"The moment of a two-cut cut for film and literature has come..."
Poster of The Shadow of a Forsaken Ancestor (1964).
The first time I read Tarkovsky's words in "Carving Time", I suspected that he himself repeatedly quoted Nai's father's poems in the film, and I don't know what to do? The western concept of literature has always been the dichotomy of narrative and lyricism, the cutting object of the old tower is probably only the former, and later contact with the "poetry film", the old tower is one of the poles, and guess the original meaning of his sentence, or that the film does not have to be led away by the narrative.
In his eyes, the most compatible with the film is naturally poetry, its metaphors, jumps, lyricism and cut-and-paste, which can be combined, converted and amplified by sound and painting.
Of course, the film can also take into account the poetry while narrating, such as Fei Mu's "Spring in a Small Town" on the "country breaking mountains and rivers, the city spring grass and trees deep" of the realm, Zheng Junli's "Lin Zexu" in the farewell scene of Deng Tingzhen also has the background of "the lonely sail is far away and the blue sky is exhausted, only to see the yangtze River skyline". The essence of poetic cinema is to minimize narrative (or even counter-narrative) in order to maximize poetic presentation.
The predecessors mentioned most in the old tower pen are the Ukrainian director Du Furenko (1894-1956) and the Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi, and the old tower himself is more influenced by Du's early naturalistic works.
This article only mentions Sergei Parazanov (1924-90), Du's assistant, who is known to have gone down in history with four poetic films.
Pasch is of Armenian origin, but born in Tbilisi, from Cobain, originally wanted to eat under the Soviet realist program, so he also filmed some main themes, until he watched the old tower "Ivan's Childhood", only to get the revelation, by 1964, in the Kiev Film Studio Dufuzhenko studio, he made "The Shadow of the Forgotten Ancestors", born from Kochubinsky's novel, the whole film is divided into 11 paragraphs, quite like the image of long folk poems, although the narrative context is there, but it is diluted to only a thick line.
The film is about an old mountain village on the border between Ukraine and Romania, and the main line is Ivan's growth and his two emotions, one is the tragedy of his love with mare chika, the daughter of his father's enemy, and the other is his unhappy marriage to the witch Balagna, filling the surroundings, at a glance is dazzling folk customs, costumes and rituals.
But if this layer is poetic, it is only a appearance, only for curiosity. A slightly in-depth dissection, or further poetic penetration, and the following is organized:
Throughout, the film has been shrouded in the shadow of death - the opening scene is the eldest brother in the snow forest to save Ivan is crushed by a tree, followed by the father in the church because of the charity of the rich man and the scabdom of the disaster, many years later, Ivan's lover Marichika fell into the water, and finally the jealous Ivan died at the hands of the enemy, the shadow of death followed Ivan's life, and also poetically became the tone of the whole film, the implicit motif;
The second interweaving of the film is the voiceover element— the interweaving of folk rap forms, religious chants and prayers, and bystander whispers, forming an aural and unending picture of customs, while the dialogues of the main characters are compressed to the lowest point;
The third is color, the national costume on the background of the vast white snow is gorgeous, but in connection with the melancholy tone of the whole film, the large area of the snow scene exists, and there is also a sigh of "the white expanse of the earth is really clean", on the other hand, the whole film is colorful, but the "loneliness" chapter after Marichika's death uses black and white, representing Ivan's heart like dead ash;
The fourth is photography, take more upward shooting, the blank of the picture is the sky, there is a folk epic pattern, and the meaning of coexisting with the gods, shooting this hand up, but also reminds people of Du Furenko's "Land" in the white clouds, grassland reflection of each other's habitual composition, but Pashi a large number of moving lenses, frequent fast follow-up shooting also makes the film full of supreme dynamics, highlighting the original vitality of the Carpathian Mountains.
Refined to the local, this piece has another point. The most obvious example of Pa's alignment with the old tower is the follow-up in the swamp scene of "Ivan's Childhood" and the direct reproduction of a dream-like non-dreaming situation composed of dried branches, and the beginning of the film, the young Ivan in Pa's mirror, is also running between tall tree trunks, and the bushes are like long swords piercing the blue sky.
Another example may be seen as Paws's regurgitation of the old tower: the moment Ivan's father is chopped to death by the rich man, a large picture of a group of red galloping horses treated by color filters appears, meaning that blood gushes out like a fierce horse, and the old tower", Andrey Rublev, borrows from this play, the opening hot air balloon crashes down, and he inserts an irrelevant shot - a white horse slowly falls to the ground, and the metaphor of the horse forms a rhetorical relationship to the body balloon - a metaphorical relationship derived from the oldest poetic tradition!
The code of poetic film, thus reaching a complementary relationship between the two Soviet directors, so that we can understand their later sympathy that stems from artistic resonance and is based on fate.
It is not only the bushes that pierce the sky, but also the top shape of the ubiquitous wooden buildings (churches and houses), the wooden tombstones and crosses on the tombs, and even the stakes of the wooden fence and the wooden shelves supporting the bearskins, which can constitute a medium, pointing to the unknown and deep clear sky, supplemented by endless spells outside the painting, and "The Shadow of the Forgotten Ancestors" is always overflowing with a certain sorcery atmosphere.
After the death of Ivan's father and brother, the mother has been cursing the enemy, not knowing whether it has indirectly led to the loss of Ivan's lover, if the aura of witchcraft can be defined as the spiritual experience of prophecy, then some of the foreshadowing of the future in the film can also be regarded as another expression of Pawsian poetry, although they have long become a common phrase in the history of 20th-century cinema.
After making love with Marichika, Ivan goes to another village to work, the two reunite after the autumn, and the 360-degree rotating camera is a kissing scene, but then they are bathed in the mysterious rain that does not know how to break through the sky;
When the two are parting, Ivan is in front, walking across a wooden bridge, the lover is trailing a few meters away, if it is separated, the wooden bridge under the overlook splits the picture in two, the water under the bridge gushes, filling the whole shot, both scenes emphasize the existence of water, can it be regarded as two prophecies of marichika's death? And there are inserts in both of them, recording Ivan's mother sitting in the back corner of her house cursing, "I wish the enemy sheep all sick and dead, and the family is surrounded by walls", but it is precisely this ending that quickly falls on Ivan's head.
In the second half of the film, Ivan and his second lover, Balagna, make love, and complete the scene in which the two work together to nail the horseshoe, which seems to foreshadow his fate of being trampled.
Ivan's frustration in emotional life has also been elevated to the expression of folk epics, he went out to make a living one night under the stars, the master while making cheese, while telling the story: "God asked the mountains why they did not get married, the mountains answered, it is the grassland unintentional, many centuries have passed, the mountains and the grasslands are still separated, only the wind brings them songs" ——
This is really an excellent folk song material, if it can be sung, how can the acura not be the most common sorrow and joy in the world? In this way, the film of poetry is not the poetry of film?