(no subject)

[proximoception]

Tarkovsky's attempts to anchor in real earth and real time I find entirely admirable, but not always successful - but where you're unable to immerse yourself on one viewing you might be on another. It's just quite risky. The long takes can push you right out of the viewing experience, or pull you too far in in hypnotized disregard of where the story went. For me Andrei Rublev was a fantastic experience, Solaris an interesting ordeal, but I feel like either could produce either watched some other year.

But when it works! The vertical shot of everything underwater had me in tears. Seemed just the best thing that could have happened.

His problem, one assumes, was finding subject matter where audiences would understand the value added by being brought back to the second-by-second, inch-by-inch existence we usually expect movies to free us from. (Insert dasein/design pun here.)

This project fits him perfectly. That first terrifying approach to the building was all of Lost at once, more tan that was the Last Tycoon nickel scene, more even than that was how I played for years as a child. Furtive pruposeful movements beside a field, some weeds, a stretch of fence, a decaying brick, all of this made your world precisely because it hadn't made another. You got to place it, it was open to your modifications. And you were grateful to it - not everything permits that sort of nothing to operate on. The specifics mattered even though / precisely because they weren't use- or recognition-stamped. They stood in for the continuities of the final world, were film rather than scenes.

A friend of mine had a backyard that opened somehow (Crowley's Somehow) into a secret place with a stream in between a garage's back wall and a tree-and-fence barrier. I think the "stream" may have been a flooded ditch, in adult parlance, and given the dimensions of lots in the neighborhood it all must have been a couple hards by a couple yards. But it felt cut off from everything, to the extent that I remember not understanding at the time precisely how I'd gotten there from my friend's yard. The friend had shown it to me but never much cared about it. I thought he was the luckiest human alive. There was nothing to do there but make sounds and stories, though of course make-believe of that sort has more in common with dreams than with stories: you forget or neglect the beginning, deviate further and further from any kind of end until one drops like an anvil. You're done because you're hungry, or some other rock brushed your bubble.

As a good hater of "belief in belief" - the sin of pride of those atheists who don't expect others to be capable of the sort of reasoning that led them clear of religion - I couldn't have been more ambivalent when it was suddenly clear that this rule-heavy odyssey of pretending was associated with that other kind of faith. But just as Tarkovsky's filming proclivities fit travel in the Zone, loco-imaginative child games do kind of fit religion. A time-honored avenue of skeptical invective against believers that I've always avoided, which may have been why it shocked me so - I just don't think of faith that way. For me it really did make it suddenly harder to condemn, as did the fact that, given when, where, among whom it was made, the issue here isn't ridicule but proscription.

Suppose there's a thing to it other than what it thinks is there, something sideways from it, finally natural rather than beyond nature, but with which communication (more in the sense of between wings of a house than words between heads) is enabled only by this exagerration of categorical gaps. As though we moved in a thick fog through which only a scream could come across as speech. The Zone dog that follows him home isn't what he's there for, but it's what he gets (meaningful, then, that the scientist too has a number of dogs, can't take another when it's offered?). That Marvellian dissolution into green - could he have managed it without the promise of nearby gold? One of the most beautiful things was the Writer and Professor being sucked in despite themselves, their plans and antipathies and ennui and whatever else. They want this house to be more than a house. (Disturbing realization that one of my favorite movies, eXistenZ, may owe a hell of a lot here).

As any house is more than a house. Whatever hoops you need to jump through to permit yourself to love this self, these others, this life, this room you immediately should. Better the ones you don't trip over, the ones not lined with razors, not on fire.

The matter of fact setting and nature of the miracles the girl performed were also perfect, along with being perfectly surprising. But why didn't she seem happy? I am not a Soviet Russian, and I know I sometimes mess up getting what faces mean, don't mean in (e.g.) French movies, Japanese ones. Was the point that she wasn't excited - to her it was no miracle at all, just how she and the world do things? Or were we to take this as a final ambiguity, given the earlier talk about blowing up the Zone so the wrong people don't access its power (or power to make us think there is a power, just as real and frightening)?

Comments

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

i find plusses and minuses to analyzing the extratextual in regards to the text, but:

as lapsed modernist mentioned in wolodymyr's post, and as i'd learned from the bonus features, many members of the crew including tarkovsky himself contracted cancer as a result of this film shoot. dying to create a work of art, and this particular work in which it's postulated the meaning of life is to create art, seems worthy of discussion. is a work of art truly worth dying for? i would agree with the writer -- not if it's not going to be read/seen by others one hundred years from now. but if one feels certain that it might be, perhaps.

i don't see that anyone's mentioned this yet, but tarkovsky filmed the movie twice -- the first time the film stock 'could not be developed' either due to sabotage or just unfortunate circumstances. the second movie is said by some to not resemble the first at all, by others to be quite similar. imagine how devastating it would have been (and reportedly was) to lose one's work after such a tremendous amount of time and money and effort. and the effort it would take to try and replicate one's best work from the prior attempt.

and i'm not going to like the film nearly so well as some of you have -- it's not for me (in the best sense of the classic penny arcade <a=href"http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24">strip). tarkovsky's own take on that (from the wiki): "on being told that it should be faster and more dynamic, tarkovsky replied: 'the film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.' the goskino representative then explained that he was trying to give the point of view of the audience. tarkovsky supposedly retorted: 'i am only interested in the views of two people: one is called bresson and one called bergman.'"

and that's terrific, and every artist should be free to pick his audience, but as narrow as his intended audience was, i don't fall into it.