安德烈·塔可夫斯基：电影的元素

• Efkfra

  2012-09-17
  Sacrifice hearkens directly back to Turnabout in its use of sound; in both works the air carries the noise of seagulls and distant fog-horns both to place the narrative and, at the same time, to dissolve it within the greater natural and social world. Shot within a bird sanctuary during the mating season, Tarkovsky was insistent that no birds be audible; thus all of the sound was recreated in the studio and post-synchronized. The creaks of the house were reproduced by the sound engineer Owe Svensson in his own country cottage, who recorded each character’s gait by walking in an old house with various pairs of shoes, avoiding the use of stock sounds like the footsteps in Nostalghia. In addition to Bach, the soundtrack featured music of the Japanese bamboo flute and Swedish herd calling that...
• Efkfra

  2012-09-16
  Of course, Eugenia’s temptation to ‘surrender to the inertia’ of natural flows is inseparable from her hysterical resistance to it; this tension is at the heart of all of Tarkovsky’s characters and even his camera. Žižek proposes that Eugenia is protesting ‘not only against the hero’s tired indifference, but also, in a way, against the calm indifference of the static long shot itself, which does not let itself be disturbed by her outburst’.23 Tarkovsky had noted a similar effect in the scene of the blinding of the masons in Andrei Rublëv, where ‘[t]he impassibility and frigidity of the immobile camera only underscored the tragic nature of what was occurring, heightening its dramatism’.24 Indeed, the tension is stretched most taut not between Gorchakov and Eugenia per se, but between each o...
• Efkfra

  2012-09-16
  Each of Tarkovsky’s poems presents a single space within which three details are simultaneously present. Moreover, not all of the lines communicate single images; some describe motion or even sound within the same frame as the preceding line. The discrete action in each of Eisenstein’s haiku – the wolf howling or the butterfly flying – punctures a static background and is over. By contrast, in Tarkovsky’s first haiku it is the dynamic background that brings the foreground into motion, while in his second the movement is created by the narrowing of the aperture as the poem zooms in from the plant to the dewdrops suspended upon it.Tarkovsky shifts from sequential juxtapositions to what Eisenstein would call ‘vertical montage’ or juxtapositions between different planes within the shot or se...
• Efkfra

  2012-09-16
  Both Tarkovsky and his original cameraman Vadim Iusov frequently speak of the way the camera ‘captures’ or ‘isolates’ (fiksirovat’, literally ‘fixing’) its visible environment (sreda). On the one hand the camera stabilizes it as an image;17 on the other, as I have argued, the camera allows for its self-manifestation as an unrepresentable and impenetrable alien will, the flows that intervene in and flood over the image. The precise ways in which the camera either settles the image or renders it unsettling cannot be reduced to any one factor or technique. Tarkovsky and Iusov, in particular, marshalled all the resources at their disposal to heighten this internal cinematic tension. Iusov contributes a dose of sobriety by noting the role of cinematic technology in establishing the realm of p...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-04
  The complex role of Bach’s music was evident in Solaris, in the course of which the music itself is gradually deformed by Eduard Artem’ev’s electronic elaborations. The play of familiarity and distortion, as well as of venerable age and jarring novelty, augments the indeterminacies of the narrative and visual representation. In an earlier variant of the final scene, Snaut plays Bach from a metallic disk: ‘suddenly Kris was overcome with the smell of the earth and moist earthly plants, and female hands covered in the juice of earthly fruits’.3 Kris leans over to touch this newly revealed material and organic world and finds himself walking towards his father’s home. However, he stops when he sees his double walk along a dusty path amongst the trees, approach his seated father and hug his ‘d...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-04
  Tarkovsky has sometimes been suspected of pursuing just such an impassive, alien view on the world. In particular, the reactions of cinema authorities to Mirror suggest that this was precisely the way they read the film’s portrayal of the Soviet imaginary. True, Tarkovsky did not submerge Soviet images in water, as he had done with Andrei Rublëv’s icons (and would do with Jan van Eyck in Stalker). But was this not the effect of showing war footage to the strains of Pergolesi? While he drew on stock images of Soviet culture, Tarkovsky wholly ignored its soundtrack, whether popular songs, bombastic orchestral suites or army choruses. Tarkovsky seemed in danger of becoming like the Ocean in Solaris, draining reality of its living juices with his camera’s eerily calm gaze.For Tarkovsky, thou...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-04
  The success of Ivan’s Childhood emboldened Tarkovsky to try a radical experiment in poetic storytelling in the screenplay of Andrei Rublëv, co-written with Andron Konchalovsky. Moreover, Tarkovsky unapologetically described a difficult narrative: ‘Arbitrarily breaking the narrative plot, we will strictly observe the poetic logic. We will try to combine apparently incomparable things. There is much poetry in this method. It allows us to speak in rich images of what is most important.’21 It was conceived less as a story than as an extended pause before the demonstration of Rublëv’s icons, expressive of ‘the life of his spirit, the breath of the atmosphere that formed his attitude towards the world’ (ST 34–5; ZV 129). The long, difficult production of the film confirmed Tarkovsky’s belief in ...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-04
  The aural accompaniment adds a further level of thickness to these sequences, especially the second, which proceeds to the strains of Eduard Artem’ev’s electronic score and then to Arsenii Tarkovsky’s poem ‘Life, life’. Of the use of his father’s poems in Mirror Tarkovsky said: ‘These poems are not an illustration; they are just poems born at the time about which one or another episode is telling’ (UR 29). This claim suggests a parallel to the epilogue to Andrei Rublëv, in which (in the original conception) each icon was to be ‘accompanied by the same musical theme that sounded in the episode of Rubl?v’s life corresponding to the time during which the icon was conceived’.20 In fact, the three poems actually read in the film all date from the 1960s, long after the events they illustrate bef...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-04
  Tarkovsky spoke repeatedly of the footage of the crossing of the Lake Sivash, a marshy region of the Crimea that had also been the site of bloody fighting in the Russian Civil War.I had never seen anything of the kind; as a rule one deals with insincere skits or short, fragmentary shots of literally conceived wartime ‘life’ or with ‘showy’ footage in which one senses too much planning and too little genuine truth. And I saw no possibility of uniting this salad with a single temporal feeling. And suddenly I find an unprecedented case of newsreel footage: an episode, an entire and unified event, extended in time and shot (unusually) in a single place and telling of one of the most dramatic events of the 1943 offensive. […] I couldn’t believe that such an enormous quantity of film had been ...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-04
  Much of the confusion in the history of Mirror stems in a cardinal shift of emphasis that occurred during the film’s preparation. Conceived as a film about Tarkovsky’s mother, it eventually became an autobiographical study: At one point [Aleksandr] Misharin and I wrote the screenplay ‘White, White Day’. I did not yet know what this film would be about, how it would be organized in the screenplay and what role would be occupied there by the image, not even the image but the storyline, more precisely the storyline of the mother. All I knew was that I kept having the same dream about the place where I was born. I dreamt of the house. It was as if I was entering, or more precisely not entering but circling around it. There was some strange shift. […] I thought this feeling had some material ...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-04
  After declaring on 10 July 1984 his intention to remain in the West, Tarkovsky received a provocative letter from his father, prompting him to insist: ‘I was and remain a Soviet artist.’ When challenged on the ‘accessibility’ of his films he would frequently respond, as he did in a 1974 interview, ‘I consider myself a part of the people. I live in my own country and contemplate the same processes and problems as my contemporaries; I love, hate and worry in the same way, and therefore I consider that I express the ideas of the people.’7 Similar in many ways to that of his contemporaries Vasilii Shukshin and Vladimir Vysotsky, Tarkovsky’s innovative work was closely coordinated with key motifs in the Soviet imaginary, even as its original treatment of these motifs raised suspicions of alien ...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-04
  The bounds of the director’s conception extend far beyond the autobiographical screenplay and shooting script, beyond even the specific memories and associations on which Tarkovsky based Mirror; the conception includes also the implicit and perhaps unconscious scaffolding that supports any narrative, indeed which supports narrativity itself, and which reveals itself only when it collapses under its own weight, that is to say, when experience outstrips the subject’s attempt to contain or capture it. Tarkovsky contrasted his presence within the frame to that of Fellini in 8½ or Bergman in Wild Strawberries, which ‘fail by introducing the Author as a regular character [which] makes the film a plot-based narration’; by contrast, Mirror is itself ‘the process of the maturation of the film and i...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-03
  The rigorous method that Tarkovsky developed for executing this rather expansive conception ensured that the material itself would be allowed to dictate its own rhythm and structure. Although the original title for the project was ‘Confession’ (Ispoved’), and although it begins with the declaration ‘I can speak’, the result was an almost scientific analysis of the images that comprised the artist’s consciousness. One such image was that of Leonardo da Vinci. At first, Tarkovsky relates, he intended to use Leonardo’s instructions for painting a battle as a voice-over accompanying footage of the destruction of the local church in Iurevets in 1938. Later this episode was omitted, and in its stead there appeared several quotations of a purely visual nature, most notably the large book on Leona...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-03
  The particular ability of cinema to address the imaginary is evident in Tarkovsky’s treatment of photographs. In the prologue on earth we are shown the black-and-white photograph of Kelvin’s mother in a frame on the sideboard. Then, when Kelvin is burning his archive, a photograph of Hari lies on the grass alongside a partially burnt photograph of an unknown woman in a bonnet standing at a window. It appears that Kelvin takes the photos of his mother and of Hari to the spacecraft. When Hari finds her own image she fails to recognize it until she sees herself looking at it in the mirror, although she later recognizes Kelvin’s mother in the family film he shows. Still photographs are also used by the other crew members: Gibarian left a book with photographs of Armenian churches, while Snaut ...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-03
  True, Tarkovsky also added references to Russian literature. The characters in Solaris mention both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and Pushkin’s death-mask is prominently displayed both on earth and on the orbital, alongside Don Quixote. Tarkovsky has Snaut repeat the argument of Viacheslav Ivanov’s famous essay ‘Ancient Terror’ concerning the historical transition from Greek paganism to Christian monotheism: ‘we’ve lost our cosmic sense,’ he says, ‘[b]ut at least we now have hope’.34 The film could easily be read through this essay as a glimpsing of the primeval faith in an absolute Goddess. After all, in Lem’s novel the drunken Snaut explicitly identifies Hari as ‘fair Aphrodite, born of the ocean’;35 in one discussion of the film Tarkovsky described Kelvin as ‘a man who experiences anew – and ...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-02
  If for Lem the unknown is elsewhere and in the future, for Tarkovsky the unknown is in the here and now. As Žižek comments, Communication with the Solaris-Thing […] fails not because Solaris is too alien, the harbinger of an intellect infinitely surpassing our limited abilities, playing some perverse games with us whose rationale remains forever outside our grasp, but because it brings us too close to what in ourselves must remain at a distance if we are to sustain the consistency of our symbolic universe.However, to reduce the film to any ‘point’ whatsoever is to negate it as a narrative that is extended in time and perceived by the entire sensorium. The real conflict between Lem and Tarkovsky concerned less their contrasting philosophies than the very admissibility of such philosophical...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-02
  For me there is no difference between a science-fiction, an historical and a contemporary film. If it is directed by an artist, then the problems that concern the director are the legacy of the current day, whatever time the plot might occur in. The most realistic plot is always invented, is always fantasy, while the ideas and thoughts of a true artist are always topical and current, they are always reality, whatever unlikely or supernatural form these ideas might take. After all true realism is not the copying of any particular circumstances of life, but the unfolding of phenomena, of their psychological or philosophical nature. […] This is why I dream of screening Stanis?aw Lem’s novel Solaris; I am attracted not by its entertaining and provocative plot, but by the profound philosophical...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-02
  Tarkovsky’s main concern was to replace Bogomolov’s matter-of-fact manner with a ‘poetic’ visual style. Poetic cinema, at least for Tarkovsky as this time, meant ‘exploding’ the logical connections between events and examining their ‘inward force’, their ‘associative connections’ (ST 20; ZV 112–13). Considering the way human memory forms a composite image of a temporal experience, Tarkovsky adduces a characteristic spatial image: ‘Against the background of the entire day this event looks like a tree in the fog’ (ST 23; ZV 116). In particular Tarkovsky speaks of the need for the spatial composition – the mise-en-scène – to provide a contrast to the story-logic (ST 25). If it merely repeats the point of the action it builds an ‘intellectual ceiling’, against which the spectator knocks his he...
• Efkfra

  2012-07-02
  In his essays, interviews, lectures and (most importantly) films, Tarkovsky consistently held that the artist ‘thinks in images and only thus is able to demonstrate his attitude towards life’ (UR 22). He was never interested in the ideas with which he tagged his films for official and commercial consumption; one senses that he would have preferred not to speak about his films at all: ‘When we deal with a genuine work of art, with a masterpiece, we deal with a “thing-in-itself”, with an image that is no less incomprehensible than life itself’ (UR 22). Like the physical setting of the film, the story provides a framework within which natural flows and human gazes cross and enter into interaction. It is, in short, the crucible in which the spectator will burn the film into experience (ST 89).
• Efkfra

  2012-07-02
  Tarkovsky frequently spoke of the inevitable subjectivity of a director’s adaptation of literary works. In literary prose, Tarkovsky wrote, ‘the reader sees what he has been taught to see by his experience, character, interests and taste. The most detailed passages of prose leave the control of the writer, as it were, and are perceived by the reader subjectively.’ In the cinema, by contrast, the camera ‘captures the action, the landscape and the characters’ faces’ in an ‘unambiguous designation of concreteness, against which rebels the personal sensuous experience of the viewer as an individual’. The only alternative for the director is to record his or her own visual experience of the narrative:I have noticed from my own experience that if the external emotional structure of images in a ...