Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Hand of Glory

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)
directed by Sergei Parajanov
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Even in Albuquerque, where we were told that cool weather arrived in the middle of September, October began feeling more like summer than fall. Only yesterday did I re-arrange my Netflix list to accommodate the season, and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was in my mailbox before the unseen pleasures of Halloween were awarded their annual bump to the top of the queue. The first try was a false start: a blare of long mountain horns like a failed Ricola commercial, the death of a young man beneath a felled tree, wailing mothers and brutish men converging in the mountain snow.

There is a temperature swing in the mornings at 5,000 feet, from the 50s to the 80s by lunch. I sat on the sofa at 8:30, cold, and began again. The snow, suddenly, was less a contrast to last night's dark, dry air than an imaginable gradation from blankets to roaring outdoor fires. Inside the Orthodox Carpathian church, where the family goes to mourn, the image felt - felt - like the year does when you first decide to close the windows in the house before bed. However I'd imagined the mountain tangles of Orloc, Nosferatu, and Dracula, this was no contrast, but a return of a world seen only in night to rich color - even colder, if possible, by day. More magic than fiction, mad as a hatter and marvelously coherent, this year's herald of a haunted mindset of dusk, wind, and rain.