Page 108 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

The film is about a drunken seminarian (Leonid Kuravlyov), who falls asleep in a barn but is
stalked by a broom-flying hag, an exact replica of Baba Yaga, one of the scariest personages of Slavic
folklore. When he refuses to make love to her, she jumps on his back, forcing him to run until the
first cockerel song at dawn revokes her evil powers. In a fit of revenge the seminarian whips her
savagely, but is scared witless when she turns into a beautiful princess. Later in the day her fathers
servants drag him to a remote village, where he finds out that she has been dead for a day. His pathetic
prayers fail to relieve her soul of her naughty designs and, after terrorising the poor lad to death, the
vampire princess turns again into a hag. The film ends without giving sufficient clues whether the
whole story is conjured up by the almost permanently intoxicated seminarian, or did indeed happen.
Ptushko's work on Vyi is remarkable for the three church sequences, culminating in a scary parade of
evil creatures - flying coffins and harpies, rattling skeletons and midget gargoyles. After so many years
Vyi remains one of the best Gogolian movies, complete with Kuravlyov's tongue-in-cheek anticlerical
innuendos and the ironic commentary of Khachaturian's original score, underlying its sublimity.
Alexander Rous Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki {A Night Before Christmas, 1961), and Yuri
Ilyenko's Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala aka Nich pid Ivana Kupala {The Eve of Ivan Kupalo, 1968)
were also inspired by Gogol's Evenings. While the former went unnoticed by Soviet film historians
as yet another fairytale (Rou was also a writer of fairytales), extrapolating fabulous motifs from the
Russian classics, the latter is an undeservingly forgotten masterpiece. And four years earlier, Ilyenko
had photographed Sergei Paradjanov's much acclaimed Tint zabutykh predkiv {Shadows of Forgotten
Ancestors, 1964). These films saw the light of day as a result of a larger, centrifugal drive towards
a revival of indigenous traditions of the Soviet republics, encouraged by the relative ideological
'thaw' in the 1960s. Ukrainian mystical, semi-Christian beliefs quietly endorsed the Ukrainian
language and culture on screen, challenging the official Russification policy. In addition, Paradjanov
and Ilyenko defied the positivist romanticism of Socialist Realism with their obsession with the
'terrifying mystery' of death and afterlife, 'not simply unknowable but linked with desires better
kept unknown'. 17
According to Socialist Realism, the 'traditional way of life was to be portrayed as uncanny'.18
Or, in light of Tzvetan Todorov's discussion of the fantastic, 'the supernatural is explained, leaving
no doubt that superstition and backwardness were the only explanations for the persistence of
demonic and "semi-Christian" beliefs'.1'' On the other hand, 'representations of the supernatural in
traditional/folkloric discourse could be defined as marvellous by definition', where the 'supernatural
remains unexplained'.20 Paradjanov and Ilyenko tell archetypal stories about the marvels of love in an
exalted mythological (and native) context, 'signaling a rupture in the natural order, one, unlike the
miraculous, not necessarily divine in origin and a challenge to rational causality'.21
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is a mystical story about Ivan (Ivan Mikolajchuk) who falls in love
with Marichka (Larissa Kadochnikova), the daughter of his father's killer. They grow even closer after
she drowns, suggesting that the true kingdom of God (and love) lies beneath the waters and beyond
death. When Ivan remarries, her ghost keeps visiting him. In her jealous desperation Ivan's wife
seeks help in divinations and evil spirits, and finally entices her lover, a sorcerer, to humiliate and kill
him. Ivan's tragedy is seen in poetic harmony with nature and the perennial rhythm of the lively and
colourful village life, of its work and holidays, changing with the seasons.

94