Amorphous forms: time and subjectivity in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Abstract

In Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965), new ways of perceiving and thinking shape a radical re-evaluation of traditional modes of cinematic narration and subjectivity. Not only does the film violate some of the most basic expectations of what a film can or should do, it also persistently impedes the conceptual construction of a unified, stable and truthfully presented world. As with Parajanov’s later films, this forms what may be considered a sui generis variation of what Gilles Deleuze describes as the ‘powers of the false’. What most distinguishes Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, however, is not the constant subversion of any primary ‘truth’ implied in the fiction, but rather the extent to which the filmmakers use the manipulation of perception to accomplish the task. This article explores the intrinsic connections between the film’s innovative play with narrative perspective, the destabilization of verisimilitude and its deeply qualitative presentation of time. In this respect, the screen itself comes to function as the interface for a complex interaction with the viewer, as we are forced outside the familiar norms of cinematic convention to confront and challenge traditionally closed notions of cinematic subjectivity and an intensification of the basic experience of time and reality as ‘perpetual motion’, change and transformation.