Back to Back 50 - Magic for the Folk Back Home
Powerful wizards and magical duels in some authentic folktales from Ukraine and Mali
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) - writer/director Sergei Parajanov, co-writer Ivan Chendai
Yeelen (1987) - writer/director Souleymane Cissé
My love for old things is not a hobby, it’s my aesthetic conviction.
Sergei Parajanov's cinematic credo
...one could argue that Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, along with Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba (1964), represented the most thoroughgoing experiment in poetic cinema in Soviet feature films since the creative zenith of filmmakers such as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, and Dovzhenko in the 1920s and early 1930s.
James Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, (2013) p62
Sergei Parajanov is known in cinephile circles for the radical aesthetic experiment that is The Colour of Pomegranates (1969), the life story of an Armenian poet that renounces any kind of traditional narrative in favour of a series of vignettes, tableaux and musical pieces, and is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful works of cinematic art ever made.
His own life story is incredibly dramatic, featuring spells inside the gulags for homosexual acts, a wife murdered for marrying him, and countless tussles with the Soviet authorities over the artistic direction of his films.
His cinematic influences were above all Tarkovsky and (much later) Pasolini. He strove to depict the cultural and artistic life of the minority nations of the USSR, which he felt to be brutally overwhelmed by the Russian culture: Ukrainian, Armenian, Georgian and Azeri legends each got the Parajanov treatment.
In relation to this film, the word that keeps coming to mind is elemental. Elemental, the elements of filmmaking: framing, colour, composition, movement, editing, sound, above all sound. All these are chosen to perfection. Elemental, the elements of story: love, death, conflict, harmony. Elemental, the elements of nature: fire, earth, wind, water. Their magic is invoked along with the seasons.
This film breaks with everything that was prescribed for film-making under the prevailing socialist-realist aesthetic. Moreover he refused to allow it to be dubbed into Russian language for general release, insisting that the Soviet public saw it - or heard it, rather - in the Hutsul dialect of Ukrainian in which it was made. Though in fact there's very little dialogue, its style hearkening back to a silent film approach and with a bare minimalist storyline that doesn't need much elaboration. It shows a lot and tells very little.
In the definitive book on Parajanov's work, critic James Steffen recognizes the form of the film is designed to work on a mythical level, but suggests something more is also at play:
In his analysis of the film, David A. Cook emphasizes how the film’s experiments with sound, color, and camerawork serve “to destabilize the viewer perceptually, and therefore psychologically, in order to present a tale that operates not at the level of narrative but of myth, a tale that is an archetype of life itself: youth passes from innocence to experience to solitude and death in a recurring cycle, eons upon eons.”
James Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, (2013) p62
Let's consider it as myth or folktale. It's a story that starts out very recognizably like Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers from feuding families, then at the midway point progresses to something much darker and dare I say 'elemental'. Sex and death, black magic and the hauntings of sad ghosts.
It's based on a Hutsul folktale of Ivan ("Ivanko", played as an adult by Ivan Mykolaichuk, later a stalwart of Soviet film) and his childhood sweetheart Marichka (Larysa Kadochnykova), who come from rival feuding families. The setting is the high Carpathian mountains and like all mountain people these Hutsul are intensely clannish and warlike folk.
As the story develops, romamce, tragedy and finally a fearsome magical combat will ensue. This brief synopsis makes it seem a bit Disney, but it's very much a grounded and spectacularly unexpected experience, the vibrancy of the filmmaking continually offering new and astonishing sights and sounds.
It's a total experience, the camera attempting to be everywhere and do everything, from a tree falling on a man which we see from the tree's POV, to the operation of magic itself, which is shown with totally original editing techniques and symbolised by the outbreak of sudden fire, as we will also see in Yeelen.
Take this sequence as an example. Here an evil sorceror is casting a spell on an unsuspecting girl in a remote farmstead. Don't worry about the dialogue, which is mostly just the words of a magical incantation. Focus on how the images and sounds create effects of uncanny dread, unlike anything established in Western horror cinema:
Though it is pure Parajanov to emphasise the aural, and push hard on the sound design to create his effects, the music has a great part to play in creating both the emotion and the feel of an isolated mountain people. Miroslav Skoryk’s original score, modernistic and minimal, is combined with traditional folk music. Most striking of all is the strident presence of the trembita, the Carpathian alpenhorns which become a dominant sonic and visual motif.
Cinematographer Yuri Illienko creates, under Parajanov’s direction, a fantastic and restless montage of images, taken from every conceivable vantage and moving in every imaginable way. It’s one of the most kinetic traetments of a basic folktale ever seen, an endlessly dynamic feast for the eyes.
Parajanov from this point on will focus on the primordial and mythic as frameworks to hang his highly sensorial visual and sound collages on:
After Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, narratives with simple outlines — or narratives already widely known to the audience, such as myths and literary adaptations — would become Parajanov’s preferred vehicle since they allowed him a great deal of latitude for visual digressions and improvisations. More complicated narratives would have demanded more attention to the mechanics of storytelling in order for the plot to remain comprehensible.
James Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, (2013) p70
Parajanov's film attempts to describe and define the culture of a people through its magical praxis. Of course a folk culture is much more than its spells and magic rituals, it includes costumes, food, music, dance and the religious beliefs, all of which are explored in the film. But what a people does with its magic says everything about what they are. Our own culture's magic is film and video itself, so the pairing between folk magic and the filmic magic of editing and camerawork is inevitable and absolutely satisfying in the hands of a master like Parajanov.
— INTERMISSION —
This kosmos no god nor man has made, but it always was, and is, and forever will be: everliving FIRE, kindling in some places and in some places going out.
Heraclitus, Fragment 37
Heat makes fire and the two worlds — earth and sky — exist through light: Yeelen.
Opening title card for Yeelen
In Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors we saw Hutsul highlanders of the Carpathian mountains living their folkways while surrounded by elemental magic and the stunning beauty of nature. An unscrupulous sorceror was able to take advantage of his power and assault the hero. Yeelen, from twenty-two years later, is very much the same story in outline except set in ancient Mali (the time period is not specified but it is certainly before the coming of Islam to the region in around 1050 AD.
It's the kind of thing usually called magical realism but perhaps better called metamagical realism, as it is also an expression of cinema, our culture's central form of magic, in the propagation of stories about magic in the lives of real people.
Magic is often signalled through the spontaneous bursting into flames of objects, a simple but highly effective device which was also used in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. It is absolutely shocking in the first few minutes of the film, where evil uncle causes a blasted tree to erupt in fire then strides around screaming imprecations and curses. .
Yeelen is a quest undertaken by a young man gifted with magical powers as he journeys through the land. He must increase his store of magic, gather a sacred object and seek the collaboration of a wise man, his 'good uncle' the blind seer, who lives in exile. Meanwhile he is being pursued relentlessly by his father and 'bad uncle', immensely powerful wizards who are determined to keep their occult magic a secret and not share it with the people. It's packed with mythical elements and structured like an episodic hero's quest, with tragic and comic episodes along the way.
The film follows the three peoples of modern-day Mali, the Bambara, the Dogon and the Peul (aka Fulani). The protagonist Nianancoro (Issiaka Kane) is Bambara, but his travels take him to the lands of a Peul king and finally to the sages of the Dogon, who have given shelter to his 'good wizard' uncle. Among the Bambara the most dominant force in traditional culture are the Korê Blacksmiths, who follow the Mande belief, an animist religion which credits a life force to all objects and territories.
This makes it universal in nature, since all human beings around the world started with such a belief, known by Westerners as deist. Think of the classical nereids, nymphs and satyrs of classical myth, or the fairies and trolls of Celtic and Nordic tradition - these are spirits manifest from the very spirits of place, be it forest trees, mountain streams of glades. In Yeelen we will see the Hyena spirit, sitting on a tree, and the ‘fetish figure’ of a man representing the spirit of a sacred grove.
The magic is based around the Mande belief in nyama - in Star Wars terms, The Force. Only Koro blacksmiths, a secretive. It has the feel of 'real' magic, not movie-style magic - a statement which doesn't necessarily imply a belief in the magic as such, just a recognition that it's authentic to the kind of magical practices we see in the real world.
This is a sorcery of strictly enforced constraints, of sacrifice and sacrificial rites, secret rituals, talismanic objects and spells that aren't immediately obvious. How can a horse's split thigh bone, bound together with some talismanic object and driven like a nail into a termite mound call forth a swarm of bees to do your bidding?
The most common sorcery technique in Yeelen is spitting, which fulfills many functions: to activate the bone in the termite mound, to'conjure the images in the cauldron, and to effect and release spells that paralyze people. Saliva embodies strong nyama blending the material moisture of spit with the incorporeal breath or soul. Ritual speech also actualizes the sorcerer’s command; one sorcerer releases a frozen arm by announcing, “The spell is broken.”
Suzanne H. MacRae, "Yeelen: A Political Fable of the Komo Blacksmiths/Sorcerers" in African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings, ed Kenneth W. Harrow (1999)
Meanwhile uncle's nasty black magic makes use of some very terrible practices still in use today, such as the sacrifice of a red dog and an albino man to shorten the path to vengeance. He walks about comically - but also as token of a deeply sinister power - with a pair of men carrying his sacred pole, which is used as a divining rod to follow his prey, but these men are magically enslaved to his bidding. He and his brother both act like typical tyrants in their dealings with others, coercing cooperation through threats of unleashing awful sorceries.
It all moves toward a climactic magical showdown, though if you're expecting a spectacular wizard's duel like Gandalf vs Saruman or Harry Potter vs Voldemort, you might need to tone down your expectations for spectacle and increase your sensitivity to the physical and metaphysical cost of practising magic. There are some special effects, but this is cinema done on a budget, not Disney. It's expected that the spectator contributes a little through their own imagination, like a child hearing a fairytale.
NOTE
Kyle Kallgren did a very nice appreciation of this film way back in 2013, so if you're a fan of the BHH ‘sweaty critic’ style you might like to take a look.
I'll have to check them out. You've convinced me. These screengrabs are gorgeous. 😮