Watch Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors For Free

the audience applauded

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Simply A Masterpiece

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Parajanov helpfully tells what he's up to in the epigraph of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors as he explains that the film is a dramatic poem meant to evoke the old fables of the Carpathians. To achieve this, he gives the narrative only perfunctory attention, focusing instead on imbuing his film with an otherworldly aura. The film is extremely stylized as the characters and sets are intentionally unnatural or even artificial. This is emphasized by Parajanov's unique direction which is as likely to focus on seemingly trivial details in close up as it is to take up a more comprehensive view of the action of such events as a village gathering or a religious ceremony. No angle is left unexplored by Parajanov's camera: if a shot isn't a close up, it's probably canted. The result is as visually dynamic and breathtaking as it is alienating. Part of the narrative here concerns a romance between members of two feuding families which has led (perhaps inevitably) to comparisons to Romeo and Juliet but where that relationship was obviously doomed from the start, this one feels much less predetermined. Instead, there's a sense of the fragility of the characters, whose problems seem to be more a result of arbitrary circumstance than design human or divine, being contrasted with the harsh, unchanging environment they inhabit.

I hate looking at dead human bodies. I hate funerals and especially lengthy funeral processions. I think when a person dies; the body should be disposed of as quickly and as inconspicuously as possible. This was the reason enough for me to dislike this movie. I do not appreciate its obsession with death and funeral rituals. I can imagine some viewers may find it worthy of watching, not me.What else is in the movie? Sad, monotonous folk songs, folk dances, awful musical score are supposed to fit with that (unspecified) historical period; unnaturally looking costumes clumsily worn by the actors and extras; practically no plot to speak of, and no meaningful dialog; beautiful mountains and woods shot with irritatingly jerky moving camera; flashing colors from time to time for no reason, surprisingly inept, unprofessionally looking and talking actors.*** for (mostly unsuccessful) effort

I first saw this film in 1973 when it was relatively new, and one of my most vivid memories of it was the director's marvelous use of rich colors. The colors were still pretty intense when I saw the film again in about 1979.Then I saw it at the Portland Art Museum in about 2002, and I was disappointed to see how much the colors had faded. A friend who had not seen it before agreed that the photography was excellent overall, that the soundtrack of folk music was thrilling, and that the story was reminiscent of magical realism. But the colors had all gone drab.I hope that whoever is doing digital restoration these days has this movie on their list.

Well, i don't really think this movie is the masterpiece most critics say it is, first of all because, according to me, you can hardly feel a sort of empathy towards the two main characters, their acting is quite poor and they always seem pretty distant, like if they were images more than characters. Moreover, the extreme beauty of some images, the camera "overwork" compared to the poverty of the acting and the lack of in-depth of the characters, makes the film look magnificent but also formalist, "manieriste" at the same time. Very interesting to watch, but most of the time emotionally dull and boring.. As a consequence, even the "maestria" of the camera get sometimes annoying.. (i'm not a native English-speaker... i wish i could tell it in better words..)