Showing posts with label The Sacrifice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Sacrifice. Show all posts

Thursday 16 May 2019

Three Tweets [maybe more ?] about Woman at War (2018)

Three Tweets [maybe more ?] about Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð) (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


16 May


Three Tweets [maybe more ?] about Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð) (2018)








Postlude (with TAKE ONE) :






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Friday 18 March 2016

The intensity of poetry and of Bach Passions (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


17 March

This is an accreting review of The Mirror (Zerkalo) (1975)



Words can’t express everything a person feels

Some people like the security of being told what a film means (or ‘is about’), especially if it is a difficult one (and, from when they first appeared there, Andrei Tarkovsky’s films attracted serious critical approval at Venice, and Cannes).

However, even if you really believe that a film such as The Mirror (Zerkalo) (1975) can be summarized in a couple of sentences, what appears on the film’s page on IMDb (@IMDb)) may not be they – where someone seems intent on imposing an interpretation as if it is definitive and conclusive of all :



One would imagine, from what is claimed, that The Mirror coheres or coalesces around the scene to which it refers (and from which it infers much) : it is, indeed, in the nature of some film-making, as perhaps it sometimes is here, that one’s understanding of what one sees and hears requires being patiently provisional, of waiting five or ten minutes for what that shot or comment was really saying to be confirmed or disclosed. (In other types of film, some aspects may not be revealed right until the closing shot, and then all makes sense.)



By contrast, The Mirror simply does not give the impression that there is one way of understanding it, and that, with that as a key, all is plain sailing and can be directly comprehended : it does not ever resemble that kind of film, and offering this token to the world at large is no real invitation in, although it is not without an element of truth.


For, having been quoted as having described the film as about a man who is seriously ill, Andrei Tarkovsky said about it (in an interview with Ian Christie) :

People ask themselves serious questions at different times, and especially in the face of death. [...] But I want to emphasize that this film was not constructed in this way for dry, dramatic reasons. It is important to see our hero in an extreme psychological situation, so that we don't feel his illness is entirely accidental. And it is the kind of illness where we don't know if he will survive, although it is not important to the meaning of the film — if there is any meaning !


[‘Against Interpretation : an Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky’ (1981) (collected and edited in Andrei Tarkovsky : Interviews¹, p. 67)]


And here is Tarkovsky, again in very simple terms (and from the same source-book¹), saying what he made the content of The Mirror²:



For example (as he told his later collaborator on Nostalghia (1983) and Tempo di Viaggio (1983)) :

[…] And my father came home very late one night. [...] He wanted me to go to live with him in the other house. [...] That night [...] I was asking myself what I should say the next day if they asked me who I wanted to live with. […]


[‘Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky’, Tonino Guerra (1978) (ibid., p. 47)]


At the same time, Tarkovsky says how he battled the film, or the film him :

The picture was simply not working out [...] Editing the picture I thought about dramatic composition. Only having made twenty edited versions did I realize that I had to try and paste together my material according to a completely different principle, without any regard for logic. This was the twenty-first version. And this is the version that you have seen on the movie screen.

[‘The Twentieth Century and The Artist’, V. Ishimov and R. Shejko (1984) (ibid., p. 128)]



Everything will still be ahead. Everything will be possible.


In its entry, IMDb (@IMDb) also appears to give prominence to the fact that Tarkovsky chooses to use Bach’s St Matthew Passion, BWV 244, whose aria Erbarme dich was to appear so sensitively in The Sacrifice (Offret) (1986) (the last film that he was able to make of those planned, on account of terminal cancer).

However, there is a very long section from the opening Chorus of the St John Passion, BWV 245, addressed to the Lordship of Jesus, which is just one of the many elements to the film : dialogue ; his father Arseni's poetry being read (three or four poems) ; scenes and sets (and their juxta- and interposition) ; sound-design / scoring for symphony orchestra ; archive footage (e.g. of nuclear-tests, or armaments and munitions being dragged, with much effort and by different soldiers, through shallow waters) ; existing compositions such as those works by Bach³.

The passage used from the St John Passion opens the work : maybe one is used to recent recordings and performances that bring out the contorted dissonance of the oboe-line, but Tarkovsky’s choice does not have that bite. If it did, would it fit better for us with the screen-time over which he has it play, perhaps feeding into the moments shown, by the superposition of the tension of the Passion story, in the way that the fevered mind or confused imagination may mix things together ?


Cinema, in contrast to literature, is the film-maker's experience caught on film. And if this personal experience is really sincerely expressed then the viewer accepts the film.
I've noticed, from my own experience, if the external, emotional construction of images in a film are [sic] based on the filmmaker's own memory, on the kinship of one's personal experience with the fabric of the film, then the film will have the power to affect those who see it.


[‘Dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on the Screen’, Naum Abramov (1970) (ibid., p. 35)]



[...]


Perhaps The Mirror might have been what Tarkosvky had in mind when he said to Gideon Bachmann (during the 1962 Venice Film Festival) that he was seeking a principle of montage that will allow me to expose the subjective logic — the thought, the dream, the memory — instead of the logic of the subject.

Though those twenty editorial versions that he alluded to above (in talking to Ishimov and Shejko) do not suggest that he was instinctual in making this film... If, as Tarkovsky himself says in that interview, he had to cut loose from ideas of dramatic composition and any regard for logic, then maybe we need to consider ourselves encouraged by these words about our response to the film (immediately preceding what Bachmann quotes):

One doesn’t need to explain in film, but rather to directly affect the feelings of the audience. It is this awakened emotion that then drives the thoughts forward.

[‘Encounter with Andrei Tarkovsky’, Gideon Bachmann (1962) (ibid., p. 11)]



End-notes

¹ Andrei Tarkovsky : Interviews, edited by John Giavinto. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson (2006). Other quotations will appear above, as indicated.)

² To Ian Strick, He admitted, with regret [as to the 'autobiographical aspects' of The Mirror], that the film had lost him a lot of friends. 'It was rather silly ; they reproached me for being too personal in telling my own story. But, if I show things that I didn't understand when they happened, how can I explain them now ? [...]' [‘Tarkovsky’s Translations’, Ian Strick (1981) (ibid., pp. 71-72)].

³ During the opening credits, we also hear Das alte Jahre vergangen ist, BWV 614, from Das Orgelbüchlein (BWV 599–644). (Does one also think that one hears Mozart's Requiem Mass ?)



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Friday 21 February 2014

I don’t want the spring to come

This is a review of Mother and Son (1997)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


21 February

This is a review of Mother and Son (1997)

* Contains spoilers *

It is not just the nature of the relationship that makes one think of it, because one’s thought is not there, say, with Kristin Scott Thomas as Iva and Marin Orcand Tourrès as Noé in Looking for Hortense (2012) (though she, arguably, is a stepmother, and he too young), but about the quality of the tenderness and the gestures between Aleksei Ananishnov and Gudrun Geyer that makes one think of Jesus and his mother Mary, of the Way of the Cross (Via Crucis), of the crucifixion (Woman, this is your son), and of Michelangelo’s Pietà.

A painterly or sculptural sensibility in the composition and lighting of shots is evident from the opening scene, with the foreground – the mother’s dramatically foreshortened supine body, which yet seems to ripple like waves – relatively dark, and the son lying at right angles, his head by her head, in an uncertain space, and with what seems as though it might be an opaque window onto the luminous sea and sky behind him (for we can hear the ocean, the waves and the wind).

There is a playfulness as well as a more serious connection between the mother and her carer, with her saying that she is ‘pretending’ to be ill, and, though seemingly seriously, concerning herself that she has nothing to wear in the spring, whereas there seems no one to see what one wears (and the son says that he has nothing special to wear either).

When the pair are first seen together in the light, she pale, he ruddy, there is a momentary flicker of Beckettt’s Endgame (Hamm and Nell) in the contrast of the faces, and, over the whole 73 minutes, set in and around what appears to be a small former church or chapel, there is an air of finality, as of something playing itself out*. It is partly built by the fragmentary musical accompaniment, which seems to be a familiar theme refracted (it sounded like Bach, later Brahms, but is credited as Glinka, Verdi and one other), which causes the mind to ruminate, but not reach an answer.

The topography of indoors and the world beyond remain oblique, though, in the former, there is a raised area that could be an altar (or a stage), and the mother, when lying in bed, is in a recess that is surrounded by a stone lintel and so resembles a side-chapel, a bier, or a tomb. The sea that is so much part of the soundtrack is only seen twice, once indistinctly**, and near this place the railway runs, and, at one point, we half wonder whether the son might catch a train and disappear.



Atmospheric in the extreme (because of the skilful use of sound and music), and with even the motion of the train that we see seeming restrained, held back, this is a film at a pace that is determined by the body, by falling in and out of sleep (where the dreams of the two seem to be the same, and to be overladen with poetic words), and by slowly going on ‘a walk’, which is the son carrying his mother. We have no notion how many times these things may have happened before (as with Endgame), but are in the immediacy of the present :

When she is laid on a bench at the front of the building, and – until he comes back into shot and cradles her head in a sort of crouching position, which brings their faces together again – we fear that she will fall, her physical fragility is emphasized by how the camera moves around her, first from a view that heightens the sense again of her being laid out, and then by him coming into shot and the support that he gives, touching her hair, and covering her over. The direction dares keep us wait and beg our patience, time and again, and so heightens the stillness at the centre of this place, despite being in the midst of the noise of the elements.

During the walk, he at least twice puts her on her legs, and countless times lays her down in a comfortable spot, which stresses, large man though he is, at what cost he takes her out in this way. The second time, in a clump of four silver birches and where he leans her against one, we again feel that she is defying gravity, so closely do we believe that this is not an actress who is, of course, capable of standing up - the uncertainty adds to their brief moment, standing side by side and exchanging a few words.

In such a moment in particular, the external world resembles indistinct watercolours, ones that seem to have been deliberately smudged***, not unlike the impression of some of Gerhart Richter’s paintings. This aesthetic of the film, both in its visual and musical elements, feels quite akin to that of Tarkovksy, say where the lens roams over a print of The Adoration of the Magi (by Leonardo da Vinci) in The Sacrifice (1986), his last film, and where the sound of the organ approaches, and then moves away from, a motif that cannot quite be placed****.

Just in a couple of places, the translation (originally rendered into German with dubbing, so the film bears the title Mutter und Sohn) foxes us, such as where the son urges ‘Yourself, yourself’, and, less obscurely, where she later says ‘You got me out’, but this is a slight defect, and cannot detract from the intense feeling in this film.

In its heart, it embodies a meeting with the truth, such as when she says that she was told that he would be clever, but heartless, and he replies I am a cold person : bit by bit, we are subtly asked questions about our own humanity and mortality.


End-notes

* Beckettt’s text has other phrases, which are resonant with this mood, such as Outside of here it’s death.

** The other time is during his walk alone, where we progress from cliffs to a glade, tree trunks, the sound of a bell, and a sailing-vessel at sea.

*** The Wikipedia page for the film suggests some of the techniques used.

**** There, as in this film, the result is more effective, and less inducive of a sensation of nausea, than Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)