SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (Sergei Parajanov, 1964)

Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s tribute to Ukrainian mentor Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Tini zabutykh predkiv draws upon weirder, denser visual material than does the master’s beautiful piece of Ukrainian folklore, Zvenigora (1928). I find Parajanov’s film remarkable but also, because I can only imperfectly follow it, frustrating.
     There is a melodramatic plot in the Carpathian Mountains a hundred years earlier, with Ivan in love with Marichka, the daughter of his father’s killer; she dies, but her memory prevents Ivan from loving the girl he eventually marries, Palagna. Ivan’s constant rebuffs move Palagna in the direction of a sorcerer, who kills Ivan in a tavern hatchet fight.
     This linear tale, however, exists as pieces of narrative that are buried in a dazzling kaleidoscope of imagery. Parajanov’s shots include all sorts of camera angles and movements amidst elemental Nature and applied to robust humanity, including shots up from under water, in both rich color and chilly black and white, with explosions of music (lots of Jew’s harp), rivulets of freeze frames, and sheafs of Orthodox Christian iconography, symbolism, ritual. The film unfolds in titled vignettes. There are two fatal sacrificial acts early on: Ivan’s elder brother dies protecting Ivan from a falling tree; Marichka dies rescuing a lamb. Curiously, Ivan, the sole survivor of eight siblings, doesn’t seem fazed by his brother’s death. “Let go of me!” he says over and over as he tries pulling away from the crushed corpse with a poignant grip.
     Life is harsh, full of hard work. One wonderful shot follows the sharpening of a scythe. All life, it appears, is preparation for death; familial love, romantic love, a preparation for loss.
     The sorcerer who kills Ivan resembles him—but grotesquely. Perhaps he embodies Ivan’s refusal to embrace life after Marichka’s death.

LOVE UNTO DEATH (Alain Resnais, 1984)

A frantic Elisabeth struggles with Simon on their bedroom floor. Apparently Simon has had a heart attack. Dr. Rozier pronounces him dead.
     After the doctor has left, though, light as air Simon descends the corkscrew staircase that reminds us of the spiral staircase encapsulating the mysteries of Time in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Simon, we learn, abandoned wife and children a couple of months earlier to live with Elisabeth. Are we watching Elisabeth’s fantasy of Simon’s resurrection? “I don’t think I loved you before,” Elisabeth declares. “Before?” “Before your death.”
     Directing from Jean Gruault’s script, Resnais tweaks Time in L’amour à mort. A genetic botanist, Elisabeth works toward the future; an archaeologist, Simon digs into the past. At a site, Elisabeth tells Simon, “Here come Judith and Jérôme,” a long-married couple, both ministers, and Simon’s oldest friends. A long-shot follows, which we expect to be a point-of-view shot of the Martignacs’ arrival; but Elisabeth and Simon are also in the shot, making their way down a hill. Time has turned, briefly collapsed.
     Resnais has stated that music set the film’s course. (Hans Werner Henze is the composer.) Simon is haunted by music he heard when he was “[a]mong the dead,” which eludes his memory, however. But we hear it periodically, the accompaniment to full-screen inserts of vast mystery: dark heavens in which white specks float around representing stars, snowflakes, drifts of Time. (This implicitly placed us “[a]mong the dead.”) Sometimes the inserts are only blackness, and sometimes the inserts are so frequent that the human drama seems what’s inserted.
     As Simon dies again Elisabeth promises to join him. They already seem a fully meshed couple; the Martignacs, an unmeshed one. Resnais’s final shots suggest that the film has always really been about the Martignacs.