Rewind to Christmas 2013 when, in homage to the most celebrated hanged man in history, we analyzed institutional hangings in two movies. This Christmas we look at a film featuring a mystic from the Middle Ages, famed for painting that most talked about torture victim of all time.
“Andre Rublev” (1966), Andre Tarkovsky’s second feature, equates the creation of art to an act of faith. A Russian monarch summons medieval monk Andre Rublev to paint scenes from the Last Judgment in his splendid new church. On his way to the gig, the gifted, medieval icon painter becomes an eye-witness to an act of ruthless destruction followed by one of sublime creation.
In this meandering epic, Tarkovsky comments on the moral predicament of an artist. Andre the monk doesn’t believe churches should be decorated with devils and dungeons, so he defies the prince. His conscience dictates that he be responsible to his audience for the images he creates. As the artist’s work matures and comes into its own, each artifice he or she erects is a gamble in which one wagers their soul as well as their worldly reputation and for which there is no return and no second chance.
Andre’s friends and masters warn him to stop procrastinating. They keep urging the reluctant genius to just go give the devil his day and be done. Instead, the forlorn mystic of brush and pigment wanders the countryside, taking shelter in poverty, chastity and trying to be kind. Everyone is terrified of what the prince might do if he doesn’t paint the Last Judgment in time. Andre is unmoved. Why glory in the ungodly, he muses, when cruelty is so prevalent in daily life?
One thing Andre Tarkovsky proves through Andre Rublev, with his tryptic lens, is that we can pick from just about any point along the continuum of history to find inspiration for the Last Judgment. In Rublev, the theme echoes in three distinct variations. In the representation of the biblical event the artist is commissioned to paint; in the ritual of torture that we witness during the sack of the town of Vladimir; and finally, in the casting of a huge bell from molten bronze by a young craftsman.
The middle section of Rublev depicts a bloody invasion. In Rublev’s time, the Tatar were hired to do the dirty work. They served a similar purpose as the torturers that came to light recently in the US interrogations report. It seems every generation enacts its version of the Last Judgment.
During the invasion of this picturesque Medieval Russian town, we observe an act of torture in horrid detail. Men are blinded and left groping on hands and knees; a horse falls backward through a staircase, gets speared through the heart and bleeds to death onscreen. These crescendoing, atrocities unreel before our eyes as we witness the overthrow of the feudal prince by his brother and the torching of a town with the help of hired guns. Their leader wears a horned helmet and is the very picture of a charismatic warrior on the back of his powerful steed.
The climax of the pillage surely must be when an official of Vladimir is interrogated. His inquisitor is all smiles while he’s blindfolding the victim and binding him to a board before laying him back, forcing his mouth open and filling it with boiling pitch. Then the poor fellow is dragged on the ground behind a horse.
Cruelty stalks this film but I ask you to compare it with another movie I recently reviewed. Some readers may wish to revisit our previous zoom-in on a discussion begun last July, about the Theater of Cruelty. Why not highlight the different ways the concept is experimented with in these two films?
I have proposed that, with his recent film, “Nymph()manic” Vol II (2014), director Lars Von Trier intended the audience to push back. He provokes the viewer to employ self-defense, which led the film reviewer at our local independent free weekly paper to pronounced it “shit.” That left dozens of valuable debates on problems in our society never to be exchanged among the readership; at least among those that accepted the reviewers lazy condemnation and stayed home. Violence against women is in the headlines, so why was Von Trier’s film considered taboo instead of tuned in? Does the nightly news claim to have the sole right to sensationalize society’s ills?
I think Theater of Cruelty can be either toxic or tonic. When I watched Von Trier’s film, I did not read his intentions as being disrespectful to women any more than men. I found the pictures he made alarming and painful for anyone to endure. I closed my eyes through some of it. Nevertheless, after I left, I did not hold a grudge. I have been intrigued by many of that director’s previous movies, enough to swallow his bitter draft from last year, if for no other reason than to search for and discover its antidote in another film, as I believe I have in “Andre Rublev”.
In “Andre Rublev”, Tarkovsky’s application of the Theater of Cruelty is fashioned to nourish pity, tug at the heart and urge us toward compassion and harmony. He intends for me to empathize with his victims. With Von Trier’s “Nymph()maniac” Vol. 2. (2014), being harder to watch, the intent of the film is therefore harder to interpret. View, if you can stand, the controversial passages before you draw your own conclusions. Next month, “Andre Rublev” Act III.
In his book “Sculpting in Time,” the director adopts the attitude that the more the artist’s views are hidden the better for the work of art. I am not convinced Tarkovsky practiced this. The artist’s view seems to me to be the most obvious thing about any work of art. It’s the very thing that makes it art. So, we obviously don’t agree on what the term “artists view” means. Does he mean that art is less pure if the artist creates it to solve personal problems rather than collective ones? The artist’s conscience is on trial.
What is the point of hiding your views if you are an artist? Does he refer to the artifice that we create as the thing we hide our views behind? If so, does it follow that the more splendid the artifice, the better concealed the artists views? I don’t think so. Does he mean to hide his views so that they cannot be found or so that they cannot be easily detected? Are they to be walled-off from the work entirely?
No, they are to be disguised and smuggled in, silently, right through the audiences’ self-limiting defenses, past their precious prejudices to side-slip our cultural conditioning. If art helps us find meaning, as Tarkovsky states in his notes, then an artist would be obliged to share any vestige of meaning he or she has gathered through experience with his art. Sharing helpful information is what its about, is it not? Tarkovsky was making a statement against propaganda. He’s not going to pry open our minds so he can fill them up with what is in his. His objective is to leave behind a community of wide-open minds.
We’re at the point in our brief analysis of “Andre Rublev’ where Tarkovsky and his band of master Soviet craftsmen stage the casting of a massive church bell for the camera. Imbibe, with me, some of his potent allegory. Four blast furnaces dispense blazing bronze into an earthen mold meters deep in the ground. It would be hard to find a moving image with more poetic power than the casting of bronze to articulate the refinement of artistic conscience.
I’m going to digress briefly here and confess why the third act of “Andre Rublev” especially impresses me. There are bell makers in my family. They own a foundry to this day. Its bells ring all over the old country. The relatives that immigrated here from the Balkan alps found work in mines, metallurgy labs, and steel works along the Rockies in Colorado, but back in the old country they were bell makers. I was a jeweler for much of my life and so a predilection for liquefaction of metal can, evidently, transfer through the blood.
Deep background aside, just try and snore through the action in Act III once the fire begins to roar. Tarkovsky commandeers all possible avenues to our senses to capture the imagination, not to enslave, but to woo.
The filmmaker penetrates deep into our subconscious recesses with his novel explorations of mid-tones and greys, his uncanny knack for rhythm and pace, precocious echoes and rapturous vapors, mysterious murmurs from nature beckon from enchanted byways, all scintillating in supportive counterpoint to character arc and story beat.
I have been searching for a word or phrase that stands for what Tarkovsky mastered and I found it on the splendid art series by Charles Greenleaf Bell, the entirety of which Open Channel Content LLC has posted on YouTube for your edification.
“Omnivoyant” is the word Dr. Bell’s series supplied and also a quote to help explain it. This is from part fourteen of the “Symbolic History Through Sight and Sound,” entitled “Fifteenth Century – Early Renaissance.” The actual quote is by a medieval philosopher talking about the eyes of Christ in devotional painting.
“If I strive in human fashion to transport you to things divine. I have found nothing better than an image which is omnivoyant… such… I call the icon of God. This picture, brethren, ye shall set up in some place… and each of you shall find. From whatsoever quarter observed, that it looks at him as if it looked at no other…As in a mirror, an icon, a riddle. I see life eternal which is nothing less but that blessed regard, that gaze of love that never ceases to behold me even in the most secret places of my soul.” Cusanus (1401-1464)
This is what Tarkovsky’s movies do. They tap in to the root of the collective unconscious and look back at me and you with great regard. In act III of Rublev, for example, the horned helmet and his ruffians ride into the churchyard acting contemptuous and rude. The same clan of Tatar horsemen that conquered the town ten screen minutes ago are back in the churchyard, inciting a fight among the local dogs with spoiled meat.
Right here, Act III scene one flips fate’s coin from abduction to seduction. At the mid-point of the previous act, Rublev the monk adopted a young woman who is a bit touched, but very tuned-in to human nature. Durochka is her name and Andrei, the monk, kills a soldier to spare Durochka being raped.
So here in Act III this charmed female savant gets caught up in some tawdry snare again. The haughty heathen appraises his little rabbit, up and down, amused that she comes across more childlike than full-grown. Andrei looks on from a safe distance, while the foreign raiders box in the peasant girl for their horny lord. Up to now, Durochka’s lived by a simple sort of native grace, but all that might be about to break. Andrei’s faith is tested twice. If he doesn’t do something she’s lost for good. Yet, if he does, they will surely do him harm.
The monks stand by in collective disgrace looking more marooned on an island than ensconced in God’s dwelling place. They couldn’t look more distraught. It’s dead of winter. Dogs snarl and tear at each other. The harvest has gone to rot. Now these well-fed Tatars gallop in making sport. Hired horsemen cajole and corral the helpless one they’ve caught.
Watch how she endears herself to us as an uncommonly curious soul with some native twinge of witch in the mix. Watch now while the fierce warrior and the enchanted waif face off. From cloak to tongue they appear distinctly different stuff, but when he asks her to become his eighth wife, she more than catches his drift.
Everyone else has a good laugh. Meanwhile, this proud stud of a medieval mobster gets caught off guard by the charms of a girl that seemed retarded. We are watching one of the most enchanting moments in motion pictures. Of course, it involves a mirror. The sculptor of time was never keener than when Durochka pulls herself close to that devil’s belly, polishes his breastplate to catch a glimpse of herself, then gazes up in the eyes of her plunderer with hers lit up in raw and wild wonder. His expression mirrors her effect, to us, as that beast’s intents are bent to love from lust.
This film’s in a class of its own, like so much Russian art, music and lit. Tarkovsky’s art combines harmonics for the most discriminating sophisticate. Who could have seen it coming when the most frightening figure in the story becomes the disadvantaged peasant girl’s ticket. In a final pass by the lens, late in Act III, we see Durochka clothed fresh, head to toe, a good deal better off yet still as comfortably herself as ever with lovely Tartar horse and child in tow.
Tarkovsky was an alchemist, a shaman and folk physician. May his illusions live on to enchant generations. Positive and negative charges, visible and invisible rhythms, complimentary opposites and their parental nodes balance, almost algorithmically, throughout his life’s work. For me, the seven stories Tarkovsky fashioned for the screen are among the finest antidotes for the handful of toxic things in this world I wished I’d never seen.
Andrey Tarkovsky was harassed by Soviet critics but praised by the proletariat. I think his written remarks about masterpieces of art being immune to association or else prone to infinite association, which is the same thing, was an evasive action taken by a misunderstood genius trying to be bullet proof. Who can blame him?
It’s not that I disagree with his enlightened presumption, but I’m pretty sure that analyzing its components in order to discover layers of meaning in art is as natural for audiences as our search for meaning. No masterpiece can elude our need to break it into digestible units. To discourage us from analyzing complex works of art, when the human brain is conditioned to do it, is ludicrous. Great movies are displayed on the high altar of a movie screen, after all, like some blessed sacrament. Absorb as much of their greatness as possible; digest, assimilate, amen!
Surely Tarkovsky is warning us to not get carried away with the sound of our own digestion. Regarding analysis of jazz, Duke Ellington was quoted as having said, “too much of that kind of talk stinks up the place.” In other words, let the art speak for itself. If words could say everything, then we would need nothing else.
Why then, do I analyze films? Not to make definitive pronouncements on their merits. In discussing anybody else’s work, I try to limit myself to specifics that might provoke a common response or well-meaning debate. I don’t write to be quoted, but simply hope that someone reading this might discover the movie for themselves. If they’ve already discovered it, perhaps I will provide them an excuse to look again.
Tarkovsky’s suggestion that infinite associations can be provoked by a single masterpiece, is not entirely relevant, in my opinion, since the likelihood of most humans making identical associations is much greater than us making unique ones. Art reaches us through our imagination and through our senses. Our senses are all going to have a common reaction to certain stimuli. That’s one thing great art understands. It seems to me an artist depends on the fact that essential associations eventually will carve predictable lines through common precincts in our brains.
Getting back to Tarkovsky’s second film, as Act III of “Andre Rublev” unfolds, the narrative line shifts radically and our attention switches from the floundering faith of a monk/painter Rublev to the budding prodigy of an orphaned son of a bell maker Boriska. Rublev shifts to a supporting role, however we are still viewing the action through his eyes, so Tarkovsky really isn’t hanging the narrative out to dry.
How important is it for the audience to experience Boriska’s initiation from Rublev’s point of view? Critical. Rublev, the conflicted monk/artist, gets his religious faith and creative inspiration super-charged by witnessing the unknown craftsman take a quantum leap.
The ringing the enormous bell at the finale becomes an audio/visual talisman to forever remind us a truly great artist works in service to the people. A truly great artist’s and any truly holy mystic’s responsibility are one in the same. Both are pioneers, confronting the fact that whatever any of us does ripples through the culture with consequences.
What worker in the realms of imagination would not relate to their process as a fire burning off superfluous matter; getting out of the way and becoming a conduit for a greater power? Rublev receives a summons from the prince but procrastinates and waits for the juice to come down from God–the artist’s conscience, in other words–he is rewarded with the privilege of witnessing someone else step into their genius. this, in fact, melts the last of Rublev’s resistance. Observing the good vibe that Boriska’s sacrifice generates, Andrei rededicates himself and his talents to a life of service.
In the aftermath of the fiery rite of passage, mud takes the place of blood and coats the crowning shot’s pieta-like design. Borisky remains mired in regret, even though he has greatly succeeded. He gambled with his talent and won, but can scarcely comprehend such luck.
He’d have been beheaded if he’d failed. Instead his bell sends good vibrations out over the land. The royals ride off to party. Common folk take the day off as well, but pitiful Boriski weeps and wails for what he thinks he lacks. Mirrors in Tarkovsky’s movies come in many guises. Rublev looks down at this one, realizes Boriska is his reflection and lifts him out of the mud.
Tarkovsky did his best over the expanse of his short career to call out the best in his fellow artists. He was blessed with some consummate craftsmen with which to collaborate, capturing all the intricately designed and timely processes of his magnum opus. Nevertheless, political censorship bogged down this film after its premiere, dishonoring its great director as well as the top-notch crew that made it. While the Soviet’s government sealed the country’s fate as a failed state, their artists bequeathed us some of the greatest works ever made.
Next month “a summersault into the unknown” beginning with “Nostalghia” (1983)
If I had seen Tarkovsky’s sixth film, “Nostalghia,” in the year 1986 when it was released, it probably would have infuriated me, but I was only twenty-six. It’s easier to comprehend after half a century’s worth of experience.
In Act I, the poet and his female interpreter arrive in a Tuscan village near a chapel with a miraculous fresco and some steamy, natural, healing baths. The couple stays dry and bickers over which one of them better understands the other’s culture. He tells her to throw away the book of translated poems she’s reading because “poetry, the whole of art in fact, is untranslatable.” This is Tarkovsky’s retort to the Soviet censors whose State he has fled in his quest for artistic freedom.
However, the conviction expressed by the poet in that little exchange of dialog flatly contradicts an opinion the director wrote in his book, “Sculpting with Time.” Tarkovsky proposed that the more successfully the artist’s views are hidden, the greater a work of art will be. Yet, here is a case where the main character blatantly expresses a view that the director lays claim to publicly.
So it appears he is contradicting himself, but perhaps there is an untranslatable view hidden within all of this. To help us get at it, I supply a quote from composer Paul Hindemith. I came across it decades ago in a very helpful book entitled, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” by Betty Edwards. This quote evokes what Tarkovsky might be saying regarding what remains untranslatable.
“We all know the impression of a very heavy flash of lightening in the night.
Within second’s time we see a broad landscape, not only in its general outlines but with every detail. Although we could never describe each single component of the picture, we feel that not even the smallest leaf of grass escapes our attention. We experience a view, immensely comprehensible and at the same time immensely detailed, that we never could have under normal daylight conditions, and perhaps not during the night either, if our senses and nerves were not strained by the extraordinary suddenness of the event…”
The quote goes on to say that a bona fide master is capable of holding such an impression in his imagination and construct it with his chosen medium, remaining engaged in the task unto the very last detail. Tarkovsky worked that way.
Returning to our current film, no matter how beguilingly she offers it, the Botticelli-like beauty of the Italian translator fails to seduce the enigmatic Russian poet. Why has he brought such a desirable woman along and then arranged for separate rooms? This seems not quite right. He could have hired a friar for less. We won’t be attempting to answer that question here, although I invite you to.
It is clearly not what she had in mind when the poet retires to his quarters. He peruses the room, alone. The windows, walls, and furnishings are like living lines in a poem. Shift to black and white; a dark-haired woman beams at him in some recurring dream or vivid reverie. An adolescent girl gambols barefoot with her German shepherd dog on the edge of a pond.
When he snaps back to the present the light spectrum expands with him, but what’s the difference? Light is scarce. Colors are subdued. He pokes his head out a window. It’s raining, he closes the blinds. He turns on a wall switch then turns it off. He crosses in front of a whitewashed wall, past an iron bed. He pauses, framed in the dark doorjamb of a lighted bathroom, then goes in. On the wall hangs a mirror over a sink. The poet practically brushes it with his cheek as he bends for a drink, but never glances at himself. In the third act, he takes a rather long look in a mirror, making this one echo even more mysteriously, in retrospect, lit such as it is so deliberately, almost like the ring of Saturn.
At this time, the cinematic master begins riffing variations on a familiar pattern. He makes chords with objects and their resonances. For example the next visual harmony in the key of H2O is impressive. It involves rain that’s been shut outside, a stream that flows freely from a faucet and a bottle of aqua mineral standing still on the dresser.
Before we leave the bathroom, notice this dark sliver along the left limb of that disk-shaped mirror. Tarkovsky’s lens insinuates all possible depths. He does so by concealing the camera in a shot and then pointing it at you. What that black slit reflects, to the poets left, is a cleft where the audience sits. Go ahead, stare back at yourself with us, behind the man’s back. We share a magic wall with him and his double. You’re hiding inside there too, along with the camera and the director.
In shots we have already analyzed, from both “Mirror,” “Ivan’s Childhood” and “The Sacrifice,” it is evident that Tarkovsky loves to crowd three dimensions with illusion of more. Here in “Nostalghia,” he imbues the mirror with a total of ten.
Now there’s something for the imagination to stretch out in.
He is riffing comfortably on this water triplet, we’ve already described. Then he inserts this little variation for mirror and lens that opens like an accordion, but with a cinematic instrument, not music. If two mirrors opposed each another here it would demonstrate what is known as the Droste Effect.
Exchange one of those mirrors for a lens and hide it inside the other. Now we are not confined to look from one end to the next through a score of dead reflections, but can penetrate the image with our mind while each layer of the telescoping reflection penetrates in a backwards direction, through our perceptions, one after the other. We are introduced, through the vivid suggestion of this superficial edifice, to the intricate pleats of a hand-made, ingeniously embedded, pre-digital hologram.
The room you occupy at present happens to be connected to this bathroom on a movie set where the actor stood in a bygone time and place. Thanks to the filmmaker’s device we can locate ourselves peering out from behind that blind, decades later in a completely different physical space. You think I’m making this up? For more on this preoccupation, listen to postman Otto spin his yarn about a widow and her unfortunate son at RT 38:10:00 in Act I of “The Sacrifice” (1986 – Criterion 2011 Ed.).
Now let the rest of us proceed to RT 21:48:00 in “Nostanghia” (1983 – Kino Lorber 2014 Ed.) Help me decipher the number of dimensional thresholds through which we are looking. Glance backward, for a moment, through the camera, hiding in that dim sliver, is if your eyes were the lens. Behind it is some film in a compartment where the impression is fixed. Now see if your imagination will let you climb onto that image and travel with it wherever it goes. For no longer than it takes to fall in and out of a daydream there are nine coils packed in this jack in the box, hung vertically on the screen for your senses to expand through. You think I’m full of it? I don’t blame you. Let’s have a closer look.
In the center of this multidimensional point of view, a poet’s image subdivides. Right behind his back, in the same frame, find yourself looking both outward and inward. Through the clever, cinematic, domain-shifting telescope, witness how it simultaneously projects into dimensional recesses on screen and bounces backward through your irises and off the back wall of your brain.
Three distinct thresholds, on either side of the glass, delineate four dimensions; each counts as one volume and its twin for a total of ten domains stacked, unpacked, rewound, played and multiplied again and again, every time this clip is selected.
When I first saw this, I turned the movie off and went to bed pondering the rare perspective. Behind those indelible thirty-three seconds of film time Tarkovsky’s secret is protected.
Let us proceed to the end of the scene which we highlighted in the last post and we’ll leave the rest of this masterpiece for your own inquisitive appetites to feast. If we were to describe the action in the preceding shot, the poet gets a drink of water and simply acts inside the nucleus of this elegant ten-dimensional telescope as if it wasn’t there. He aims his mouth upside down under the faucet, never once glancing at himself, foregoing the mirror, foregoing even the drinking cup for a direct sip. As he wipes his mouth and turns, exits toward us, the mirror serves as a halo and the doorframe are like the edges of an icon as formal; lovingly composed as anyone of those introduced at the end of “Andre Rublev.”
The poet comes back out of the bathroom and transfers a heart pill from a tin into his mouth, then stomach; inviting our awareness to pass from one dimension into another as easy as the passage of that pill. The poet advances to the dresser with a mirror that reflects the open window across the room. The geometric shapes from the previous shot of the bathroom are all re-represented here in reverse as if, in some type of omni-dimensional reflection inversions of all kinds can spring out in all directions. There is a rectangular mirror framing his head instead of a doorway and a spherical lamp approximately where the round mirror was in the shot before. He picks up a Holy Bible that is lying there and flips through it enticing us to escape to and from different realities with the filmmaker as easily as vanishing into a good book. The poet then looks over his shoulder and right in to the camera, for an instant, inviting us to merge with the character as easily as can happen when any two sets of eyes meet squarely.
A coin can be heard falling and rolling on the floor and fluttering to a stop with no apparent explanation other than beckoning our imaginations to slip between the threshold of curiosity as effortlessly as a coin slips through a slot. He walks away and leaves the book open on the dresser. Inside the front cover is a black hand comb with a hank of white hair wrapped around it.
The poet opens the door to the hallway. There stands the statuesque silhouette of the Italian interpreter. She leans back into the strong side-light in the hall facing him like Venus on the half-shell. Probably, she was responsible for the coin. What a bewitching way to capture the Poet’s attention behind his door. His book of poems she has calculatingly clutched to her breast, with which she next begins subtly whacking herself between the legs. Such an exquisitely encoded erotic gesture I have rarely seen.
It sure seems like it would be a nice time for a poet to make love to the beautiful and intelligent admirer with some of the passion she’s just finished devouring in the pages of his poetry. He takes the book from her, shuts the door again and throws it across the room. It lands in the corner. What is wrong with this guy? I think I know. I can’t answer for his love life, but what’s a piece of art to an artist after it’s made? A former mistress.
Left alone outside his room, she turns away, plants herself on all fours, sets her elegant frame in the starting position of a track racer, then she takes off fast-as-she-can through a threshold in the hallway beneath the staircase. High heels immediately loose their grip, she slips and collapses on fresh-waxed tiles like a baby bird trying out new wings. It’s such a beautifully quixotic scene. In any other film, we’d laugh, but it’s not presented as a pratfall. She picks herself up and bounds up the stairs laughing all the way as if nothing could make her happier than to be leaving the poet in his gloom.
Back inside his room, the Italian interpreter’s infatuation makes his dream all the more distant and irretrievable. He is simply in love with someone or else an idea of someone and someplace that perhaps represented home. He walks over to the window. The rain starts to get on my nerves. It’s sound is sharp and trebly, as if bits of glass or shards of broken china were being slowly raked and it positively saturates, dribbling on, relentlessly. He turns off the bedside light, opens the blinds. He sits on the edge of the bed in deep shade. He falls asleep sitting up but catches himself before he falls to the floor. He sits back up but swoons again, almost immediately, surrendering head first to gravity. He stops himself again in the nick of time.
This character might be said to have a female double in the part of Maria in Tarkovsky’s third film “Mirror,” the movie I started this series off with several months ago. Both characters seem lost in an obsession with the past.
The poet lies down on the bed. He could be crying. I feel like crying for him at this moment and just when the camera seems to have overstayed its welcome, in-through the bathroom door slips a German shepherd dog, just like the one in his dream. It encircles the bed and settles on the floor at the poet’s side. The poet reaches down and puts his hand on it.
Set aside, for the time being, the novelty of the dog’s appearance, practically out of thin air and appreciate with me the consequence of all the slow camera movements that precede it, all those dominant shadows, the poet inside them fluctuating between water and mirror, drifting between depression and sleep. We’ve been waiting for something to change and not much has.
Tarkovsky keeps it interesting but time has slowed down so much that we’re on the brink of snapping out of it. After he finally lays down, I expect a cut to the next scene, any second now, or else my thoughts will start to wander toward what I’m going to do after the movie, or perhaps those thoughts have already taken over for some of us in the audience when that magical dog steps through the bathroom door.
By the way, the animal comes from the room with the round mirror where the previous transcendent moment took place. This sleek, healthy, dog strides in and traverses the room. As if it knew just what to do, it then spirals into a prone position on the floor beside, where the poet lies. This bit of business suddenly puts us back to what we were waiting for all along and it rewards us for the extra time it took. This could be an example what Tarkovsky means when he talks about sculpting in time. In a sense, we travel to the future and back again in the last sequence of this scene.
Rewind to Christmas 2013 when, in homage to the most celebrated hanged man in history, we analyzed institutional hangings in two movies. This Christmas we look at a film featuring a mystic from the Middle Ages, famed for painting that most talked about torture victim of all time.
