A DAY OF ANDREI ARSENEVICH
1. ARRIVAL OF Andrusha
Larissa watched the arrival of the plane from Moscow
Seeing her at the window,
we thought the first shots of the Mother in The Mirror
Russia saw a bun back it is a sign of expectation.
There were five years Larissa had not seen his son or his mother.
When Tarkovsky and his wife had decided to stay at West
Soviet authorities
faithful to their political hostages
had banned visa the rest of the family.
The time to leave the airport
check the amazing ability journalists to ask the right questions...
... And Andrusha was projected on another planet.
This image also called for more images other films.
As if all children lived his work
were given appointments at the bedside Andrei Tarkovsky who was dying.
After five years of lobbying
bureaucratic and deafness
it took them to learn medical source
how health Tarkovsky deteriorated seriously
to agree that the Soviets Andrusha to let go.
When the two embassy employees had come to tell him,
Andrei had taken them for KGB killers.
"They came to liquidate me."
Absurd idea at that time,
but an image that spoke volumes about an era,
who came from afar...
For his directorial debut
when he was still a student at VGIK
the legendary film school in Moscow
he had directed two of his comrades in roles of killers,
and not just any.
Here, dialogue that sounds familiar...
Doubtless he knew not the movie Robert Siodmak
but it's the same story by Hemingway it was adapted by The Killers...
And this school work is another surprise in store:
the entrance to the author, who was awarded a small role.
In his first appearance on screen,
Andrei whistles Lullaby of Birdland...
"Review of these images by Andrei in his diary in 1986:
"I've taken a look monstrously, unnatural,
I hold my emotion and I repeat nonsense, like:
But where are the bags?
Larissa also not bad,
her monologue, utters words in a toast
laugh and cry at the same time...
But this is home: Airport
All the pain and despair accumulated during these six years
were reflected in her eyes... "
2.THE FOUR ELEMENTS
It rains a lot in Tarkovsky as in Kurosawa
One sign probably the Japanese sensibility
to which he often referred
And as with the Japanese
a physical nature.
There is no more earth, more carnal
the work of renowned filmmaker mystical.
Perhaps because the Russian mystic is not that of Catholicism
terrified by nature and by the body.
Among the Orthodox,
we respect nature,
we revere the Creator through his creation.
And in counterpoint to the characters,
each film weaves a plot between the four elements
sometimes treated separately,
sometimes paired.
In The Mirror
a simple camera movement combines water and fire...
Reverse path in Solaris.
It is not unusual in film that people take showers
or burn
but the element is part of the action,
if it occurs as a last resort,
as the answer to a prayer,
can not reduce it to its photogenic.
The water is lost when the woman continued in Andrei Rublev,
one or Ivan continues to run, beyond death,
Water is a liberating
water loving, as nature
and as God.
At the beginning of Andrei Rublev
is the air and fire, which is mixed.
The water will soon appear.
And then the earth,
present until the film as close, up to root.
How many times the characters Are they facing the earth,
mud,
silt original from which they come,
and as not yet fully released,
and they choose to bury it?
Boris Godunov is not a movie.
A staging theater in London.
And the author of this portrait, During a very Russian confession...
Because he stole the pretty twins we rent in Covent Garden
and for some reason even more that unspeakable crime:
in the hope that one day, magically,
they render frames they had seen.
Because there is strangely no trace of the show in London.
Only an honest reconstruction
Kirov Theatre in Leningrad,
that at least we did see the big ideas of staging.
Like in the movies
Boris buries in the earth ruse
but he is the czar
that is to say, a symbol,
and so it burrows into the symbol of the earth:
a carpet in the image of the Empire.
It burrows in Russia...
The map becomes the territory,
and History in turn is part...
3. A PLAN FOR SIX MINUTES
Seven months earlier, Tarkovsky turned in Sweden
One of the last shots of Sacrifice
probably one of the best laid plans complicated history of cinema.
Six minutes continuously,
where the eye follows the character who comes setting fire to his house,
his family joined him and panics,
the ambulance arrives,
all in the same report framework,
and worn only by comings and goings of the camera.
Cheerfulness shown by Andrei during the implementation
is simply superhuman
the nature of the plan,
with the burning house while the characters are at,
obviously requires a single dose.
But this decision has already happened once,
and everything went wrong:
special effects misfire,
camera down...
The production has managed to rebuild outside the home,
but there will be no third chance.
The requirement of this unique plan
is not a director's whim stage virtuoso.
Here the four elements play together.
Land and water intertwined,
liberating the sea on the horizon
fire made by man
and the air that envelops everything, served in this space,
edges that this distance language photographer called precisely "air".
Treat it the conventional way,
close-ups, reverse shots,
inserts of the fire,
would any biased.
The entire action must take into a single framework,
where the case is no longer traveling morality,
but metaphysics.
Director of photography,
Sven Nykvist
the incumbent operator of Bergman.
In the beginning, was troubled by Sven This way of composing Andrei
its plans for the camera:
he flew his place.
Then the complicity was established,
and the game boils down to who will be the most perfectionist.
We talk constantly four languages on the set,
sometimes six.
In Italian he learned in exile
Andrei communicates with Sven who has worked at Cinecitta.
Russian, Swedish and English are added,
all orchestrated by the great Leila Alexander
reflecting the same gestures.
Patiently, Andrei them back all one by one.
One mistake of space or gesture,
and it would be a disaster again,
this time irreparable.
The establishment continued throughout the afternoon.
Among a hundred things funny
there was one who would have to worry,
but we did not know yet...
The day ended in good mood.
But when he said "Engine" the next morning
It was felt by this experience the young founder bell Rublev
when he says "Dava?!
4. RANK OF OTHER ARTS
The bell had well melted.
The plan had been turned out well.
But what struck the visitor
Andrei is put as much intensity and concentration to solve a traveling
to shoot a picture -
the kind of thing that a director general director leaves the bench as specialists...
Leonardo da Vinci is often mentioned in the movies.
This evocation of a specific meaning.
The man seen here
taut like a bow when Shooting a minor
said a hundred times:
"My goal is to place the film on the same level as other arts. "
Not a movie where the painting appears,
usually in the form of a book which one turns the pages.
And Ivan's Childhood,
even in the heart of war...
These images are there as benchmarks, and challenges.
Andrei Rublev itself is a long mediation on the meaning of art
where the confusion of names betrays the anguish of an artist never satisfied.
"Beauty is in the heart of the Faith"
Florensky father wrote.
Any late Andrei Rublev detaches from the narrative,
and becomes a poem about the icons.
He exalts it searched,
It explores the forms they contain
as he was filming the ground level with the plants,
and like this movie Russia's Middle Ages
is ultimately the only true movie about our time
it also shows where these forms were that we have seized the outskirts of the twentieth century,
Malevich and that was already in Rublev.
Often the character itself confronts the paint.
False Mirror, unattainable beauty,
with which he must nevertheless trying to measure.
The reflection in the paint a second approach the mirror.
Then it is the mirror itself which becomes a metaphor for painting.
In naming her the Mirror most personal film,
Tarkovsky advance without a net
for his fight with the Angel.
Armed with all that learned to paint,
with as a loyal ally
this supreme art, music,
now it's cinema to prove he can,
by its own means,
reach the Pure Beauty.
5. THE VISION
The great classic movie,
as Hollywood has set the codes
has a favorite corner cons slight angle,
which detaches the characters and allows the effects of sky.
In Tarkovsky
it is usually the opposite:
the camera is a bit above characters,
rooted in the landscape.
The naive American contemplating the sky
Russian, in any case the Russian point,
moved heaven and earth behold.
Sometimes the angle widens and camera that overlooks all the action.
Simply admire the formal perfection of such a plan
would again be wrong room.
This vision-this makes sense.
We are, in Andrei Rublev
when the young boy who claims hold the secret of making bells
managed to mobilize a crowd workers for his project.
We learn at the end in fact he knew nothing,
he had lied,
but that this lie could be in him a clandestine presence of faith.
And while the work progresses,
the camera is no longer content to dominate,
she flew
and ends on a cliff absolute
a viewing angle
that we, Orthodox familiar:
is the gaze of Christ Pantocrator
one that the top of the dome of churches we contemplate,
and we judge.
This abrupt vision
is found at times keys of certain films
At the scene of the Sacrifice Apocalypse...
At the end of Solaris.
After the space station,
sends a mysterious ocean waves hallucinatory
modeled on the memory of the inhabitants,
the main character is returned to earth,
in his home.
And the flight of the camera reveals
that this return is still an illusion,
The ocean secretes its surface patches of memory...
Much has been said that this Ocean was a figure of God.
Only if it is God who is watching?
6. AREA
Occultism was for Andrei, Sometimes a shortcut with the afterlife.
It was during a seance
it had entered into communication Boris Pasternak
which he announced that turn out seven films.
"Only?" Said Andrei.
"But the good" replied Boris Leonidovich.
And except for his school work,
Tarkovsky realized about seven films.
Ivan's Childhood
Andrei Rublev
Solaris
The Mirror
Stalker
Nostalgia
-And the Sacrifice...
From the first, Ivan's Childhood,
theme is present,
that of the "other side"
a region to achieve the price of transgression...
Here the codes are known:
in the war movie
area to be explored information
is a respectable reference
In Stalker the codes are reversed.
Imaging concentration Classic
but a tremendous turnaround,
Freedom is inside the wire:
it escapes to enter.
The question remains unanswered.
Three characters,
the writer, scientist and Stalker,
The ferryman, who takes them in this Chamber of the "Zone"
where, say, wishes come true.
The Stalker himself the appearance of a deportee,
but it is a red herring.
Ocean Solaris communicated also with awareness.
He sent them visitors, visitors,
the clone of a woman loved and lost...
But that was in terms of science fiction,
with a repertoire of causes and effects:
Station space
a strange planet that needed study the events...
A scene of levitation was explained and announced a shift in zero gravity.
In The Mirror in The Sacrifice
levitation occurs alone, without excuse.
More work ahead
most of it lightens excuses and reasons.
Until the director who overcomes excuses he gave to himself.
The swirl of herbs at the beginning of the Mirror
served to avoid a cliche
that of the man who turns the woman he just met.
It was something unusual was happening.
In Stalker
it's fiction Area which stir the herbs,
it does not accountable, it is autonomous.
But in an interview,
Andrei said that perhaps Zone did not exist,
it was the stalker who had invented
"So that men are less unhappy."
Imagine the effect of such remarks the Soviet authorities...
Stalker was cited as an example
the "low level" of films produced by Mosfilm.
7. THE INNOCENT
"I am very distressed
by the disappearance of Andrei Tarkovsky.
We're all very distressed.
He was the preferred
our collective cinema.
I know the sentence that is yours.
I gotta say
that our group does not approve
the sentence has been made of his actions.
with the same pain that you
and that many people in Paris.
We felt the loss
This wonderful man,
Interestingly,
Today
all this could not happen... "
Yes, but it happened...
And moving tribute to an old Bolshevik
does not erase twenty years of harassment of any kind.
Ivan's Childhood
demolished for "individualism and oneirism petit bourgeois. "
Solaris
honored with a list of 35 "remarks"
advocating cuts a great variety,
from "remove the concept of God"
to "remove the plans where sees Chris walking without pants "
- Without knowing clearly which of these two was the more serious transgressions.
Andrei Rublev and The Mirror sabotaged their output.
A continual harassment which lead him to choose exile
He was so naturally and deeply Russian.
Andrei was not a dissident.
Invited to participate in a film on dissent, he replied
"And why not on the kolkhoz?"
His heroes were not rebels, were strangers to this world,
like Dostoevsky's Idiot he dreamed of adapting.
His films are traversed by these fools, these fools, these aliens
whose archetype Yurodivi,
lack of a better one that results in
the innocent, in Boris Godunov
To understand this a Yurodivi,
it was included in the program
the story of legendary pianist Maria Yudina and Stalin:
one evening
Stalin hears on the radio the 23rd Mozart concerto played by Yudina,
and ordered that he brings the disc the next morning to hear it again.
Consternation was live, the disk does not exist.
Called a primary Conductor hiding,
a second vanishing,
that accepts a third trembling,
Brief panic everyone except Yudina,
fearless person who loved cats
and made the sign of the cross beginning of his concerts.
At dawn the disc is pressed
and Stalin sends a happy bonus 20 000 rubles to the pianist
who replied:
"I will offer this money to my church
and I pray that the Lord will forgives your sins against our people. "
Obviously the order of arrest is ready,
Stalin but said nothing
Yudina and is safe.
It was a Yurodiva?a.
Unbelievable?
But the scene is in Boris
where thousands of Russian victims of successive tyrannies
decipher the past century
- And that is why Andrei was to the quote in the program of Covent Garden.
The innocent proclaims the Crime Czar Guards rush,
but Boris stops them and asks Yurodivi to pray for him...
Unlike Yudina,
The Innocent refused to pray for the tyrant.
The most extraordinary story
Is not that one day, Stalin had wanted listen to Mozart's 23rd Concerto?
8. ONE HOUSE
"I look like a pirate," said Andrei.
The disease progressed,
and this shoot video, began to Gotland in the sunshine and gaiety,
had changed color.
But energy swept tarkovskienne everything when he was about the film.
From his bed he ran assembly, who was in Stockholm.
Sven came to Paris, with the necessary Leila
to refine the calibration.
January 23, 1986
Michal Leszczylowski landed the editor with a near-final version of the film.
The screening began.
It was the first time Andrei really saw his film.
Sven took notes...
In The Sacrifice
the house was a character.
But to think of others,
that the idea came from one film at the same time he was building a real house,
sometimes with his own hands,
Andrei was building an imaginary house,
one house where all parts communicate
and resulted in the same lane:
opening a door unexpectedly,
actors might Mirror Nostalgia come across those.
Now the house built in Russia was permanently lost.
Her new home in Italy was far away.
Tarkovsky and watched the house of his movie from another house of passage,
as he was known as.
And maybe why the object extreme the sacrifice was to be a house.
The screening ended.
Someone applauded.
Andrei screamed "light"!
Has he thought about the Pasternak's prophecy?
Andrei Tarkovsky died Hartmann Clinic, Neuilly,
December 29, 1986.
It was the New Year
As in the old expressionist cinema
where a funeral procession through necessarily a carnival,
is a forest of fir trees in his party been overcome to reach this cathedral
which is named after a movie:
St. Alexander Nevsky.
The foreground of his first film
showed a child standing next to a young tree.
The last shot of his latest film,
a child lying under a dead tree.
We could see a loop pile
and a farewell.
But when he turned the plan, Andrei did not know he was sick.
An enigma more than each according to decipher its codes.
Others make us moral,
Very Large leave us we do with our freedom.
Everyone must decide for itself
if the ocean of Solaris exists
Zone stalker if any,
if Alexander, the character of Sacrifice
has done or not a miracle.
He must find his own key to enter the house of Tarkovsky
the only filmmaker whose work holds in full
two children,
and between two trees.
Subtitle Arthuro di Bandini