by studioxadmin | Aug 31, 2015 | Seven Greatest Films Ever Made
We’ve penetrated the center of this great director’s ouvre by gazing into his “Mirror” (1974). Might as well go wide now by contrasting his first feature, “Ivan’s Childhood,” (1962) with his final one, “The Sacrifice” (1986). From there, we’ll work our way back to the core.
It was not a totally random choice to compare Tarkovsky’s first film with his last. One is set in WWII, the other in WWIII. They both begin and end with a boy and a tree. “Ivan’s Childhood” opens at the base of an evergreen. A child walks out of the frame and the camera cranes upward along its trunk to the top. Tarkovsky’s final feature begins with practically the same image, except the boy doesn’t walk out of the shot; the camera leaves him. In another deviation from Ivan, with Sacrifice, the camera stops before we reach the top.
The film was dedicated to his son. I suppose that last shot was a self-portrait, of sorts, dreamed up by the poet and left behind to be remembered by. By the time principle photography on “The Sacrifice” had commenced, Tarkovsky was terminal with cancer and knew he would never attain old age. This barren tree, appearing late in his last opus is rueful, in the context of its prominence in the opening of his first film, when the camera floats all the way to the growing tip of a sapling with all promise of genius in full bud.
Experience accumulates and organizes itself as knowledge along great forked trunks and on down the branched, limbed, twigged networks in our minds. Tarkovsky’s camera conducts itself along similar lines. He employs very long takes, with camera in motion, inducing perceptual shifts, drawing us even deeper in with mirrors and other reflections, rooms within rooms, frames within frames, mimicking the natural paths of attention and accumulation of awareness.
For this filmmaker, capturing a passing moment with motion in space is sculpting in time. His cinematic chisel consistently modulates, like good music, between finite and cosmic. What a poet expresses with choice words, a composer does with appropriate musical instruments. Tarkovsky plumbs the possibilities of leitmotif with trees, wind, rain, water, milk, mirrors, snow, ash, stairs, ladders, mist, steam, smoke, fire, gravity, weightlessness and on and on. In his first film an expansive forest of birch stands like a great intersection of chords in a high mass. In his final one, a solitary tree soothes like a Japanese flute riffing in a solitary key.
The outcome of both is tragedy within triumph. In Sacrifice, an aging artist forfeits position and possession to reverse a cataclysm. In Ivan war orphan lays down his life behind enemy lines to repel the Nazi’s. But Ivan is not a common infantryman. He’s a scout, resigned to beat the enemy singlehandedly if necessary.
The boy soldier’s winning qualities are instantly recognizable in scene one when he behaves as if he outranks the officer assigned to interrogate him. In the quality of sheer bravery, he does outrank everyone. Our diminutive hero exudes formidable cheek and grit with anyone that threatens to stand in his way. He is so traumatized by war he can neither digest food, nor rest without reliving what’s lost in his past. He seems only able to counter it by leading the heroics.
His adoptive kin are all army officers trying to protect him. It just so happens the battalion could really benefit from some good intelligence, at the moment and Ivan’s age and size provide an edge.
Despite his sacrifice, Ivan’s not a Christ and this is not a passion play in military drag. We encountered that hybrid about a year ago in another Soviet era masterpiece, Larissa Shepitko’s “The Ascent.”
I’ve heard Tarkovsky criticized for wearing his religion on his sleeve. What religion? Nothing is entirely black or white in his works except some film stock. His complete works demonstrate that opening doors of perception is this filmmaker’s fascination, not deifying invisible entities. For example, during the transition to a flashback early in the first act, Ivan is tri-located for an instant. He is catching some rest in an army bed and he is waking up in the bottom of a well and finally, he is caught in the memory of standing over the well with his mother before she was killed.
“If a well is deep enough,” she tells Ivan, “you can see a star even on the brightest day.” “What star?” He asks. “Any star,” she answers. Notice that Ivan and his mother are gazing deep into the earth in search of something far out in space. Poetic inversions abound in Tarkovsky’s films. An exquisite communion of opposites is achieved with this one. Other than the veritable yin/yang symbol itself, what more all-inclusive vision could convey such otherwise unspeakable insights?
Almost immediately upon searching, Ivan declares he can see a star as he reaches down the mouth of the well. Suddenly is relocated there, caressing its reflection on the surface of the water. Here is an early bit of evidence of the boy’s exceptional gift for observation, so we can appreciate it is not just raw revenge that qualifies him for his vocation, but a child’s eye opened wide on the world.
For added fascination, notice the view down the well is not the reflection of a star as Ivan sees it but the POV of Ivan and his mother looking back at us. It’s a magnificent shot. Where’s the camera? We’re looking straight into it. The actors are too, right down the barrel of the lens, but we see their reflection backed by the sky above and encircled in the mouth of the well. The camera is looking at us as well, but from what position? This is just the first of countless fresh flourishes that supercharge Tarkovsky’s films, front to back.
The spell of memory is evoked by the artist with this deep yet simple scene, buoyed by equally evocative talk. “It’s daytime for you and me,” Ivan’s mom explains, “but nighttime for the star.” Every single sequence in Tarkovsky;s films seems embedded with counterpoint such as this. The image of star in full daylight is a kind of epigram. Tarkovsky is conditioning us for deep shifts to come. Our preconceptions will be subverted, time and again, with fascinating, alternate conceptions in abundant variation. Once again, I am reminded of the great Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. Appreciate with me how paintings of his such as “The Enchanted Domain,” (1952), “The Kiss” (1951) and “The Blank Page” (1952) assist our senses in with radical realizations about reality.
“Ivan’s Childhood” proposes that children possess the courage that adults lack. Chimes play on the soundtrack while Ivan looks out over the prow of the rowboat on his final mission. The choice reminds us of the hero’s immaturity even as he is about to act.
While Tarkovsky’s movies distinguish themselves for being planned and executed with consumate craft, there are some scenes so uncanny, surely they must be a result of sheer luck. For instance, just as Ivan makes landfall, says farewell and slips behind enemy lines for the last time, an enemy flare lands in the background. It’s grey column of smoke remains perfectly slender and vertical like one of the trees as it drifts on an invisible draft like a silent bludgeon sneaking between scattered black trunks, on a rendezvous with Ivan. The convergence takes place just as he disappears in the dark.
In the end, we are told Ivan was hanged. The final shot tilts down out of the clear sky, descending a dead tree on the riverbank with Ivan, before the war, in the foreground. The last shot of the film refers back to the first. The camera tilts down the length of a tree, this time and fading out on a war scorched trunk.
This description may read like bad poetry but my feeble effort is to blame. If what I’m talking about could have been conveyed in writing, Tarkovsky would not have bothered to commit it to film Much like Ivan, Andre was a scout at heart; his films probe the frontiers of poetic potential. Ivan’s attitude and actions shame fellow soldiers for not showing greater courage. Andre criticized most filmmakers for not taking full advantage of their art form. Precious few heard.
It seems like I’ve heard “Ivan’s Childhood” mentioned less often than other motion picture child memoirs of the era such as Truffaut’s “400 Blows,” (1959) or Schlondorff’s “The Tin Drum” 1979. I’m not sure why, Ivan is every bit as compelling. It contains Tarkovsky’s most straightforward narrative with an unforgettable central character whose predicament is loaded with tragic irony and portrayed with deep humanity, boundary pushing style and heartrending detail.
I will leave a choice center-cut of this complex and beautiful film for you to form your own unfettered opinions and keep my analysis to its edges. Next up, “The Sacrifice” which comes in second, of all Tarkovsky’s films, with regard to clarity of story. The balance of his output plays checkers with structure. This coming November, at Open Channel Content, Tarkovsky contemplates nuclear winter.
by studioxadmin | Aug 26, 2015 | Seven Greatest Films Ever Made
I’m certainly not the first cinephile that wishes they could have had a conversation with Tarkovsky. Back in the nineteen eighties, I’ve recently figured out, we were in Italy at the same time. I was just writing my first travel journal. He was writing his book “Sculpting in Time.” Our paths would not converge there. I was not quite half his age and only recently introduced to world cinema . He was writing his testament, “Sculpting in Time. ” In it he says, “If there are cinema-goers for whom it is important and rewarding to enter into dialogue specifically with me, that is the greatest stimulus I can have for my work.” If he were alive today, I’d look him up.
In reading from chapter seven in his book “Sculpting in Time,” I am gratified to find so much confirmation in his writings of my own thoughts with regard to his films. The subject is of the artist’s responsibility. I have written about it in several previous posts, most lately in relation to pornography, screen violence and theater of cruelty. In any discussion about an artist’s social obligation Chapter VII of “Sculpting in Time,” should be quoted aloud and “Stalker” should be required viewing.
What I gather from Tarkovsky’s philosophy is that any image rendered in service to truth is worthy of projection. Most often, according to him, it is rendered in service to money. Tarkovsky likens the makers of modern entertainment to merchants of commodities rather than artists. That was due to the high cost of filmmaking in the days of celluloid, but modern digital tech has leveled the playing field. Anyone can make a movie that could be seen by millions of viewers nowadays. What hasn’t changed, however, remains what is most important. The intention of the filmmaker determines whether what they make will contribute more to culture or commerce. Tarkovsky speaks of art as an act of sacrifice for the sake of love and as a potential unifier of humankind. What a thing to say in a book about filmmaking.
“Cinema uses the materials given by nature itself, with the passage of time, manifested within space”Andre Tarkovsky.
Here’s one thing that sets this filmmaker above the lot. He builds perceptual provocation into every shot. The long take, by its very nature, affords the viewer plenty of time to reevaluate their first impression. When someone as fine tuned as Tarkovsky lavishes each frame with purposeful detail, there is no getting back to the mindset you occupied when the shot first struck your retina. Tarkovsky’s cinema, like no other, conspires to take us on a journey of no return, and regarding the filmmaker’s intention, no film more than “Stalker” (1979) shows higher concern.
A typical Tarkovsky image constantly evolves, constantly challenging us to reconsider what we think we know. What we assimilate at first, by the effect of a moving camera, is a space filled with currents that move at deliberately devised rates. Almost the same way composers uses notes, Tarkovsky busies himself making intervals of time stand out to our sight. His layers of complexity compare and contrast with each other, over and under, to drive out lazy assumptions, bring our senses around, restore a sense of intimacy and wonder.
“Failure to develop the audiences capacity to criticize our own judgments is tantamount to treating them with total indifference.” Andre Tarkovsky
Film snatches events from the unconditional world and this skilled film director constructs an image of whole truth with captured fragments from such stuff. Tarkovsky goes to all this trouble to help the audience recover ‘lost past’. Assuming that a movie projector, as I have suggested in a previous post, is a kind of celluloid clock, Tarkovsky sculpts time inside that beam that connects the filmmaker’s heart to the audience’s brain. We’ve delved into this subject in a previous post, “A Camera is Simply a Clock with a Lens.” (OCC March 2012)
It’s not enough to call Tarkovsky a filmmaker or even an artist. We have reached the core of this beloved humanist’s work with his fifth film “Stalker” (1979), the greatest dystopian drama of all time. It is the last of his films we will discuss in this year-long series focused on the greatest Russian artist of the 20th century.
by studioxadmin | Aug 25, 2015 | Seven Greatest Films Ever Made
Andre Tarkovsky had a penchant for confronting our worn-in perceptual habits and restoring a sense of awe and wonder to the ways we see. Relatively ordinary scenes and settings in his films always have a way of transubstantiating into spiritual states.
I am reminded of another wizard of pictorial rigor and invention, Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte. I introduced Tarkovsky in these pages after mentioning some Danish filmmakers and promising to compare and contrast them with him. I haven’t gotten around to that yet. This is what can happen when you open the iris on a vast and intricate subject such as this. In doing so, it feels natural to identify another root influence in modern art that helps me comprehend and appreciate Tarkovsky all the more. There seems to be some overlap in these two artist’s interests. Magritte addressed what he called “the problem of the mirror” in a number of paintings. None is more effectively than his “Not to Be Reproduced (1937).
Magritte said his pictures were material evidence of freedom of thought. In addition to this similarity, Magritte’s paintings came to my mind while watching “The Mirror,” when Ignat is leafing through a book of drawings and paintings by Leonardo. The last color plate in the series is a study of hands. I’m not sure of Tarkovsky’s intent, but the disembodied particulars on that picture plane reminded me of paintings like “The White Race “(1937), “Acrobatic Ideas” (1928) and “One-Night Museum” (1927) from Magritte’s catalog. This might seem a rather obscure association if it were not for all three artists’ fascination with perspective. Where the overlap occurs is in their shared penchant for confounding our habitual ways of seeing.
Maria, the main character reflected in Tarkovsky’s mirror is heartbroken and grieving. Like Dreyer’s “Gertrude” she clings to idealized love. Gertrude imagines eventually meeting the object of her infatuation in the future. Maria’s ideal is anchored in the past. It invades every image in which she appears. We witness her emotional preoccupation even more acutely, with every close up, but we aren’t invited to share in it, because that’s what we’re accustomed to.
We are treated to something far more rare, Tarkovsky’s universe. His camera follows, not the characters onscreen, but the essence of a vivid moment in their past, as that very moment is imprinting in their memory. The camera grabs on to random details similar to the way our imagination does, for mental prompts associated with that time and place.
As a case in point, recall the spectacular image which takes place in the beginning of “The Mirror,” the barn fire. The sequence begins in the kitchen. Neighbors are shouting, a low rumble fades in on the soundtrack. A couple of children eat from bowls at a table. Their mother tells her children to come see the fire. The room empties out, but the camera remains. We hear the roar of combustion and voices shouting off screen, but we’re made to pause on a static view of the empty room–until a bottle falls off a table and lands on the floor mysteriously, without visible provocation. Then we move on.
Some kind of anomaly is present in the vast majority of Tarkovsky’s virtuoso passages, a small detail that defies ordinary laws. Is this because it was misplaced by the imagination of the rememberer; a floater or phantom, the shred of something not quite in sync with the rest, but somehow part of what happened back there in the past? Here in Tarkovsky’s frame it waves to us all from the shores of the unconscious.
Only after we receive that sublime salutation are we allowed to leave the kitchen and pan left to the much-anticipated fire. When we finally do, we think we must be looking through a rain saturated window, at the backs of the children, noting its glow on their faces. It turns out we are actually gazing at a reflection in a mirror. We come to discover this as the camera moves on.
The real action is gradually brought front and center with a 180 pan, then we push-in through the front door. As we track right over the threshold, the filmmaker’s first unforgettable, mesmerizing vision of “The Mirror” wipes in from behind a ladder and some trees. Finally, what we’ve been hearing about and anticipating since the first shot in the kitchen is set before our eyes, spitting and roaring up there on-screen.
Tarkovsky’s movies are often criticized for being slow, but that’s only valid, for instance in this case, if you’ve missed everything between when mother and children slip out of the kitchen and the moment we finally get a look at what they went outside to see. When it does happen, what a delectable feast for the senses; all those snapping fangs of heat and slashing claws of flame, crouch in the calm, damp green like Rousseau’s beast.
We the audience are set upright again, metaphorically speaking. That bold, dramatic, visual statement is reassuring after the woozy, misty transition from the kitchen, yet the loss of a barn is not the point of the cinematic sequence. All the alternatively oriented images that accumulated and morphed on the way to the fire expose the real root preoccupation in Tarkovsky’s work.
Now, zoom out with me just long enough to appreciate the fresh vision, precocious daring, admirable craft, uncanny timing and impeccable collaboration required to pull off a bravura shot like that in a single take with no digital FX! This is why Tarkovsky is perhaps Russia’s greatest artist of the 20th century.
There’s a lot of second hand war footage in the second act of “The Mirror.” It puts some viewers off and may seem out of place at first. I think it effectively represents what kinds of things remain lodged in a war child’s mind. I find the content of the found footage emotionally earthshattering from a that point of view. It’s not only Tarkovsky’s originality in movie making, it’s his compassion that draws me to his films.
Tarkovsky would say the experience of the present is elusive, a slippery one where anything could yet develop. The past is certain, it is therefore more solid. Evidently even a sculptor of time seeks something substantial for his chisel.
Its difficult to talk or write about Tarkovsky and not grow tired of the sound of my own voice. Nevertheless, I will proceed next month…
