Instead the viewer will read about “… the remote Carpathian Mountains of medieval Russia …”

Born and reared in Tbilisi, Georgia, in an Armenian family, Paradzhanov shot “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” in Ukrainian and famously refused to have the film dubbed into Russian defying the assimilationist policies of Russian authorities. This valiant act of cultural solidarity with a repressed nation by the Armenian master, that was nothing short of suicidal, inspired then as it does today people who would not submit to oppression. Ironically, what the Soviets failed to do in the USSR is now being done by the US distributors of the VHS version of the film. One hopes that Kino International which is to release the DVD of the film in February 2008, will demonstrate a modicum of expertise as well as respect for the film’s author and will allow the protagonists to remain who they are – the Carpathian Hutsuls fiercely proud of their Ukrainian roots, language, and culture. The first signals that are emanating from Kino however point to the contrary. As if to demonstrate the tenacity of imperial mentality among or simple ignorance of some of the US “film experts”, the amazon.com site offers a patently wrong information about “A love story set against the historical pageantry and epic legends of medieval Russia” even though the part of Ukraine where the action takes place was never inhabited by Russians and got occupied by the Russian Soviet empire only at the end of World War Two.

Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s novel Tini zabutykh predkiv, on which the film is based, was written thirty-three years earlier, in 1911. Despite years of brutal assimilation campaign, the Soviets never managed to eradicate the Ukrainian language among the Hutsuls. The product description of this special Kino DVD edition of the film yet again includes nonsensical pronouncements like “…its unsentimental depiction of the harsh realities of Russian regional history …”. By the same logic “Kama Sutra” should be presented as a monument of British regional philosophy. The amazon.com web site goes on to say “In this DVD edition, Kino is proud to present one of the landmarks of 1960s world cinema in a new widescreen transfer that restores Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in all the extravagant color, vivid tragedy, and lucid anthropological detail that stunned audiences when it first premiered.” Perhaps, before taking pride in anything, Kino should first stop misleading the American consumer and remove all mention of Russia, Russians, Russian regionalism, history, etc. from the description of the film. While it is at it, the attribute “Soviet”, like in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s (of the Chicago Reader) comment on the film quoted on the amazon.com website, “… one of the supreme works of Soviet Cinema …”, should be qualified by the attribute “Ukrainian” – as in Ukrainian Soviet cinema, lest the American consumers equate Soviet with Russian as they would surely do. The special edition so infelicitously advertised will include: Documentary: Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradjanov (2003, 40 min.) - Featurette: Songs of (sic!) the Ukraine (1985, 8 min.) - Paradjanov Photo Album - Stills Gallery - Cast & Crew Filmographies - Trailers in Ukrainian with optional English, French or Spanish subtitles - Dolby Digital 5.1.

The Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University.