Balance Your Maps with Mystery

Some Thoughts on Tarkovsky

Anrei Tarkovsky is a heavy-handed sleight-of-hand artist. Some of his images are so weighted, so full of melodramatic religious existentialism, that they risk absurdity. Somehow, he always avoids the grotesque. Somehow, he always pulls it off. He's part magician, part mystic. Even with his obsessively repeated images, I'm thinking levitating lovers, burning houses, writhing women, indoor rain, his films always refresh me. The camera movements, the precise color pallets, the sounds of Artemyev, have a calming effect on my internal organs. Seriously. After watching Solaris, I lived inside the movie, or the movie entered my realm, for weeks. The same thing happened with Stalker and The Mirror. I was as confused as Kris Kelvin. One should watch his films on a rainy day or late at night.

The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky's last film, is just as heavy and deep as his others. You get the sense that this is the film of a dying man. A Dark Night of the Soul. There is one funny image though, a weighted-funny image but still funny. Alexander, played by Bergman actor Erland Josephson, madly limping around his house in a black robe with a yin/yang on the back. He even sets his house on fire with it on. I almost laughed.

Roland Barthes said "Trauma is a news photo without a caption," and Tarkovsky is an artist who understands this truth. I am thinking of the black and white shots of crowds running through city streets that enter the film seemingly out of nowhere and are never explained. Are they dreams or scenes from World War Three? Is this what the postman-philosopher Otto means when he says "I've always been terrified of Leonardo"? The trauma in this film, which is of truly epochal proportions, has no captions, as all art does not.

Finally, I have to mention the map. Alexander receives an old map of Europe from Otto. He sits on the floor staring at it like a child. Its borders and dimensions obviously wrong by modern standards. But the modern standards are just as untrue as the old, as Alexander observes. Otto says "We are blind. Simply, we know nothing." Like myself, Tarkovsky believes in balancing one's maps with mystery.

Lastly, I'd like point out Susan Sontag's 1995 lament of "the death of the cinephile." This lament came 100 years after the birth of cinema. For a variety of reasons(faster cutting, general commercialism, mass stupidity) cinema "doesn't demand anyone's full attention," she says. I would like to encourage anyone reading this to rent a very long film (The Sacrifice, Solaris, Seven Samurai, Bela Tar's Satantango if you're really up for it) and set aside 2,3,4 hours to watch the film. Don't answer the phone, pee before you start it, get some snacks and drinks ready.

blog by darin