The Lady Vanishes: Collective Traumatic Memory in the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Abstract

How does traumatic memory of bloody events of the first half of the 20th century, which had to but could not be worked through in the cultural texts of its second half, makes its appearance? The mother of the main character of the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Serhiy Parajanov disappears without a trace, and without a funeral, despite the structuring rule of the film, which makes the mourning of its numerous deaths obligatory. The article analyzes this disappearance as significant. It is seen as a symbolic failure of the screen reality; as a symptom of what Aleksandr Etkind refers to as a “warped mourning,” an unfinished work of mourning for the victims of Stalinism. It is shown that the main character’s mother in the screen version of Shadows (unlike in Kotsiubynsky’s novel) becomes an embodiment of the collective traumatic memory; in this respect she merges with the lyric person of Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem on the intertextual level. Yet, despite this association, the mother in Parajanov’s film accumulates the dark energy of resentment and ancestral feud, which is present in Kotsiubynsky’s novel as an impersonal mythic background. The role of mother has changed from novel to film not only in terms of the quantity of her presence but also in terms of the quality of her relation with her son and her overall family. A secondary character, who makes only one appearance in the novel, she represents the distant relation of a traditional family; on the contrary, the mother in Parajanov’s film turns out to be a very significant figure, who holds her son very tightly through the first half of the film, as it is more typical for the modern nuclear family. Parallel to this transformation, the article follows the transformation of an object-symbol of invisible exe, the voice of which could be heard throughout the film. The invisible exe is what Michel Chion refers to as “acousmaton,” a character with the voice but without a visible body. This complex object-symbol, the only mythical entity that was taken by Parajanov from Kotsiubynsky’s novel densely populated by natural spirits, finds its body (not as an ordinary object, but as an incarnation of the doom) in the episode of the last appearance of the mother. This episode reveals the aberrant presence of this object-symbol, which marks erasure of the mother from the screen reality. Unraveling the intertwining texture of the meanings of these characters that emerge in the film as opposed to the source novel one can see the working of the collective traumatic memory both on the conscious level of this cultural text as well as in the gaps and ruptures that appear in it. Analysis of the complexity of maternal image in Parajanov’s film helps to unpack the “unconscious” of this cultural text, its nonverbalized visual subtext: what is shown, but not told. As in Alfred Hitchcock’s spy film The Lady Vanishes the disappearance of an older woman reveals a dense ring of silence that blocks the work of memory.Article received 27.04.2019