Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
Director: Sergei Paradjanov
Year Released: 1964
Rating: 3.0
Colorful, poetic story about a young man whose first real, true love dies ... and his second relationship with another woman ends in his own demise. It sounds deeply tragic - and it is - but Soviet great Paradjanov's aesthetic is so lively and free-form - his camera always finds something wonderful to look at, and he's so great at experimenting with filters and various techniques without making it gratuitous, it never feels oppressive. The sequences don't always lend to easy analysis or necessarily 'flow together,' but the approach is so unmistakably distinctive that fragments of it are bound to be (mentally) retained.
