TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: Tempo di Viaggio & Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky made just seven full-length features in twenty-four years, mostly in the most unimaginably compromised circumstances and with gaps of up to seven years between films, so you can imagine how enthusiastically he must have seized upon the opportunity to make 'Tempo di Viaggio'. Produced for Italian television while he was working on the script for 'Nostalgia' with Tonino Guerra, it ostensibly records their journey to find suitable locations as well as documenting their working relationship and Tarkovsky's musings on film and art in general.


I won't knock him for simply wanting to get back behind the camera and film. What I will say, though, is that 'Tempo di Viaggio' - as beautiful as some of the images it contains are - is little more than a very well-produced, slighty pretentious home movie. It's basically 'Andrei and Tonino Do Italy' with Guerra reciting some dubious poetry, Tarkovsky discoursing more on other filmmakers than his own work, and the whole enterprise becoming a series of increasingly wordless and extended takes which ultimately look beautiful but say very little about the creative and collaborative processes or the themes and considerations of 'Nostalgia' itself.

The only scene that has any frisson is utterly bizarre. Guerra and Tarkovsky visit a villa which the former has earmarked as a possible location. Guerra recounts with some excitement a legend about a noblewoman who lived there and the series of romantic/tragic events that led to her commissioning a marble floor decorated to suggest a scattering of petals. Like a kid at the entrance to Disneyland, Guerra is almost agitatedly eager to see this ornate feature. When the owners' representative, an oleaginous but diplomatic type, regrets that the proper arrangements have not been made for them to tour the interior, Guerra promptly throws his toys out of the pram. Even Tarkovksy - who, as the next documentary under consideration demonstrates, wasn't adverse to throwing his teddy in the air either - looks shocked and urges the writer to calm down.

The creative process is more thoroughly explored in Michal Leszczylowski's 'Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky', an assemblage of footage shot by Arne Carlsson, assistant cameraman on 'The Sacrifice', during the production of that film and fleshed out with interviews with Tarkovsky's widow and readings (by Brian Cox) from the director's book 'Sculpting in Time'. There are fascinating scenes of Tarkovsky dealing with a multi-national (ergo multi-lingual) cast - we're talking about a Russian director making a film in Sweden with a cast including Swedish, French and British actors - and the one person who impresses most, for her patience and sense of calm, is Tarkovsky's translator. The director himself comes across as fussy and obsessed with minor details, yet often frustratingly vague in his direction of actors.

Tarkovksy sometimes seems undisciplined, dithering over an onset instruction or hesitant as to where to place his actors within the mise en scene (all things, to my thinking, that should have been tied down in pre-production and rehearsal) and even repositioning stones in a brief coastline scene. An hilarious moment has him demand that a tree be removed because the blossom is the wrong colour - for a scene he shoots in sepia! The dramatic crux of the documentary, however, centres on the climactic burning of a house, a six minute scene documenting the protagonist's perceived descent into madness playing out in front of the conflagration. Tarkovksy evinces little control of events, a couple of pyrotechnic effects don't work, and to top it all the camera jams, necessitating the rebuilding of the house within days. Second time around, Tarkovsky plays safe and shoots it with two cameras. It's a tense finale to an otherwise overly reverent documentary and it's priceless to hear the otherwise highly cerebral and locquacious Tarkovsky resorting to calling someone a "motherfucker" when things go wrong.

TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: The Sacrifice

Sweden. The present. Alexander (Erland Josephson), an actor who retired from the stage after excelling in Shakespeare's 'Richard II' and Dostoyevsky's 'The Idiot', gathers his family and friends at his luxurious country home for his birthday celebrations. The occasion is interrupted by a TV newscast announcing that nuclear war is imminent. By his own admission, at the start of the film, not the most religious individual, Alexander finds himself not only praying but offering God a bargain: avert the holocaust and he'll give up everything he has, his family and home, and take a vow of silence.

Next day, everything is as it was before and Alexander has to keep his end of the deal.

These quotes are spattered over the cover of my DVD copy of 'The Sacrifice':

"A work of genius" - The Times

"A classic ... No one in the cinema at present can compete with Tarkovsky on this level" - Derek Malcolm in The Guardian

"Towering ... One of the great films of Western Europe" - Alexander Walker, Evening Standard

Now, far be it from me to question the words of such established film critics as Messrs Malcolm and Walker (and I've been trying to find away of hedging the issue and coming up with 800 non-committal words), but I have to go with my gut instinct. There's a reason I titled this blog after Werner Herzog's words of wisdom. That reason was to get away from arty-farty, up-its-own-arse film writing and simply celebrate the medium. I've not always managed to adhere to that, and I probably shouldn't be writing about 'The Sacrifice' now because the next few paragraphs are going to fly in the face of my mission statement. That's the danger of a retrospective, I guess.

"Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of the mind." I know this is only my opinion and there are people out there who will consider me a godless heathen for saying this (and they'd be right on the first count and pretty damn close on the second), but as far as I'm concerned the only thing 'The Sacrifice' agitates is my patience.

And already I'm undermining myself: "it's boring" is the argot of the school yard and as far removed from a legitimate critical statement as a politician is from integrity. And yet I can't get away from the fact that, in capturing my gut reaction to the film on first viewing and my more considered evaluation second time round, it's the best catch-all description I can come up with.

Nor is it made any easier for me to say having discovered such awe-struck love for Tarkovsky's previous film 'Nostalgia', whose final scene left me gaping slack-jawed at the screen for a good quarter of an hour after the film ended. Following 'Nostalgia', I really wanted 'The Sacrifice' to be a profound and inspirational encapsulation of Tarkovsky's entire moral and spiritual philosophy as a filmmaker. What I resolutely didn't want it to be was dull, turgid, interminable and a test of the patience.

On paper, it sounds like it has all the elements: a celebration interrupted by the certainty of death; the agonising hours which follow; a man of little or no religious belief arriving at what must be a life-changing decision to get on his knees and pray; a quite literal long dark night of the soul as daylight fades and no-one knows if they will see the dawn; the faint hopes of the new day arriving; the miracle of deliverance; Alexander's awful, wrenching decision to do as he promised. This, no doubt about it, is the stuff of real, sinewy drama. Astoundingly, confusingly, frustratingly, Tarkovsky either doesn't engage with these elements, or completely drops the ball.

Firstly, the concept of imminent death intruding on a celebration sets up an immediate juxtaposition, a dynamic; only Tarkovsky presents us with the least celebratory birthday party ever committed to film. None of the supposed celebrants are happy. They're all coolly aloof and cerebrally cynical. Where's the drama in them facing death if none of them are tangibly alive anyway?

Secondly, there's how they respond to the news. I'm not sure how I'd react to only having hours left to live, but I hope I would demonstrate neither the wailing histrionics or the po-faced stoicism that seems to be the either/or choice for Tarkovsky's characters. Nobody says "Screw it, let's drink the good wine. Alexander, you got any decent cigars, mate?" No-one turns to their nearest and dearest and simply holds them close. Personally, I'm betting the majority of people would rather die with a belly full of good food, head buzzing with the pleasant sense of inebriation. That or in the arms of the person they love.

(Mention deserves to be made of 'The Simpsons' season two episode "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Bluefish", which posits that Homer has a single day left to live. He determines to flip Mr Burns off, listen to Lisa play saxophone, have a beer with the boys and be intimate with Marge. To my way of thinking, this emerges as an infinitely more realistic response to imminent death than 'The Sacrifice'.)

Thirdly, Tarkovsky greets the new dawn and the aversion of global annihilation not with the profound spirituality that conjured the unutterably moving final shot of 'Nostalgia' but with a ploddingly awful scene in which Otto the postman visits Alexander all in a fluster and tells him he can save mankind by going to see his servant girl Maria and "lying with her" (and he doesn't mean they tell untruths together, either). For what probably only lasts about five minutes - but seems like 'Satantango' and 'Shoah' on a double-bill - Alexander repeatedly asks "who?" (even though the script has only identified one Maria during the entire film) instead of the burning question: "why?" Why does Alexander need to do the wild thing with a servant girl (hasn't he already struck his bargain with God)? Why does Otto know that this is the singular course of action that no-one but Alexander can possibly undertake? Does Alexander just assume that Otto has become God's messenger (why use burning bushes when He can send messages through the postman)?

As much as I tried to engage with it - on both viewings - 'The Sacrifice' lost me at this point.

Alexander's sacrifice itself, albeit the only point where the film breaks ground from underlit drawing rooms and flat coastland and actually gets visual*, exacerbates the sense of the ludicrous. While the raging image of Alexander's flame-wreathed house is an undeniably powerful one, Tarkovsky relegates it to the background while Alexander runs around dementedly in front of it, stumblingly pursued by his family and by the two orderlies who accompany the ambulance which turns up to cart him off to an asylum. The ambulance, it should be noted, turns up within minutes of the blaze starting (by comparison, the scene ends without even a distant siren announcing the impending arrival of the fire brigade) and without any of Alexander's kith or kin placing a phone call or signing any committal papers.

Suspension of disbelief? Oh, puh-leeze. It'd never happen in Springfield.

*If for no other reason, 'The Sacrifice' fails as the single visually uninteresting film by a director whose talent, elsewhere, for creating striking, startling, challenging images remains largely unchallenged in the medium. What makes it worse is that 'The Sacrifice' was lensed by Bergman's DoP of choice, Sven Nyqvist, a man for whom light and shadow was ordinarily second nature.

TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: Nostalgia

Italy. The present. Russian poet Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovskiy) is travelling with his translator Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) while he researches a book on the life of a famous composer. Their relationship is tense and Gorchakov is haunted by thoughts of his wife and memories of his childhood back in Russia.

At a spa town, Gorchakov meets Domenico (Erland Josephson), a mystic who has experienced visions and is infamous for having locked his family away in preparation for the end of the world. A kinship is evident between Gorchakov and Domenico, and the mystic tasks Gorchakov to complete a symbolic act.

Readying to leave Italy – the act (to cross the drained spa with a candle which must be kept alight) not completed – Gorchakov is contacted by Eugenia who alerts him that Domenico, in an almost euphoric state, is preaching to crowds in Rome. When Domenico concludes an intense sermon on brotherhood and the necessity to strive for something better with an act of self-immolation, Gorchakov returns to the spa town to keep his promise.

‘Nostalgia’ is the one Tarkovsky film I’ve almost dreaded writing about. How does one discuss Domenico’s fiery departure from the film without making it sound unbearably melodramatic? How to describe the mise-en-scene and elliptic accretion of imagery which finds majestic synthesis in the very last shot without haring off into the realms of purple prose and pretentious parlance? How to communicate the sustained emotional power of an eight and a half minute take in which a man makes several slow shuffling attempts to cross an empty pool without a candle going out?

What makes ‘Nostalgia’ even harder to write about – as a fully paid-up atheist – is how deeply, profoundly religious it is. Even more so, arguably, than ‘The Sacrifice’ with its bargain-with-God premise. Gorchakov’s appointment with the pool and the candle goes beyond metaphor, beyond symbolism. By the end of those painful, interminable eight and a half minutes, the pool and the candle have become his own personal stations of the cross.

Then Tarkovsky throws in that indescribable, awe-inspiring final shot, the camera pulling slowly back from a fairly ordinary image, one already located in Gorchakov’s memories and referenced earlier in the film; the camera pulls back and a reflection in a pond (as in all of Tarkovsky’s work, water provides a wellspring of images*) suggests that there is a bigger picture, a larger element, something beyond the merely nostalgic or pastoral; slowly, gradually the camera pulls back until the whole astonishing image is revealed.

And even then the full import isn’t immediate. The visual bravura initially overwhelms; invokes comparison with the metaphysical imagery which closes ‘Solaris’. The combined emotional, intellectual and – damn it – spiritual meaning of the image gradually radiates from Tarkovsky’s mind, via the screen, and into the viewer’s.

Yes, I know, that comes across as hyperbolic and downright sloppy writing. But I can honestly find no other way of describing the cumulative power of ‘Nostalgia’. It is the cinematic equivalent of a religious experience.

*Sorry. Serious article; bad pun.

More thoughts on Stalker

When I wrote yesterday's post, I think I was hung up maybe a little too much on the comparison between book and film, how 'Stalker' (for me) is a stripping away of all the genre tropes from the Strugatskys' novel 'Roadside Picnic'.

Also, the enigmatic qualities of the film appealed to me so strongly that I resisted analysing or probing the film. But as with even the most slippery and ambiguous works of art, there are doorways - or even just hairline cracks - that allow a way in; that allow for a reading, an interpretation, an understanding.

I didn't strive for these things in my review, content to let the mysteries of 'Stalker' swirl around me.

Francisco Gonzalez discussed 'Stalker' as the inaugural review on his blog The Film Connoisseur (a brave and inspired choice of film to kick off a new blog with), and he left a comment on my article which proved a thought-provoking take on the film. I thought it was too good a piece of writing to remain hidden in the comments section, and with Francisco's kind permission, it is printed below:

The way I saw it, the whole film was a metaphor for religion. The Stalker serves as the religious preacher, looking for new members - in this case the two people he is guiding through "the zone".

The Zone to me is religion. The film was an exploration of why people need it, why its there, and why should it be there? Do we really need it to survive? And should it be blown to smithereens? Eliminated forever from society?

All this revealed through the conversations that the characters have, and it's intriguing that one is a writer, one is a philosopher and one is a mathematician.

That last scene, where they are looking at "the room", I guess the room means something different to each of them, one wants to blow it up, the other thinks we need it. Kind of like in 'Solaris' where they were thinking of blowing up the whole place with bombs, I believe it was?

Also, the last shot with the little kid being "different", I thought there was some telekinesis involved there, demonstrating that it's in the future generation's hands to change things...with the power of their minds. That's how I saw it, youth, future generations can move things, change them, including problems that plague our society right now. But then again, maybe it was just the vibrations from the train that was passing by? Or was it? I loved that ambiguity there!

It seems Tarkovsky enjoyed playing with these themes, which in my opinion he also played with in 'Solaris'. The planet that makes people see things...

Francisco's review of 'Stalker' can be read here; it's a good and insightful piece.

TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: Stalker

Russia. The not-too-distant future. The Zone, an area of land devastated by a meteorite, has yielded unearthly artefacts. The authorities have sealed it off. Armed guards provide sentry duty. Rumour has it that somewhere in The Zone is a place called The Room. Here, it is said, a person's deepest, innermost wish is granted.

The Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovksy) accepts a commission to guide two clients - the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko) - into The Zone, much to the chagrin of his wife (Alisa Freidlich), who reminds him that his forays into The Zone are illegal, have already cost him time in prison and that their daughter, nicknamed Monkey, is a "mutant" because of him. The implication is that a child of a Stalker is "different".

Nonetheless, the Stalker leads the Writer and the Professor into The Zone, narrowly escaping death at the hands of the trigger-happy border guards. Once in, the Stalker insists they follow his instructions to the letter and not deviate from his directions. Despite continual warnings as to the dangers which await them, The Zone seems benign. The Writer eventually begins to question the Stalker's expertise.

As they near The Room, the Stalker offers the cautionary tale of his mentor, who entered The Room, became rich within days and hanged himself a week later. The Professor reveals he is in possession of an explosive device and intends to destroy The Room. The Stalker tries to wrest it from him, but the Writer intercedes. The Professor, though, is unable to go through with it and the three men depart The Zone.

Writing in Sight & Sound, Jan Dawson described ‘Stalker’ as "one of the cinema’s most searingly pessimistic visions".

Fair dues. But ‘Stalker’ is also – certainly in its extended first reel set-piece wherein the Stalker and his clients play cat ‘n’ mouse with the border guards through the dark streets of a ruined township prior to entering The Zone – tense, suspenseful and pacy. Never mind that Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s source novel ‘Roadside Picnic’ is firmly bracketed in the sci-fi genre, Tarkovsky here seems to be channelling film noir. A really perverse strand of thought currently uncoiling in the back of my mind is speculating on an alternative cinematic reality where Tarkovsky made hard-bitten, cynical, Jim Thompson style thrillers … and coming to the conclusion that he’d probably have been bloody good at it.

For all the thrilleramics of this early sequence, though, ‘Stalker’ is definitely a product of Tarkovsky’s post-‘Mirror’ aesthetic, where narrative is all but abandoned. As in the four films that precede it, the external is a pathway to the internal, his characters’ journey through desolate landscapes mirroring their journey towards the deepest, innermost part of themselves.

Perhaps the idea of The Room as an X-ray machine for the psyche – revealing the human condition at the dark point where the id and the ego struggle perpetually – was what drew Tarkovsky to the Strugatskys novel. Certainly, Tarkovsky considered ‘Solaris’ flawed in that it was all too clearly a science fiction film and his aim was to create cinema without genre.

It’s no surprise then, that his take on ‘Roadside Picnic’ is less an adaptation that a stripping away: gone are the overt indicators that The Zone is the product of an alien civilisation (some of the characters in ‘Stalker’ think that it is, but Tarkovsky never defines The Zone’s origins); gone are the ‘effects’ that populate the novel and leave the reader in no doubt that something unearthly is happening (the Stalker continually warns the Writer and the Professor that The Zone "plays tricks" but we see no evidence of this); gone is the book’s denouement where The Room is breached and a better world wished for. Tarkovsky leaves his protagonists sitting outside The Room, then cuts to an ambiguous coda which never entirely establishes whether they entered it or not.

Ambiguity permeates every frame, every scene, every character. Is the Stalker a survivalist/outlaw (in the novel he is) or an idiot savant – a holy fool, even? What exactly are the Writer and the Professor’s motives for seeking The Room ? Sure, the Writer tosses out the old chestnut about inspiration, but a pre-Zone monologue establishes him as a die-hard cynical who has no faith or belief left in anything; his character does not fit this dreamy idea of inspiration as a stand-in for the continual hard work and honing of craftsmanship that writing is actually about. The Professor’s motives are seemingly revealed towards the end, but why does he desist?

Indeed, the big question of ‘Stalker’ is: what are the three of them thinking about as they sit outside The Room, the camera slowly pulling back and stranding them in a landscape of their own uncertainties as a sudden rainfall washes across them?

Paradoxically – given that I found ‘Mirror’ "too insubstantial in its construct and enigmatic in tone" – ‘Stalker’ grips and intrigues me precisely because it’s enigmatic; because it keeps its mysteries and resolutions offscreen; and because its low-key denouement, with a hint of the genuinely otherworldly and its few seconds of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, suggests (as ambiguously and elusively as anything else in this bleakly beautiful film) some small possibility of hope.

Coming attractions / the backseat blogger

I'm taking a bit of a backseat this month to concentrate on preparing material for December's month-long tribute to Sam Peckinpah.

I'll be posting the last few articles in the Tarkovsky retrospective, catching up with a couple of titles from the personal faves list and hosting a handful of guest articles. November might be a thinner month than usual, but I'll try to put at least two new pieces of material on The Agitation of the Mind each week.

Do bare with me. December will be full-on, full-blooded and worth the wait.

It's an early bath for you, Andrei ...

I enjoyed writing yesterday's 'Don't Torture a Duckling' piece; and I've been enjoying reading the other contributions to the Italian horror movie blog-a-thon. And to be honest with you, I don't much fancy seguing into the next two titles in the Tarkovsky retrospective.

So I'm showing Tarkovsky the red card. I'll conclude the retrospective with a mammoth week-long sequence of posts next month. But for now until the end of October (with a quick diversion on the 26th to honour my commitment to This Distracted Globe's Class of 1984 blog-a-thon), it's horror movies all the way, including at least two more gialli. Starting with another dark little number from Lucio Fulci tomorrow ...

Coming attractions / Sam, Dirk, Andrei and the Class of 1984

The Peckinpah poll closed earlier today with ‘Straw Dogs’ just beating ‘The Wild Bunch’ into first place with 14 votes (24%), while Pike Bishop and the Bunch take 13 votes (22%) and happily mow down an army of Mexican revolutionaries while they're at it.

The big surprise was ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ in third place with 13%. For a long time, I was convinced I was in a minority for loving this movie: most people I talked to had never heard of it, others just plain didn’t like it. I remember a screening at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema as part of their now-defunct "Shots in the Dark" festival, where half of the audience responded enthusiastically to Peckinpah’s dark-to-the-point-of-nihilistic humour while the other half sat there in stony silence.

In joint fourth place, ‘Ride the High Country’, ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ garnered 5 votes (8%) apiece. Out where the iron crosses grow, there were 3 votes (5%) for Bloody Sam's only war movie. ‘The Getaway’ made off with 2 votes (3%), while the elegiac ‘Junior Bonner’ and the less-than-elegiac ‘The Killer Elite’ and ‘The Osterman Weekend’ scraped 1 vote (1%) each.

There was no love at all for ‘The Deadly Companions’, ‘Major Dundee’ or ‘Convoy’.

And for a while I was quite impressed that the computer had worked out the percentages for me ... until I realised that the whole thing only adds up to 94%. I'm going to assume the missing 6% is in honour of his acclaimed TV movie ‘Noon Wine’ and move swiftly on.

The Peckinpah tribute gets underway on 1st December with the whole month dedicated to the maverick maestro here on The Agitation of the Mind. Feel free to join in. Swipe one of these banners, share your thoughts on all things Peckinpah and let’s mark the 25th anniversary of his passing on 28th December in fine style.

In the meantime - and celebrating a personality about as different to Sam Peckinpah as you can get - October kicks off with the Third Annual Dirk-Fest. Mid month, the Tarkovsky retrospective considers two very different works by the chuckle-free Russian director, while Sergio Leone takes centre stage on 26th October when I’ll be writing about ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ as part of This Distracted Globe’s "Class of 1984" blog-a-thon.

TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: Mirror

For some reason, when I started out on the Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective, I took to writing italicised plot synopses as preambles to the articles proper. You'll notice there isn't one for 'Mirror'. There's a reason for this: the film isn't about anything.

Well, actually it is. It's about childhood and memory and the intensely personal interplay of the two in Tarkovsky's own life. 'Mirror' was immensely important and meaningful to him. In 'Time Within Time', Kitty Hunter-Blair's translation of his diaries from 1970 - 1986, he repeatedly dwells on the necessity of making it, every reference steeped in the nostalgia of his own past. Even while he's ostensibly busy working on 'Solaris', his thoughts are consumed with making 'Mirror'.

However, for all that I've read 'Time Within Time' and have a slightly-better-than-average working knowledge of Tarkovsky's family history and working life, I must confess that 'Mirror' doesn't mean much at all to me.

Werner Herzog once described the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard as "intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film". Of Tarkovsky himself, the Bavarian maverick had this to say: "[he] made some beautiful films but he is, I fear, too much the darling of the French intellectuals, something I suspect he worked a little bit towards". I'm very much inclined to agree with Herzog on the evidence of 'Mirror'. Every frame of it screams "art film".

As a viewing experience, I find 'Mirror' too insubtantial in its construct and enigmatic in tone - and deliberately so - to engage with it on any level. It never coheres, either narratively (which in itself is no big deal: Tarkovsky was never big on narrative anyway) or in terms of the kind of internal logic which lends, say, David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' a sense of structure and completeness in and of itself even though individual set-pieces may be baffling and the denouement less a conclusion than an ouroboros.

I wonder how much Lynch is influenced by Tarkovsky. In its weirder moments, 'Mirror' puts me in mind of Lynch's erratic genius - particularly Tarkovsky's conjuration of a rural environment in which the commonplace is suddenly disturbed by a burning barn, a chicken killed for the pot becomes a statement on the loss of innocence, and gusts of wind through long grass seem mysterious and portentous. He also seems to have influenced Hideo Nakata: the best scene in the film (a black-and-white dream sequence) conjures an image that suggests Sadaka in 'The Ring' has Russian ancestry.

These are images redolent of bad dreams and proof positive of Tarkovsky's ability to achieve a sense of the dream-like on screen. Elsewhere, though, 'Mirror' is curiously flat, Georgiy Rerberg's cinematography bland in comparison to Vadim Yusov's work on 'Ivan's Childhood', 'Andrei Rublev' and 'Solaris'. It's an irony coloured darker by the compromised circumstances in which Tarkovsky made virtually all of his films, and one I'd rather not dwell on. I want to like 'Mirror', believe me. I want to find in its pastoral reveries an evocation of childhood that is timeless and universal, one that acts as a corollary to the too-soon-ended childhood depicted in his first film. But I'm afraid I find 'Mirror' an artily self-conscious and inscrutable film and the irony remains that Tarkovsky's most personal film - the one closest to his own life - is also his most lifeless.

TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: Solaris

The future. Chris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sojourning at his father (Nikolai Grinko)’s country estate when he is asked to undertake a mission to a space station orbiting the ocean planet Solaris to assess the cosmonauts’ mental state and report on the value, or otherwise, of continuing the project.

Kelvin is visited by Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky), who believes he saw something while flying over the surface of Solaris; however, footage shot from his craft revealed only clouds and he was discredited at subsequent hearings. Kelvin is dubious and Burton departs angrily.

Arriving at the space station, Kelvin finds that crew member Dr Gibarian (Sos Sargsyan) has died; reviewing a tape Gibarian made before his death, the circumstances are revealed as suicide. The remaining crew members Dr Snaut (Juri Jarvet) and Dr Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn) are behaving unusually and Snaut cautions Kelvin not to panic should he witness anything strange.

Kelvin comes to suspect that other people are on board and are being hidden by Snaut and Sartorius. Kelvin soon receives a "visitor" himself – his wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk). Problem is, Hari’s been dead for ten years: she killed herself following a bitter argument with Klein.


If the basic premise of ‘Solaris’ sounds melodramatic – the histrionic ‘Event Horizon’ is basically a fast-and-loose rip-off for the stalk ‘n’ slash generation – its execution is anything but. In Stanislaw Lem’s original novel, the emphasis is on the sheer alien-ness of what the scientists encounter on Solaris and how unprepared they are for it. This was a major theme in Lem’s fiction; he was famously contemptuous of science-fiction’s tendency to depict alien species as humanoid.

Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 adaptation focuses on the relationship between Kelvin and his late wife, relying heavily on flashbacks to document their increasingly fragile relationship.

Tarkovsky, though, turns his version into an aloof, cerebral meditation on family, spirituality and conscience. In other words, whereas Lem externalises (the novel is about mankind’s place in, and response to, the cosmos), Tarkovsky uses the vastness of space and the huge impenetrable vistas of the surface of Solaris itself in order to internalise. Herein lies both the film’s genius and its difficulty.

‘Solaris’ was the first Tarkovsky film I ever saw, back in 1991. It was shown as part of BBC2’s "Moviedrome" season, introduced by Alex Cox. I remember his exhortation not to let the slow pacing put you off, that ‘Solaris’ built to a conclusion that was – I think this is more or less how he put it – "on a conceptual level, better than the ending of ‘2001’."

Now, I’ve always been impressed by ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ – but primarily on an audio-visual level. It looks amazing and Kubrick’s choice of music is inspired. On any deeper level than that … hmmm, not convinced. (I’ve described my issues with ‘2001’ elsewhere on these pages: "I’m still no closer to deciding whether it’s a profound, cerebral, philosophical work of art, or a self-indulgent, egotistical, intellectually hollow con job.") So, with the possibility in mind that I was in for a more satisfying cinematic experience than ‘2001’, I settled down to watch ‘Solaris’.

And was captivated. The snail-like pace became hypnotic. The soundtrack, alternating between J.S. Bach’s Choral Prelude and Eduard Artemyev’s ethereal incidental music, was low-key where Kubrick’s choices were iconic artistic statements in and of themselves. There was something more chilling in Kelvin’s struggle with his own flawed humanity than in Dave Bowman’s conflict with the murderous HAL 9000. And there was that ending. At that stage of my (self-) education in cinema, ‘Solaris’ was a revelation. A science-fiction film where the sci-fi was in hock to intellectualism and not vice versa.

Then I began to discover Tarkovsky’s other works and I’ve experienced a paradigm shift. I still admire the film greatly, but I think that’s the thing: I admire ‘Solaris’ rather than like it. I prefer the immediacy of ‘Ivan’s Childhood’, the visceral intensity of ‘Andrei Rublev’, the poetic resonances of ‘Nostalgia’. ‘Solaris’ – brilliant as it is in many ways – is bloody hard work; as hard as ‘Stalker’ with its bleakly earned small moment of hope at the very end; as hard as ‘The Sacrifice’ with its Bergmanesque spiritual debate.

Tarkovsky’s first draft screenplay set much of the narrative on earth, with only the last third taking place on the space station. I think I’d have been happier watching this version. As well realised as the space station is (it’s typically Soviet: utilitarian, characterless and slightly weathered), it’s a bland backdrop to the dark drama being played out. The scenes on Kelvin’s father’s estate contain moments as achingly poetic as anything Tarkovsky achieved. The contrast, then, is brutally evident when the scene shifts to the space station and the visual beauty of the film drains away, no matter that Tarkovsky tries to retain a sense of aesthetics with occasional flashbacks to Kelvin’s childhood (images of earth, water and fire abound: Tarkovsky summons metaphors for life even as Kelvin soul-searches in the sterile confines of the space station) and reproductions of the old masters on the walls of Snaut’s library.

The other thing that troubles me is admittedly a personal issue. My relationship with my father has been a turbulent one that eventually resulted in estrangement. Conversely, my relationship with my wife has been every bit as loving and intimate as my relationship with my parents wasn’t. I won’t labour the context any further – this blog may be called The Agitation of the Mind, but that’s a still from Herzog under the title, not a psychiatrist’s couch – suffice it to say that this colours my perception of the final scene:

SPOILER ALERT

Sartorius, convinced the ocean dominating the surface of Solaris is a sentient being responsible for creating the "visitors", devises a scheme to transmit the thought patterns of one of the crew members (he "volunteers" Kelvin) to the ocean in an attempt to communicate. The experiment succeeds. The "visitors" disappear. Sartorius reports, however, that islands are starting to appear in the ocean. Kelvin reappears in the woodland surrounding his father’s estate. He approaches the house and peers through a window. He sees his father moving around inside, but something is "off" about the scene. Rain is falling, but the rain is inside the house. Moreover, his father seems impervious to it. Eventually his father comes to the door and Kelvin falls to his knees before him.

The camera pulls back as mist drifts above the house, across the woodland. The estate is revealed to be one of the islands on the surface of Solaris. Solaris has created, from Kelvin’s thought patterns, the thing he wants most in the world.

SPOILERS END

Personally, I'd have thought Kelvin would have more business seeking his wife’s forgiveness than his father’s.

TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: PERSONAL FAVES: Andrei Rublev

Russia, 1400 - 1424. Andrei Rublev (Anatolyn Solonitsyn), Kirill (Ivan Lapikov) and Daniel (Nikolai Grinko) journey from their monastery to Moscow. Sheltering from a storm, they encounter a jester who mocks the monarchy and the church. They witness his arrest and brutal treatment.

Kirill, jealous of Andrei's talent and desperate to make a name for himself, seeks out renowned artist Theophanes the Greek (Nikolai Sergeyev). Theophanes offers Kirill an apprenticeship. Kirill accepts but stipulates that Theophanes must send word to the monastery of his appointment. His attempt at one-upmanship is foiled when the messenger arrives and it is Andrei who is summoned by Theophanes. Kirill leaves the monastery in disgust, accusing his brothers of being more at one with material rewards than with God.

En route to Vladimir, where he is to paint a cathedral. Andrei comes across a pagan celebration. He is troubled by the sight of a naked woman. Later, struggling to paint a fresco of the Last Judgement, Andrei is ridden with self-doubt. Pressure is brought to bear, with a complaint against him being carried to the nobleman funding the project. A mentally deficient peasant woman Durochka (Irma Rausch) - a "holy fool" as the locals deem her - inspires Andrei to complete the work, but as a celebratory and not an apocalyptic scene.

The nobleman's brother, in cahoots with the Tartars, conspires in an attack. Townsfolk shelter inside the cathedral as the Tartars lay waste. The interior of the cathedral is gutted. Andrei intercedes on an attempted sexual assault against Durochka, killing her attacker. Returning to the monastery, Durochka with him, Andrei atones for the killing by taking a vow of silence. Kirill reappears, asking for shelter and forgiveness. Tartars pass by the monastery and Durochka leaves with them. Daniel pleads with Andrei not to forsake his talent and to accept a commission.

Later in life, Andrei is present at the casting of a great bell. The bell-maker is a youth, Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev), who has convinced his patrons that his father passed onto him the secrets of the bell-maker's art before he died. As word draws to completion, the cost having spiralled, Boriska nervously wonders what will happen if the bell doesn't ring. Finally, after the bell has rung beautifully, he collapses in a flood of tears and confesses to Andrei that his father had never actually divulged the art to him. Breaking his vow of silence, Andrei comforts him saying, "We'll travel together. You will cast bells and I'll paint icons."

Tarkovsky and co-writer Andrei Konchalovsky were considering 'Andrei Rublev' even while they were still working on 'Ivan's Childhood' in 1961. Cameras didn't roll on 'Andrei Rublev' until 1965. Two years alone were spent working on the script; as much time again in getting state approval. The original budget was cut by over a third, then ballooned again when adverse weather conditions during location shooting added months to the schedule.

Filming completed in 1966. Tarkovsky's original cut was 205 minutes. 'Andrei Rublev' didn't get an official release in Russia until 1971, by which time it had been shown out of competition at Cannes (in 1969) winning the FIPRESCI prize. So why the delay? The authorities didn't like the brutally realistic depiction of violence in the clashes between the Grand Princes and the Tartars, including scenes of cruelty to animals (some staged, some not). They didn't like the extended running time. And when Tarkovsky stubbornly campaigned against their intended reduction of the length and thematic complexity of his work, they realised that 'Andrei Rublev', for all its period trappings, was autobiographical/metaphorical (it's the story of a spiritual man trying to create art while comprised by the social and political framework of the times) and they didn't like that either.

'Andrei Rublev' was eventually whittled down to 186 minutes. Overseas distributors reduced it further to 140 minutes effectively rendering incoherent a film that is oblique and fragmentary even in its fullest incarnation. A Russian TV screening in 1973 clocked in at 101 minutes, which must have been like watching an edit of 'Shoah' that runs for two and half minutes.

Anyone who has sat through a screening of 'Solaris' only to have the acronym WTF float through their head, will find 'Andrei Rublev' baffling. I've seen it about four times and I love it wholeheartedly - even though its theological underpinnings mean nothing to me as an aestheist - but it's a fucker of a difficult film to engage with. Just writing the 300 words of synopsis which open this review (a palimpsest, by the way, leaving out a cluster of incidents, flashbacks and a wildly metaphorical prologue that is never referenced or revisited for the remaining three hours) required some concentrated surfing of the net for learned articles deconstructing the film.

One of the best pieces I came across was this one, on Filmwell, which describes 'Andrei Rublev' as "the Mount Everest of spiritual film". Kudos to reviewer Ron Reed for perceptively and honestly pointing out that "you can watch for an hour, you might even make it all the way to the end, without being entirely sure which of the grim Russian monks is the title character. They look all alike, and names are really spoken". Without a map of Russia to hand, you'll probably also be baffled by the geography and what seems like an endless series of peregrinations. So transient are Andrei and co. that you could be forgiven for thinking that the monastery is less their sanctuary and place in the world than a God-owned time-share at which they take the occasional break.

A degree-level understanding of 15th century Russian history might help, as well.

Personally, I know little of Russian history beyond reading Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy when I was in my late teens and laboured under the misapprehension that if it didn't depress the hell out of you it wasn't literature. As I've mentioned already, the theology means as much to me as a bottle of 25-year-old single malt Scotch to a teetotaler. Most of the Tarkovsky's intellectual concerns sail over my head like the balloon at the start of the film.

And yet 'Andrei Rublev' has long been a personal fave. Why? Because of the immensity of it. The film is as much an epic as anything by David Lean, but one forged by a fiery and visceral intelligence - an unflinching depiction of the tortured soul of an artist, an account of a man of faith struggling to produce art in the service of that faith while much of the world around him is violent and filthy and Godless. As such, it is a film of terrible and unforgettable beauty.

The breathtaking transition at the end - from Andrei breaking his vow of silence to comfort the bell-maker, to an astonishing seven-minute sequence in which Tarkovsky's camera explores Rublev's actual canvasses with almost tactile intimacy - is proof positive of the film's greatness: 'Andrei Rublev' is cinema's answer to the novel or the symphony; it is cinema as art.

TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: Ivan's Childhood

World War II. 12-year-old Ivan (Nikolai Burleyayev) is part of a front-line campaign, undertaking missions behind enemy lines to determine enemy positions, troop movements, etc. Cut off from his commanding officer Colonel Katasonych (Stepan Krylov), Ivan makes his way to a different command post and reports in to Lieutenant Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov).

Although Galtsev disbelieves the boy, he contacts Katasonych. The Colonel sends Captain Kholin (Valentin Zubkov) to bring Ivan back to HQ. Ivan learns that his function as an operative has become too dangerous and he’s being sent to military school. This isn’t good enough for Ivan, whose parents were killed by the Nazis, and even when he’s found after attempting to run away, he determines to undertake one last, risky mission.


Presaging the compromised circumstances that would define Tarkovsky’s career in cinema, his work on ‘Ivan’s Childhood’ was something of a rescue operation. Begun by director Eduard Abalov, Russian film studio Mosfilm declared his efforts unusable and elected to "wash" the film stock rather than complete the project, even though half the footage had been shot and half the budget spent.

Tarkovsky, having graduated film school with his acclaimed short ‘The Steamroller and the Violin’, was offered ‘Ivan’s Childhood’ under the condition that he only had the remaining half of the budget to play with: Mosfilm weren’t prepared to throw any more at it.


Despite the odds it was an immediate critical success, winning the Gold Lion at 1962’s Venice Film Festival and the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Festival the same year. Fellow director Ingmar Bergman declared, "I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where [Tarkovsky] was moving freely and fully at ease", while philosopher and intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre hailed it one of the most beautiful works of film art he had ever seen.

‘Ivan’s Childhood’ is Tarkovsky’s shortest film but already in place are the long takes, periods of stillness and preoccupation with extended shots of landscapes, the sometimes glacial pace of Tarkovsky’s filming perfectly attuned to the ravaged textures of the landscapes themselves.

"Sculpting in time" is how Tarkovsky described his approach to filmmaking: his next film, ‘Andrei Rublev’ would be his first fully mature expression of this technique. But there are undeniable glimpses here: Ivan returning from a mission, slowly wading through a flooded forest, the waters almost silvery; Kholin following nursing assistant Masha (Valentina Malyavina) through the woods as he tries to ingratiate himself into her affections; Galtsev and Kholin seeing Ivan off on his final mission; and most profoundly – in a three-minute sequence composed of just two shots – the guilt-ridden tension between Galtsev and Kholin fuelled by their abandonment of Ivan to his fate and their sexual rivalry over Masha.

Also present is Tarkovsky’s ability – perhaps unmatched anywhere in cinema – to create a dream-like atmosphere, to capture the heightened realism of those disconnected but weirdly compelling moments between sleeping and waking. The opening sequence is a brilliant example, an idyllic conjuration of a rural childhood taking on an ever-stranger timbre until Ivan jolts awake to the sound of artillery fire. More jarring – and the film’s only flaw: Tarkovsky’s use of imagery in negative seems as clumsy as it is phoney – is the dream/memory of a rain-lashed ride on top of a truck piled high with apples, which culminates in a disorientating panning shot, spilled fruit and horses on a beach.

Which brings us back to landscapes. Tarkovsky excelled at using the external in order to internalise (most audaciously in ‘Solaris’). Here the scarred but still beautiful landscapes modulate into the landscapes of Ivan’s mind. The forests shattered by war, the tracts of earth sectioned off into trenches or pocked by craters, are hauntingly poetic reminders of the lives, the families and the innocence destroyed by the same.

Coming attractions / Subtitles, Soviets and Sam Peckinpah

July's Shots on the Blog crime season was fun, even though I found myself flagging a little towards the end.

I've noticed a couple of trends emerging in my articles for the blog lately, trends that could prove disturbing if they remain unchecked: my viewing choices are becoming increasingly mainstream; and my articles are getting longer. I used to be able to discuss a film quite happily in 500 - 600 words. Virtually everything I write now puts its head down, paws the ground, emits a snort or a grunt then goes charging, bull-like, past the 1,000 word mark.

This could mean one of two things: my writing's getting more in-depth, or I'm waffling. I'll leave that for you to decide, ladies and gentlemen.

But in case it's the latter, I'm engaging in a damage limitation exercise. I'm paring things back a little for August: slightly fewer - but regular - reviews; shorter and - hopefully - more readable articles. And I'm taking a break from the mainstream. August will be dedicated to foreign movies. I'm thinking Herzog, I'm thinking Almodovar, I'm thinking Miyazaki. I'm thinking about a really long movie by Bela Tarr, and I'm already starting to wonder how a seven-hour running time and a brevity of article length can possibly reconcile.

Tomorrow, I'm kicking off a retrospective of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's small but massively important canon of films - just seven features, most of them made under the most appalling and dictatorial conditions. I'll be considering two a month, with the intention of completing the project in November with his swansong 'The Sacrifice' and Michal Leszczylowski's documentary 'Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky', chronicling the making of same.

And looking ahead beyond that, 28 December marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sam Peckinpah's death. I'm marking the occasion by dedicating the entire month to his life, work and legacy. Contributions, links, resources and information would be most welcome. If you want to join in, don't hesitate: swipe one of the banners below, bung it on your blog and help celebrate a red Christmas with Bloody Sam.