Monthly Archives: September 2016

Andrei Rublev Andrei
Tarkovsky (USSR 1966 + general consideration of Solaris, Mirror, Stalker)
Anatoly Solonitsyn

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 18 Sept 2016; ticket: £9:25

bell ring

A talk with my friend Ana Marton helped to clarify my understanding of what was central to Tarkovsky’s thinking in making Rublev. The key to understanding is surely the relation between the allegorical opening sequence of Andrei Rublev and the main body of the film which although dressed up as an historical drama set in fourteenth century Russia presents a striking analogy of the turbulent destructive forces released by the 1917 revolution that convulsed and tore up the country. The Soviet authorities were sufficiently alarmed by the analogous parallels suggested in Andre Rublev to effectively censor the film in the USSR where it was allowed very few screenings.

The opening sequence, a sort of filmic preface, comprises an attempt made by a man (an individual never identified, a type perhaps) to fly, to be released like a bird in the air. This man uses a sort of balloon technology, and despite the attempt of an alarmed mob to prevent him taking off, succeeds in launching himself from the tower and becoming airborne. “ O my God I’m flying!” he calls out. The flight does not last long, and he quickly crashes back down to the earth.

The man’s flight through the air can be understood, like Daedalus and Icarus’ flights, as an individuated action, a man claiming the power of birds and gods: act of hubris. The idea of flight has always had a strong spiritual connotation. Tarkovsky seems to be pointing out that ‘flight’ in this context is an individual solution to spiritual problems, employing a leap of faith to claim a domain that cannot be sustained, reliant on technology not on human attributes.

Spiritual life is about acts of faith not leaps of faith.

In contrast Andrei Rublev follows a long tortuous path through social upheaval and war that almost destroys his spirit, before finding his faith in action. Following the preface, the main body of the film, divided into 8 chapters, chronicles Andrei Rublev’s path through history. Unlike flight, with its sudden ecstatic moment Andrei’s journey is in effect a passion ( the film in Russian was also called ‘The passion according to Andrei), in the Christian sense of the word. A series of experiences that challenge his spiritual being, a process of suffering that is a total test of faith. Andrei Rublev’s faith is broken by living in an world characterised by cruelty, violence, bodily afflictions and betrayals. He is reduced to being mute, spiritually exhausted, unable to paint, his faith a hollow kernel without a seed. He is without voice retreating into isolation.

And then comes the bell. The voice of the Bell. The bell has been ordered by a Count. But the wars exterminations epidemics famines have killed or scattered those who knew how to caste bells. The knowledge of how to fashion bells out of the matter found in the earth is lost. But a young boy, son of a dead master bell founder, reveals that his father had taught him the secret of bell making. With this secret knowledge the bell can be made. The whole community come together as one to realise the huge undertaking of casting the bell: retrieving ‘lost’ knowledge, working with energy joy common purpose, sacrificing their individuality to the collective good. The bell becomes a collective statement of spiritual purpose. The bell is fashioned. Together the people have made a bell whose note will sound out across the land. Together they have made it under the direction of young boy who is barely more than a child. The child as he walks away with Rublev suddenly admits to Rublev that his father had never told him the secrets of bell making; his father had died before he could share his knowledge. His claim to have the secret had been an act of faith. Faith in the forces of life.

At this revelation Andrei Rublev finds the path to the deeper understanding that will enable him to start painting again. He understands faith for him is about allowing his gift to find expression in the world. His refusal to paint had become an indulgence of his subjective need, the break through was to see others needs, to allow his painting to flow out. Faith is realised and put to the proof through action.

Andrei Rublev with its analogous historical referents and its allegorical opening sequence is a spectacle. As film it adds nothing to cinema in itself, a series of images that the viewer watches and may or may not read meaning into. Superbly shot and directed, Andrei Rublev is an epic movie made in the fashion of D W Griffith rather than Sergei Eisenstein. A periodically sequenced realisation of a historic period of Russian history and its people interspersed with the constants of earth water and fire that evoke the underlying perception of a land of faith. This epic quality which points directly to image also characterises Ivan’s Childhood; and it’s a quality that distinguishes Tarkovsky’s two early films from his later productions.

In the three later films produced and shot in the USSR, the difference is in the position in which the viewers find themselves. Ivan and Andrei are linear movies. We are watchers. We watch the progress of the protagonists, reading into the development of the symbolic moving images that deepen our understanding of what is depicted. In Solaris Mirror and Stalker we are ‘see-ers’. The films work by absorbing the viewer in to worlds that are at variance from everyday logic, films that are founded in cinema logic. The films can only be seen if the viewer enters into the psychic world suggested by the form structure and content of each of these films.

Solaris Mirror Stalker demand of the viewer that they recalibrate state of mind as they move into the world of the film. The pacing of the films, allows for mediation of this process which works dynamically with the audience who have to engage by defining and understanding for themselves the aqueous world in which they are submerged. Aqueous because in all of Tarkovsky’s movies water/fluid is a key medium whether it be: still stagnant down pouring flowing renewing reflecting refracting. Water/fluid is ubiquitous, both in picture and sound, omnipresent like time which also is a focal concern of Tarkovsky’s. Time always a mirror reflecting back image. Time also an idea which in these three last films made in Russia was the basis for Tarkovsky’s personal political critique of dialectical materialism as a dead-end Soviet theory that insisted on ‘history’ as a didactic linear time scale. Tarkovsky’s explores time as a fluid experience, an envelope of Einsteinian space/time which wraps traps zaps us in waves and vectors of psycho/spiritual entanglement. Time as human dimension not a mechanism.

Mirror with its layered time structure probing personal history and a Nietschian eternal recurrence. Solaris with its temporal instabilities inducing the past to return to the present. Stalker with its zone containing spacio/temporal distortion and room of desire. Tarkovsky creates worlds that have to entered by specific psychological portals an entering that involves a surrender to the logic of the film.

It is Tarkovsky’s achievement as producer/director that he had the courage of his personal and political vision to refuse compromise with Goskino and instead to produce a series of films completely radical in their use of the medium to do what cinema rarely does: create a new concept of what is possible. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Ivan’s Childhood
(Ivanovo detstvo) Andei
Tarkovsky (USSR 1962) Nikoli Burlyayev, Valentin Zubkov

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 10 Sept 16; Ticket £8.25

embrace over the abyss

Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, is a film made on two distinct tracks: the audio track and the visual track. The audio track carries the ethical stream of the movie with its opposing concerns: the subjectivity of Ivan’s determination to fight the Nazis and revenge the death of his parents; and the objectivity of the Soviet officers that Ivan must be sent away from the danger of the front to military school. Ivan’s youthful adolescent obduracy of purpose and self justifying ordinance overwhelms the protective instincts of these hardened soldiers. Of course the dialogue/audio ‘track’ of the film is superbly filmed by Tarkovsky’s camera, moving between Ivan and the officers, capturing Ivan’s defiant energy and the lesser conviction of the officers. The space between child and man. An ineffable unbridgeable space.

In the visuals however Tarkovsky explores and probes expressively the more deeply hidden more poetically evocative layers of the film, that comprise a metaphysics of death and destruction. Tarkovsky’s ability to create and educe symbolic ideas purely in the realm of the visual becomes his keynote and defines all his subsequent productions.

One shot in Ivan’s Childhood points directly to Tarkovsky’s vision of war. The Nazi’s as an example to the Soviet fighters of the fate of those who spy and scout, display the corpses of two hanged Russians. Paul Virilio writes, such displays of sacrificial victims are “ an act of internal war, a throw back to war’s psychotropic origins in sympathetic magic, the riveting spectacle of immolation and death agony, the world of ancient religions and tribal gatherings.” The insight in this quote explains something of Ivan’s immersion into the war, expressed solely as picture. An immersion that takes him beyond the purpose of retribution. Destitute and alone after the murder of his family, entering into the theatre of war releases Ivan from the purely personal, lifting him into a primordial originary collective world. Ivan becomes party to the delirium of war; war captivates him as he surrenders to the same forces that made the first primitive cave paintings. He gives himself over to the workings of fate, even so that fate has marked him out for sacrifice.

Tarkovsky’s exteriors shot over the front line of Russia’s rivers marshes forests capture war as a magical spectacle. An hallucination, war as a fusion of exploding light reflected and refracted in nature, inducing an altered state of mind both at one with the spirit of life and with death, ecstasy and self destruction.

And right from the beginning of the movie Tarkovsky captures in Ivan this possibility of sacrifice. Dressed only in shorts naked from the waist up the first shot captures Ivan in a pristine landscape. We hear the cuckoo, we see the spider’s web, we see the land. At one with the land, merging with it. The lean white skinned boy imprints on the viewer’s mind an androgynous physicality: walking running drinking straight from the bucket of water his mother has drawn from the well. He has animal soul, animal energy, this boy. A vision of something pure, unsullied by calculation. The fate of his beauty is not to be tamed; not to be schooled; not to disciplined by life in the soviet union in agricultural college or a mechanics institute. The fate of his beauty is to be sacrificed, to be offered up to the war. Ivan is white virgin beautiful and in the maelstrom of war embraces his fate. Perhaps the soldiers also understand something of this as they cease to oppose his will and collude with the Ivan’s act of oblation.

Of course this is metaphysics not history, but strangely as the late Michael Herr also notes in Dispatches, metaphysics has its place on the battlefield. But not in history. History doesn’t do delirium. As a counterweight to Ivan’s delirium, the penultimate section of the movie is a series of shots depicting the capture of the Reich Chancellery by the Red Army. We see Goebbels’ dead children and Goebbels and his wife, their heads burnt to charred stumps, laid out on the ground for the Soviet photographers. The arch Nazi mythologist reduced to an all too real dead lump of matter. And inside the Reich Chancellery officers who had known Ivan find his file, and the prosaic fact that he had been captured and hanged by the Nazis. We see his picture. He is just another victim.

There is one famous shot in Ivan’s Childhood, a shot that is not apparently connected with Ivan. In a sort of subplot, an officer aggressively pursues Masha, a medical officer. In the disorienting setting of a birch forest, after an almost ritual chase he catches hold of her tightly round the waist pressing her hard into his body. The camera changes position and we see that he is straddling a deep ditch and that she, with her legs danlging in mid-air, is trapped between intimacy and the danger of a high fall. The shot works on its own narrative terms: the desire of men for women. But more strongly it stands as an analogy for the nature of war as experienced by those who fight: a mixture of forced intimacy and terror. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk