Once, film critic Anton Dolin (known in the Russian Federation as a foreign agent) came to my page on a banned social network and literally said: “I was the one who opened Tarkovsky’s films to the Russian audience.”
Everything was mixed up in the Oblonskys’ house – people, horses, letters, thoughts, film critic Dolin, glare in murky waters. However, in Tarkovsky’s films this situation is mixed.
Tarkovsky was always known and loved by my family since I was little. I remember very well the first impressions of the last shoot of the movie Solaris – I was frozen looking at the receding house with the torrential rain, the human figures, the island, the ocean. I was very young, about 9-10 years old, I watched late at night while everyone was asleep. It was a big shock for me. Then I will watch “Andrei Rublev”, “Stalker”, “Ivan’s Childhood” and everything else, but more than once, according to the script of the great Strugatskys.
A lot has been said about Tarkovsky, and mostly nonsense. That’s what inspired me to write this column. I recently read somewhere in the comments: “I love mysticism, deviations from reality,” a woman said in a discussion about the painting “The Mirror”.
I wanted to explain.
There is no mysticism in “The Mirror”, as in other films by Andrei Arsenievich. Film language has metaphysical transitions. There are innovative directing techniques built on archetypes. A technique that Tarkovsky would develop throughout his filmography, water scenes are more of a falling asleep technique. An attempt to blur the line between reality and fantasy.
In the literature of Magrealism (mystical realism), if in Marquez, Borges or Cortazar the metaphor leads to the unreal, to magic, to the deformation of the material world, then in Tarkovsky it leads to a dream. In the world of dreams and ideas.
Tarkovsky’s worlds are built in the head, in the consciousness, whatever the landscape. This is what makes any imitation of Tarkovsky absolutely pointless. Shooting “like Tarkovsky” is simply impossible. One of today’s fashionable festival directors is very fond of borrowing techniques from Andrei Arsenievich, trying to copy the plans. It looks funny.
If you frame a pond, moss, and a tree for three minutes, it won’t be a miracle. The audience will not experience something approximately similar to the emotion it encompasses, when, for example, in the finale of “Andrey Rublev”, hearing the phrase “Well, let’s go – I draw icons, you ring the bells.” In my memory, not a single director with so much grace and at the same time so much immersion has ever talked about man and humanity, explained the really important things about the meaning of life and art.
Tarkovsky’s genius is that context gives strength and weight to individual images. And the images reinforce the context, giving it volume. In the movie “Andrei Rublev” the issue is expressed literally in one sentence. Andrei breaks his vow of silence by saying these words. The strength of its expression stems from the context – what we saw on the screen for two hours and of course the frescoes that eventually came to us from the 15th century.
Or maybe everyone remembers the scene from the movie “Ivan’s Childhood” – a destroyed house, a chimney rising straight into the sky. There is an old grandfather next to the stove. Mystical fear is not at the moment from dissonance – the door creaks, but there is no fence, the stove stands, and the sky above it. And also from context. A war that destroyed not a single house, but the world. But the stove remained, and smoke comes out of the chimney.
The scene where the ceiling in the temple collapsed was shown to us by another director in another movie and caused only laughter and a feeling of heavy effort.
The fact is, if you shoot a woman in the toilet, a sweater with “Russia” or a man swallowing vodka, and then in one shot you show a crow on a branch and a collapsed ceiling for three minutes, the opposite is true. It is not the toilet that rises to metaphysical meanings, but the whole metaphysical idea descends to the level of the toilet. No high figurativeness is born, fiery laughter is born through the efforts of the author.
To me, Tarkovsky is one of the most important directors of the 20th century. He invented his own movie language, which writers of varying degrees of talent are still trying to use. And in most cases it is absolutely useless. However, most of the explanations, including mine, are meaningless.
But the point is that he made it clear about me personally that no other director could.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.