Time-Pressure: Watching Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky.

During June and July, I watched all the films by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.  This was not a goal of mine to begin with.  I read an article somewhere online about the film Stalker and noticed it was free on YouTube.  I started watching it several months ago but only made it through about the first 20 minutes.  It was too slow, though oddly beautiful.  Then, inexplicably, it called my name again.  

Over a couple of nights, I experienced its slow pace, its mystery, its often staggering imagery, and its heavy-handed existential considerations.  I can not say I was entertained so much as entranced by it.  After I finally got in to it, the film became something I felt strongly about but I could neither articulate what it was that I felt nor could I clearly define what I gained by viewing it.

I have known about Tarkovsky since my college days.  I watched a lot of foreign films back then.  I may have seen his Solaris around 1980.  I no longer recall.  Watching it again recently did not seem familiar to me.  But I definitely had never seen any of his other films.  He directed only seven over a 25-year career cut short by cancer.

Stalker, Solaris, and the others are what I classify as “art” films, in the tradition of, say, Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini.  But his films are distinctly “Tarkovskian”, very different from those other internationally renown directors.  Nevertheless, all these directors, and many others, share the preference for aesthetics over narrative.  The story is not as important as how the film affects the viewer visually and subconsciously.

All Tarkovsky films are sloooooow.  This is for several reasons but none more important than his cinematic theory of “time-pressure.”  Most films are edited in a certain way.  With most films, especially action films, the edits come on the action.  As someone reaches out with their arm – cut to something else.  As an explosion occurs – cut.  As a head turns – cut.  As a door opens – cut.  This was the technique pioneered by another Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, in his classic, Battleship Potemkin (1925).  Edit on the action.

Not Tarkovsky.  His films are shot in long takes.  Often in the shot the camera starts or remains back away from the actors, composed as if it were a painting.  Tarkovsky uses close-ups sparingly.  The camera may dolly slowly inward or outward or sideways.  There are few edits in his most important scenes.  That is the point.  You don't cut, you stay on the image.  In this way, a psychological tension is created.  A slow simmering that builds up.  Only then, after an extended moment in time, do you cut to another shot. 

A wonderful kiss shot in a birch forest as seen from a trench in the war zone.  From Ivan's Childhood.

A gorgeous, somewhat abstract shot of Jesus in the snow.  The way this is framed, he and his followers could be walking the bridge line of a gigantic skull with the running dark blotches as eye sockets.  From Andrei Rublev.

The build-up of tension by remaining fixed on an often hypnotic image is, in part, how Tarkovsky “sculpts time,” how pressure builds in the minds of the viewer with seemingly little effort.  It is in this subtle way that Tarkovsky creates his impact on the viewer without anything much even happening.  A perfectly composed scene, a work of art, with actors moving slowly, speaking softly, never running, never shouting, it builds and builds.  Let the time-pressure build up.  This is the essence of Tarkovsky.

A fine example of this is a very extended take of a man, Andrei, attempting to light a candle and walk across a drained mineral pool in Nostalghia.  He has to walk across the mineral pool without the candle going out.  When it goes out during his first attempt, Andrei returns to the side of the pool, relights it and begins again.  Step by step.  Sometimes using his overcoat to block the slight breeze.  Sometimes simply cupping his hand around the fragile flame.  

There are no edits.  The shot is simply a slow dolly back and forth.  When he lights the candle (twice) at one end of the mineral pool we see his whole body.  When he finally places the candle at the other end we only see his arms and hands.  By the time Andrei does this more than eight and a half minutes have past.  Music only appears as the candle is placed, before that, throughout the entire shot, there is silence.  Only the sound of his wet stepping through the drained pool and his breathing, whispered mumbling.

This is time-pressure.  Nothing much is happening.  There are no car chases or explosions.  There is simply the ordinary Being of the moment, the extended elongated moment.  The tension of the candle going out and having to start all over again.  The tension of each step as he ensures the candle does not go out again.  According to Tarkovsky, he has "sculpted " time in this shot.  Tarkovsky wrote that when he made a film he was literally “sculpting in time.”  If you expose the audience to the essence of time long enough, with minimal but understandable action, you create a kind of pressure that affects the viewer emotionally.  Or doesn't.  In which case it is boring as hell.

Why does Andrei do this with the candle?  Well, that is part of what Nostaghia is about.  During the course of the film he meets a holy fool, a crazy but harmless, deeply religious man who believes that it is important, a matter of fulfilled faith, to cross that pool with a lighted candle.  Andrei is fulfilling a promise he made to the holy fool, who has just immolated himself with fire.  Of course, this does not make much rational sense.  There is only a thread of a narrative here.  Technically, since the pool is drained, he does not fulfill the promise he made because the holy fool meant to do it while treading water.  

But that is getting far too rational about it.  There is this extended shot of Andrei painstakingly doing it.  You get a sense of what the candle and crossing the pool (drained or not) means to him.  It is an important act by a troubled man in honor of another man who set himself on fire.  The film builds up to this moment, a seemingly insignificant moment, that takes on great attribution because of how the film is constructed leading up to this.  

The soft, strange beauty of Solaris.

Now throw into this style some existential philosophy, considerations of faith, spirituality, memory, dream, fantasy, place and you become immersed in a space within the film where traditional narrative, the story, the who and what, becomes less important than the presentation of a multidimensional now.  Layers of meaning and emotions, light and dark, color and sepia tone, all conspire to get beyond you trying to make sense of anything.  You merely experience the film as it bears witness to you in a way that defies concrete explanation.  

Ironically, my personal experience is that there is a fine line between time-pressure and boredom.  If you are not alert and actively engaging with the film (which gives you precious little story to work with) then you can't grasp all that is there or, perhaps, anything that is there.  You get bored.  I found myself bored with Tarkovsky at several points throughout this films.  Does that mean I am bad at engaging with Tarkovsky?  Or is Tarkovsky bad at engaging with me?

It means neither.  As with all art, you either connect with the work or you do not.  Jackson Pollock, for example, makes great demands on the viewer.  His masterpieces are chaotic dribbles of paint, materially speaking.  If you cannot appreciate the beauty and genius of that, if you prefer, say, looking at the human fleshiness of Caravaggio, it simply means you prefer a certain style, that you have a certain taste.  It does not mean Carrvaggio is better than Pollock.

So it is with Tarkovsky films.  They are distinctive.  They are influential.  They demand your attention though are paced in ways to often challenge it for most people.  You see the resonance of them in the work of David Lynch and Terrence Malick, for example.   It is not a far cry from Tarkovsky's Nostaghia or Mirror to Blue Velvet or Tree of Life.  These are all art films, interested in affecting you aesthetically more so than telling you a story.  Of course, all these films have some narrative structure, it is clearly of secondary importance, however.  

You ruin the experience when you try to figure out “what happened.”  What part is a dream?  What is real?  Why is it so strange?  It makes for interesting discussion but such stuff is not the point.  The point is how do you feel?  Do you find yourself later recalling a certain image or scene or sound without knowing why?  The ambiguity of impact is the nature of the art form.  It is not for everyone. Even for those it is for, it affects each person differently.  An entire audience is not going to have the same experience of watching Tarkovsky as they would in watching , say, Steven Spielberg.  Spielberg affects the audience as a collective, whereas, Tarkovsky bores part of his audience and affects all the others in different ways because he is working with visual and audio elements more so than a "story."

A haunting dream shot of Andrei's family back in Russia from Nostalghia.  The dog and horse are perfectly posed.  Tarkovsky mimics sunrise with a large light that rises (probably on a crane invisible in the heavy mist) from behind his family's home.

Tarkovsky died young.  He only made seven movies:  Stalker (1979), Mirror (1975), Nostalghia (1983), Andrie Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Sacrifice (1986), and Ivan's Childhood (1962).  This is the order in which I watched them, not that that is of great importance.  Each one was fascinating to me at times.  Many of them were boring to me at times.  I don't mind telling you I have no idea what was going on in parts of them.  Why were people and objects falling down in The Sacrifice?  Why was there a levitating woman in Mirror?  What is it with this dripping water?  Its everywhere.  Some take more effort for me to watch than others.  But this is a matter of personal taste.  It does not prevent me from appreciating that Tarkovsky created his own genre.  His own film language.  

Ivan's Childhood is his most straightforward film, his first non-student film.  It closely adheres to a meaty story compared with his other works.  A boy serves as a Russian scout in World War Two.  His family has been killed by the Nazis.  The Russians want to send him to military school but Ivan wants to remain a scout.  He wants to contribute.  He acts courageously and  very mature, not innocently at all that would befit his age.  Thanks to war, his childhood is a non-childhood.  It is full of adult interaction and experiences.  

Though in black and white, the film, like all of Tarkovsky's works, is beautiful at times to behold.  Perhaps the most noteworthy shot in the film is of a kiss between a Russian officer and a young woman as he straddles a trench.  It takes place in a birch forest which looks surreal in the stark contrast of light and dark.  The entire sequence is gorgeous.  Though it contains certain basic elements of Tarkovsky (mirror shots, water dripping, horses) the artist was not fully formed yet.  This is the director being a mild (exploring) version of himself.

Andrei Rublev is also in black and white.  It vividly depicts the harshness of life in the 1400's.  The title character was a famous Russian religious artist, who made icons for the church and wealthy people.  But the film is only loosely about him.  You never see him working on any of his art.  Instead, it is divided into eight parts, each a kind of mini-film, some of which he doesn't appear in at all.  Many lovers of Tarkovsky consider this to be his best film.  It is certainly a masterpiece.  It was recognized as a special film at the Cannes Film Festival three years after its release.  Official awards were prohibited by the Soviet State.

It was also controversial upon its release.  The fifteenth century was brutal and that brutality is shown on the screen, especially to horses and dogs, two animals that recur in many of Takovsky's film.  There is one shot in which a horse is killed.  But if you can handle the authentic cruelty you will know what it was like to live in the savage squalor and simplicity of that time period.  Tarkovsky avoided such overt imagery of intense violence going forward.

Several versions of this film exist.  The Soviet Union censors did not approve of its “struggle against oppression” theme and edited all hint of that out of the movie for its only, brief showing in Russia.  For various reasons, there are other edited versions, but not by Trakovsky.  The version I saw was slightly over three hours long and was edited as Tarkovsky intended.  This version only became wildly available several years after the film was released.

Solaris is perhaps his best known work.  It is one of his most intriguing films story-wise, though it may be his least cinematic.  It is sort of an anti-sci-fi sci-fi film.  Technology is not important in this film.  The special effects are rather simplistic and B-Grade silly.  But the structure of the story is fascinating.  Solaris is a planet that has a sort of consciousness.  A psychological gravity.  The scientists orbiting it and studying it are affected by it.  Somehow, we don't know how and it doesn't matter, the planet induces and creates important people from a given scientist's life.  In the case of our protagonist, Kris Kelvin, it is his long-dead wife, Hari.  

The film deals with the memory, the reality and identity of Hari, how much the Solaris-made version of her possesses, how much Kris projects upon her.  Initially, Hari is only the same in body and basic personality and Kris rejects her as a hallucination or. at least, a fake.  Rejected, a second version appears which gradually comes to embody more of Kris's memories of her and takes on greater depth and meaning for Kris.  Simultaneously, Kris is unconsciously drawn into the planet's affective gravity.  The planet basically takes over all his memories through his greater acceptance of Hari.  Exactly how and how much is left ambiguous.  This complex web of story entanglements summons a wide variety of possible inquiries by the viewer.  Solaris is a fascinating film that won Tarkovsky worldwide recognition by winning the jury prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.

The Sacrifice.  Did the burning of this house serve as sacrifice for the ending of a nuclear war?  Is this man crazy?  Was it mostly a dream?  Tarkovsky did not answer any of these questions in the film, he merely poses them.

Then we come Mirror and Stalker.  The later film is what started all this with me in the first place.  I tried to watch it last year, but paused about a quarter of the way into it because it seemed so slow.  I came back to it for unknown reasons.  Maybe I just wanted to finish it and I was already bored at the time.  Couldn't hurt anything.  But this time it hooked me.  Then I immediately watched the whole movie again.  I did the same thing with Mirror, only for different reasons.  I'll blog about both these films in more detail soon.

I have already shared a minimalist moment of time-pressure with Nostaghia.  Some feel this film gets lost in his string of masterpieces.  It is not uncommon to see it referred to as a “masterpiece” on the internet.  If you are into Terrence Malick and enjoy philosophical films, this is a great one.  The holy fool who sets himself on fire.  The burst of birds from an icon's chest concluding a sacred ceremony.  The main character, Andrei, trying to work through a host of internal issues including his family back in Russia.  This was shot in Italy.  

Unconventionally, there are no classic Italian landmarks in the film.  Apparently, he avoided them.  By this time Tarkovsky was not working in Russia.  The communist regime did not like his maverick qualities, though his propaganda value was high, showing Russian superiority in the cinematic arts.  I'll probably watch this one again sometime.  Some of the shots are like incredible oil paintings, though this is true of each Tarkovsky film.

The Sacrifice is a fitting title perhaps for Tarkovsky's last film.  This one is shot in Sweden and there are even a few lines spoken in English in it.  Tarkovsky was dying of cancer as he edited this film.  Among other things, this is a classic retelling of Abraham's Sacrifice of Issac from the Old Testament.  Nuclear war comes to the world while a small group of people gather in the rather bleak, wet countryside to celebrate the main character's birthday.  This film feels a bit dated to me, though – of course – there are those who think it might be his best film.  

The Cold War feel to the film (this was 1986) seems sensational to me today.  It is difficult to relate to any character's reaction.  The doctor with his insistence upon sedation injections seems silly.  Otherwise, it is well-done and heavily philosophical.  The man offers to sacrifice his home and his even son if God will just make things go back to the way they were yesterday, before war had come.  He awakens to find that that is just the case.  He burns down his house as sacrifice for God granting his wish.  Was the nuclear war only fabricated in the man's mind, in a dream?  Did he burn his house down for nothing?  Simply because he woke up and the world was fine does not necessarily justify the house burning.  Is he delusional or did he bargain with God?  

Would he have killed his son if the the house burning didn't suffice?  Tarkovsky movies conjure all sorts of questions best discussed with a few friends over beers or something.

Tarkovsky struggles with faith through many of his films much the same way Dostoevsky did in his novels.  In fact, one of my first conclusions about Stalker after I watched it again was that it felt so Dostoevskian.  The Sacrifice is all the more fascinating because Tarkovsky knew he was absolutely dying while he edited it.  The finished film is as he intended.  His final statement.  He died seven months later.    

Throughout all his films, there are some interesting consistencies and obvious preferences.  Most don't make much sense rationally.  He populates his films with horses, dogs, milk (usually spilled), water dripping, fires, wind, transitioning between color and non-color (sometimes black and white, sometimes sepia), levitation, religious people, there are many others I'm sure.  

These are the signposts while watching a Tarkovsky film that it really is a Tarkovsky film.  It is made to affect you.  Not affect your understanding of the story but emotionally through the application of time-pressure, among a host of other cinematic tools and symbols.  It doesn't hurt anything that Tarkovsky had a classic artistic eye for photography.  His lighting and sets are often heart-rending or mouth-gaping.  They inspire awe.

Whatever else they inspire, even boredom, is unique to each person watching.  That is interesting to think about.  A Tarkovsky film is what it is and almost everybody who isn't bored by it has a different reason for enjoying it.  Tarkovsky is so open with his presentation of the narrative, so focused on its pacing and lighting and sound and metaphysics, that it bursts forth in a vast complexity of multiple intimacies ready for different people to find whatever is most relateable to them.  There are few works of art of any kind that accomplish that.