And their eyes were opened

Are you awake?

Tarkovsky Tuesday

Life, Life

By Arseny Tarkovsky

 

1

I don't believe in omens or fear
Forebodings. I flee from neither slander
Nor from poison. Death does not exist.
Everyone's immortal. Everything is too.
No point in fearing death at seventeen,
Or seventy. There's only here and now, and light;
Neither death, nor darkness, exists.
We're all already on the seashore;
I'm one of those who'll be hauling in the nets
When a shoal of immortality swims by.


2

If you live in a house - the house will not fall.
I'll summon any of the centuries,
Then enter one and build a house in it.
That's why your children and your wives
Sit with me at one table, -
The same for ancestor and grandson:
The future is being accomplished now,
If I raise my hand a little,
All five beams of light will stay with you.
Each day I used my collar bones
For shoring up the past, as though with timber,
I measured time with geodetic chains
And marched across it, as though it were the Urals.


3

I tailored the age to fit me.
We walked to the south, raising dust above the steppe;
The tall weeds fumed; the grasshopper danced,
Touching its antenna to the horse-shoes - and it prophesied,
Threatening me with destruction, like a monk.
I strapped my fate to the saddle;
And even now, in these coming times,
I stand up in the stirrups like a child.

I'm satisfied with deathlessness,
For my blood to flow from age to age.
Yet for a corner whose warmth I could rely on
I'd willingly have given all my life,
Whenever her flying needle
Tugged me, like a thread, around the globe.

----------

Arseny Tarkovsky was Andrei Tarkovsky's father. Some more of his poems can be found here.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

A "childhood" sequence from Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975) (which in a Tarkovsky film frequently also means a "mother" sequence in some ultimate sense):

Tarkovsky Tuesday

A painting and a drawing that Andrei Tarkovsky did in his younger days:

Sister, by Andrei Tarkovsky (age 15)

War, by Andrei Tarkovsky (age 11)

Found here

Tarkovsky Tuesday

“Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Tarkovsky Tuesday

Tarkovsky Tuesday

“It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience.” --Andrei Tarkovsky


“When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part. What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?” --Andrei Tarkovsky

“Man has, since the Enlightenment, dealt with things he should have ignored.” --Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky Tuesday

5B and 2H

Tarkovsky Tuesday

There's this part in Tarkovsky's Mirror that is in none of the videos posted here (see updates). I couldn't find this particular part on youtube. I've seen Mirror several times, and one time when I watched it this part came up, sort of at the end of a somewhat lengthy tracking sequence; I wasn't expecting it, since the way the film is put together you cannot really remember the sequencing of everything, but the image wasn't "new" to me, since I had watched the film a number of times before.

Yet, unexpectedly, without any sort of forewarning or feelings or build up of any kind, upon seeing this image I suddenly choked and burst into tears.

I didn't know why, and I still do not know why. It was an image of the eternal.





Stupid Mosfilm blocking. Just go to youtube if you want to watch any of it.

UPDATE: Oh wait, vimeo has the entire film you can watch:


Зеркало. Тарковский. from Media Club Beta on Vimeo.


UPDATE 2: Oh, never mind, it has no sub-titles.

UPDATE 3: Anyways, the image I was writing about is at the end of the tracking sequence at 1:37:41 to 1:38:30, looking out the window.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

 Domenico near the end of Nostalghia

Tarkovsky Tuesday

Roger always had a better approach than Gene (God rest Gene's soul).

Tarkovsky Tuesday

End sequence from Stalker.



How I love your eyes, my friend,
With their radiant play of fire,
When you lift them fleetingly
And like lightning in the skies
Your gaze sweeps swiftly round.

But there is charm more powerful still
In eyes downward cast
For the moment of a passionate kiss,
When through lowered eyelids glows
The sombre, dull flame of desire.


Fyodor Tyuchev, 1803 - 1873
(Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair)

That is the poem which the girl (the daughter of the title character) recites in the above clip that doesn't have the English subtitles.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

The Pacific Cinematheque (pronounced cinemateck) in Vancouver has launched its screenings of most of Tarkovsky's films. I saw Stalker there a while back, which was my first time seeing it on a theater screen, and it was like seeing it for the first time.

Here is the Cinemateck's synopsis/official blurb for its Tarkovsky screenings:

"The seven features “sculpted in time” by Russian master and mystic Andrei Tarkovsky in a career cut short by lung cancer in 1986 (Tarkovsky was 54) are among the most influential, acclaimed, audacious, and awe-inspiring film works to emerge from postwar Europe. Meditative, metaphysical, uncommonly lyrical, remarkably textured, and incomparably visual, Tarkovsky’s is a cinema of moral and spiritual questing, of powerful apocalyptic poetry, of tour-de-force long takes and tracking shots, of expressive monochrome and muted colour, of unforgettable images and dreamlike landscapes. Steeped in Eastern Orthodox mysticism, abounding in elemental symbolism, sometimes venturing forth into hauntingly enigmatic science fiction, Tarkovsky’s films conjure up a hermetic, hallucinatory world that often speaks, forcefully, resonantly, mysteriously, more directly to the subconscious than to the rational mind. The result is cinema of the rarest order: transcendent, transfixing and transformative, rigorous and redemptive, utterly singular..."

I almost want to backhand the person who wrote that gobbling piece of garbage - three times over. "Master and mystic", "powerful apocalyptic poetry", "tour-de-force long takes", "Eastern Orthodox mysticism" (gotta love that one), "hermetic, hallucinatory world"...the whole thing; the higher it attempts praise, the more wrong and perverse it goes.

It makes me think of this other sort of slobbering swine-talk from Robert Johnson (a.k.a., "a spiritual elder") that I recently read, as quoted by Heather King in her comment box:

"The Catholic Mass is a masterpiece of balancing our cultural life. If one has the courage to see, the Mass is full of the darkest things: there is incest, betrayal, rejection, torture, death—and worse. All this leads to revelation but not until the dark side has been portrayed as vividly as possible. If one went to Mass in high consciousness one would tremble at the awfulness of it—and be redeemed by its balancing effect…One ought to pale with terror at the Mass."

One ought to pale with terror at the thought of unfathomably insulting Christ through one's own slobbering swine-talk. You know, like those who slobber all over themselves about the "eroticism" of the poetry of St. John of the Cross.

But anyways, the Pacific quote reminded me most of all of something Tarkovsky himself said about the very same thing:

"I have to admit that even when professional critics praised my work I was often left unsatisfied by their ideas and comments--at least, I quite often had the feeling that these critics were either indifferent to my work or else not competent to criticise: so often they would use well-worn phrases taken from current cinema journalese instead of talking about the film's direct, intimate effect on the audience."

Tarkovsky Tuesday

Tarkovsky Tuesday

"Some critics are terribly anxious to see a filmic spectacle shown simultaneously on several--even on six--screens. But the movement of the film frame has its own nature, which is not that of the musical note; 'polyscreen' cinema should be compared not with a chord, or harmony, or polyphony, but rather with the sound produced by several orchestras playing different pieces of music at the same time.

The only result would be chaos, the laws of perception would be broken, and the author of the polyscreen film would inevitably be faced with the task of somehow reducing simultaneity to sequence, in other words of thinking up for each instance an elaborate system of conventions. And it would be rather like putting one's right arm all the way round one's left ear in order to touch the right nostril with the right hand. Is it not better to accept, once and for all, the simple and binding condition of cinema as a succession of visuals, and to work from that starting-point? A person is quite simply not capable of watching several actions at once; it is beyond his psychophysiology."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time


I think those words could be applied, in a way, to modern life.






Sequence from Solaris

Tarkovsky Tuesday

Sequence from Nostalghia.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

"It was no accident that at the beginning of this chapter I applied the word 'capital' to the responsibility borne by the cinema author. By pointing up the idea like that -- even if the result is an exaggeration -- I wanted to emphasise the fact that the most convincing of the arts demands a special responsibility on the part of those who work in it: the methods by which cinema affects audiences can be used far more easily and rapidly for their moral decomposition, for the destruction of their spiritual defences, than the means of the old, traditional art forms. Actually providing spiritual weapons, of course, and directing people towards good, must always be difficult...

The director's task is to recreate life: its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of truth he has seen -- even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable..."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Tarkovsky Tuesday

"The cinema image, then, is basically observation of life's facts within time, organised according to the pattern of life itself, and observing its time laws. Observations are selective: we leave on film only what is justified as integral to the image. Not that the cinematic image can be divided and segmented against its time-nature, current time cannot be removed from it. The image becomes authentically cinematic when (amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time lives within it, even within each separate frame.

No 'dead' object - table, chair, glass - taken in a frame in isolation from everything else, can be presented as it were outside passing time, as if from the point of view of an absence of time.

You only have to by-pass this condition to make it possible to take over any number of properties from one of the neighbour arts. And with their help you can indeed make very effective films; only from the point of view of cinematic form these will be incompatible with the true development of the nature, essence and potential of cinema.

No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time. I therefore find particularly irritating the pretensions of modern 'poetic cinema', which involves breaking off contact with fact and with time realism, and makes for preciousness and affectation."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Tarkovsky Tuesday

"Who has not written about Raphael and his Sistine Madonna? The idea of man, who had attained at last his own personality in flesh and blood, who had discovered the world and God in himself and around him after centuries of worshipping the medieval Lord, on whom his gaze had been fixed so steadily as to sap his moral strength -- all of this is said to have found its perfect, coherent and ultimate embodiment in that canvas by the genius of Urbino. In a way, perhaps, it has. For the Virgin Mary, in the artist's representation is an ordinary citizen, whose psychological state as reflected in the canvas has its foundation in real life: she is fearful of the fate of her son, given for people in sacrifice. Even though it is in the name of their salvation, he himself is being surrendered in the fight against the temptation to defend him from them.

All of this is indeed vividly written into the picture -- from my point of view, too vividly, for the artist's thought is there for the reading: all too unambiguous and well-defined. One is irritated by the painter's sickly allegorical tendentiousness hanging over the form and overshadowing all the purely painterly qualities of the picture. The artist has concentrated his will on clarity of thought, on the intellectual concept of his work, and paid the price: the painting is flabby and insipid."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time