Andrei Tarkovsky: POO

I like the scene in Andrei Rublev where they make the bell.

Pashmina OTM, and to follow on from him and flesh out my answer -- the reason I prefer Stalker is how expertly he creates the world of 'the zone' without resorting to any kind of cheap special effects, relying instead on more subtle effects of lighting and color to create that sense of foreboding. The shots of the undulating grass, the close-ups of the water with the submerged industrial detritus, the characters' physical disorientation and circular travels while in the zone, the encounter with the telephone -- all add up to one of the more eerie and unsettling films where nothing really overtly *scary* ever happens.

sokurov's whispering pages is a fascinating spinoff of the mise en scene of stalker, but NOT a film for all tastes

A guy on this Antonioni mailing-list I am on detailed how, on a recent trip to London, he made a point to visit the park from Blow Up (photographer sees Redgrave/dead guy etc.) He said it was really remote and desolate, but he still felt the thrill of recognition while there.

An anonymous young man wanders through a dreamlike, decaying, 19th century urban labyrinth; he has a series of encounters, like fragments from some long-obliterated narrative (the incidents are in fact derived from Crime and Punishment and Gogol). In the film's most memorable sequence, he looks on as a series of people inexplicably launch themselves into a mysterious, bottomless abyss--it could almost be an image of Sokurov's own brand of cinematic black hole.

Charged with supernatural and psychic suggestiveness, Whispering Pages' narrative doesn't so much move as insinuate, accompanied by the haunting strains of Mahler's "Kindertotenmusik" and a faint cacophony of distant voices and sounds on the soundtrack. In long takes Sokurov's camera creeps insidiously through this timeless, spectral underworld, more attentive to atmosphere and texture than action. The sparse dialogue scenes might as well be the fill between the real action--Sokurov's uncanny extended transitions. Employing a vocabulary of mournful pans, slow-as-molasses dissolves, radically desaturated color, degraded, murky textures, speed shifts within shots, and warped perspectives and compositions care of a custom-built anamorphic lens, Sokurov takes the cinematic atavism he shares with Guy Maddin and the Brothers Quay to new extremes of dreamlike suspension. This formal archaism conspires with the trancelike acting, and the absurd gravity of the action to produce a genuinely mysterious, mesmerizing effect. Mainly filmed in a disused St. Petersburg factory, Sokurov's masterly film is an Industrial Gothic epitaph for a civilization in the throes of slow death.

er, that's "kindertotenlieder," but anyway

http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/antonioni/

xpost

i don't think i'd actually look forward to a new antonioni movie, but the short that played twice at the landmark century ("the gaze of michelangelo") was supposedly pretty interesting

It should be.

Anyway, Tarkovsky.. Nostalghia. Doesn't make sense, but I love it. I like that the woman just gets fed up and disappears from the film. Also, I am kind of disturbed yet fascinated by the fact that there's a reference (almost the same room, same bed) in Takashi Miike's Audition to this film. I don't know what to make of it. A very close second for me would be Andrei Rublev.

but yeah after that the bell chapter of rublev is killer.

re: tarkovksy refs, loved the scene in uzak where the guy was flicking between stalker and porn!

wow, really? it struck me as a poor 'cover' of tarkovsky's original, with anything that would confuse americans removed. but maybe i'll re-read the book and watch it again.

"stalker" is my favorite. i was half-awake when i started watching it, which seemed to help me pay attention, oddly. dream logic!

i thought it was brilliantly filmed and concise. 90 minutes happens to be the perfect
length for most stories, imho.

it was definitely not as (willfully) obscure as the original. but who cares? i'm all
for more clarity where possible. leave it to umberto eco adaptations or misbegotten
thomas pynchon television pilots to leave people with brains agape,

and i've never seen a movie that justified four hours running time (re: the original).

http://www.ruscico.com/eng/films/105

Now is this the only current version available, or is there a Stateside version?

http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/

http://dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare5/andreirublev.htm

http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/DVD_Recommendations.html

Nostalgia for the scene when he's trying to walk across the bottom of the swimming pool again and again.

Mirror for the mother washing hair dream sequence.

Didn't like The Sacrifice much.

Makes no difference unless you have a 20 year old TV - the blu ray is 1080p / 24p which any blu ray player can output as PAL or NTSC or (more likely) send to the TV as 24p for display at 24fps, if it's a recent or higher end TV.
I'm not sure if it's zone B tho - in the US that would require a multi region bluray player.

http://www.openculture.com/2010/07/tarkovksy.html?fbclid=IwAR0Q6zqfyO9fW1IHqTtNnOXHV-eoaasZ_CCZ0FfNiee3Mjm0UNh1Pb28E2E

Stalker, Solaris, The Mirror & Andrei Rublev being streamed for free by Mosfilm on youtube.

https://i.redd.it/qu6hhxwnqxa31.jpg

shit, I'm getting video not available.

vpn?

that's something i don't have, if it's not a massive derail which is a good one pls?

That openculture link was first posted on this thread nine years ago when it first went up, btw.

i am no more authoritative than google. if you use opera as a browser it has one built in you can turn on.

love to see andrei dance

opera sounds a good option

xp

lol .. well I'm there for those that missed it! just started reading Last Witnesses so might give Ivan's Childhood another whirl.

yep, works a treat with Opera.

probably the wrong thread for this, but I can't even get the first few pages of Last Witnesses out of my head. It's someone who was a young girl during the invasion talking about her mother's corpse being hastily chucked under some sand before she get's onto a cart loaded with other war orphans.

Looks like the version of Andrei Rublev on youtube is the cut version, which omits the unpleasant killing of a horse (which was carried out for real in the shoot). The UK DVD also omits this due to UK censorship laws. I believe the US DVD is uncut.

Oh, it is

I think the film stands up fine without that horrible scene, so can't argue with that bit of censorship.

I'm sure that's in the BFI version, maybe I have an earlier release or something. Anyway it's a distracting scene (you start wondering if it's as real as it looks and then you're out of the world of the film), so good riddance to it.

another thing is the bit in Ivan's Childhood showing real footage of Goebbels' dead kids is something I can understand in the context of the time, but there is no question that it is absolutely gratuitous and vile as well to say the least.

Good piece:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/15/the-drenching-richness-of-andrei-tarkovsky

As far as the issue of misogyny is concerned – the biggest sticking point in my appreciation of his work – I remember flipping through an English-language volume of Interviews that features a combative encounter with Irena Brežná, who takes him to task in very direct terms. At one point, he shifts the blame from men to 'the Lord', which is such a characteristically patriarchal gesture that I couldn't help but laugh at Ross trying to wrest Tarkovsky away from the clutches of the reactionary, imperialist Russian Orthodox forces that view him as their champion. Yes, Tarkovsky was akin to Dostoevsky in that his unflagging commitment to art attenuated the most backward-looking of his political stances, but his films so clearly aspire towards theological transcendence that his self-described agnosticism is hardly the automatic saving grace Ross makes it out to be.

Anyway, Tarkovsky has left an indelible mark on me, and there is no cinematic oeuvre I value more, but I don't know if I could still subject myself to, say, the bits of Nostalghia where the Italian translator's 'hysterical' unhappiness is revealed to stem from her refusal to be a God-fearing housewife and mother. The Mirror is perhaps the only film of his that treats its female characters with genuine respect yet the mother as (false) exception to one's shameless sexism is a classic trope in and of itself. I also think Ross sells Solaris a bit short: the 'return of the repressed' embodied by the living ghost of Natalya Bondarchuk points towards a kind of self-subversive guilt on the male protagonist's part.

I really liked that Alex Ross piece, wouldn't mind more film writing from him.

Mirror gets Criterioned.

https://www.criterion.com/films/28894-mirror

Saw something about fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of Solaris.

I'll have to drive aimlessly on the freeway for 50 minutes in commemoration.

I’m going to stare at some algae drifting in my pond for this afternoon

gonna go see solaris tomorrow at the IFC

Ah fuuuuuuuuck really? Is it on widescreen (SovScope!)

https://www.ifccenter.com/films/solaris/

never saw it before! or the remake for that matter. i hear soylent green is people.

Mods!

Anyone else read the book review/profile of Stanisław Lem in a recent New Yorker? Interesting life.

I want to, before I die, see both Solaris (the original) and Andrei Rublev on a widescreen. From what I have read they were both filmed in 180 mm.

xp That Lem profile was fascinating. I've only read his Futurological Congress and a few short stories (have only seen the movie of Solaris), but I've been meaning to dig deeper. Lots of science fiction gets called mind-bending, but no other book has bent my mind or made me laugh as hard as The Futurological Congress

i read the lem profile as well, promptly bought a book that is now somewhere in the middle of the pile

Tarkovsky. Dancing. pic.twitter.com/UTckA4qLFi

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