The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky | Hacker News Reader

The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky

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77 pointsbenbreen44 comments

I have mixed feelings about Tarkovsky. He is certainly profoundly important. His sensuality is unmatched. Whether it's the perfect use of sound (endless dripping water, the ringing of a fallen cup), the incredible imagery or the beautiful stories (I think about the bell story in Andrei Rublev a lot), Tarkovsky is the king of making you feel the movie.

That said, I don't worship at the altar of Tarkovsky. I don't love that his movies have this impenetrable length. I don't love that his movies inevitably have some long philosophical lecture by a male character while the women stay to the sides, often silent. I will sound like a petulant digital native, but I have been bored by a Tarkovsky.

Too often Tarkovsky is used as this unquestionably brilliant artist. To appreciate him is to be a true cinemaphile, while to hate him is to indicate your pedestrian tastes. I don't agree. There should be no shame in being bored by Stalker, in not getting Andrei Rublev, in finding The Sacrifice a little too navel gazing.

If I had to explain Tarkovsky to someone who doesn't watch art movies, I'd say that he's like the Velvet Underground. Unless you have a particular taste, you probably won't enjoy songs like Heroin or Venus in Furs. But you'll definitely enjoy the music made by people who did like Heroin or Venus in Furs. You don't have to enjoy Tarkovsky. But watch some of his movies, and you'll start to have flashes of recognition in movies like Arrival, La Cienaga, The New World, etc.

Tarkovsky movies are boring, so I would ask someone if they minded boring movies before recommending him. It's just that lack-of-boringness is not the only axis by which to judge or enjoy a movie. I can put up with being bored for 2 hours if I get something else out of it. I don't think you need to like Tarkovsky -- I don't think you need to like anything -- but Tarkovsky is a good examples for the pleasures of cinema orthogonal to the boring-not-boring axis.

I like the way you put it about feeling the movie. When I try to picture what it was like to live in the Middle Ages, I usually end up picturing something like Andrei Rublev.

To me a boring movie is one that is mostly a constant flux of extremely predictable events with near zero content to analyze (e.g. a Marvel superhero movie). Tarkovsky is nothing like that, in fact I think his movies are the exact opposite of that.

I didn't say I was necessarily bored. But most people find art movies boring, and Marvel movies exciting. I can try to get the world to adopt an idiosyncratic definition of "boring", or I can use words in their public meaning. Movies with easy-to-follow plots and lots of excitment are not boring. Dreamy movies with messages that can't be summarized in five messages are boring. Fine. But sometimes boring movies are still good.

What is your definition of boring? The concepts explored, for example, in Solaris and Stalker are far from boring. If you rely on a cliffhanger every 15 minutes, your taste might be boring to many cinephiles.

Yes, but there are many great film makers, whose work isn't generally considered 'boring', like much of David Lean, or Milos Forman's Amadeus.

I don't understand how you can read my comment as anything other than pro-Tarkovsky. I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek by calling them "boring". I hope the cinephiles of the world can someday forgive me.

The real tragedy is that in our hyper-attention-seeking society that calling a movie "boring" is such a terrible insult. A movie that is strategically boring defeats our expectations. Movie makers know what we're expecting, and when we're expecting it, and delaying or flouting the fulfillment of those expectations can be part of the movie-making art. It's been a long time since I've seen Solaris, but I just recently rewatched 2001, and that's a movie that definitely uses boringness strategically. It has long sequences that communicate how long it takes to get around space, so that when you finally get to the Discovery One you can feel how far away and isolated Bowman and Poole are.

I appreciated the idea of an intelligent planet. (But yeah, 2:47, mostly dialog? NOt so much.)

The soundtrack was in part created on a synthesizer (the ANS) heard in several AT films. Its tones are based on patterns drawn on glass. That part of the film survives (at 38m) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrF1PSoTN3A

How it worked: http://www.theremin.ru/archive/ans.htm

"Boring" is a description of a thing's effects, not the thing itself. Tartovsky's movies are not boring for me, so I find your description completely inaccurate. There is nothing inherently boring in them, just things that don't appeal to all audiences. A lot of people might find them boring (and that's fine), but that's a description of their response, not the movie.

It's better to describe the movie as "slow", "having no action", or "driven by dialog and long scenes of nature", or, if you must, "a movie most people would find boring". These are objectively true.

Saying the movie is "boring" not objectively true. It is a subjective description.

For me it matters extremely when and in wich mood I watch a film of Tarkovsky. In the wrong mood I cannot stand watching through any of his films. Im the right mood they are pure magic of the kind that will stay with you forever.

Some of the action in the hyperactive cold-war thriller 'Atomic Blonde' takes place in a cinema showing a screening of Stalker [0].

I always wondered whether this was an intentional contrast in tempo given that the other cultural references in Atomic Blonde are music-based [1] and much more contemporary with the late-80s setting of the film

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)#Influence_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde#track_listing

>Impenetrable length.

Please consider, that Stalker, for example is 2h 42min. Compared to say, the 2h 15min runtime of The Force Awakens, which is intended for wide public consumption, it does not seem that excessive to me.

Rythm also affects perceived length; a Barry Lyndon minute is not a Modern Family minute.

The Force Awakens is an onslaught of sensory attacks, it holds you attention for 2 hours whether you want it to or not.

2hr+ of art cinema takes strong focus or experience to stay awake and watch. I could watch about 20mins of the movies from my cinema studies classes before my eyes were dropping, almost 3 hours would be a brutal slog.

My thesis is that people have troubles connecting with Stalker because they are accustomed to movies being a very voyeuristic and pornographic experience, with in-your-face exposition at every corner and the producers making sure there is nothing ambiguous happening ever. Stalker is not made for you to be a spectator. It's filmed as if you're getting on the journey of the characters. A lot of time they rant alone, they're speaking to you. They asks questions and nobody answers, because that was addressed to you. People either "get into" that movie and it's one of their favorite ever, or they don't and it's extremely boring, which is normal. I think it should be approached with that in mind, that you have to actively take part in the story to appreciate it.

Well said. When I recommend Stalker to someone I tell them to make sure they don't have anything else to do. Hide your phone. Prepare yourself as if you are preparing to meditate. Slow way down, notice how the scenes make you feel. They're the antithesis of American films where something is blowing up or crashing every minute or so. In some sense you have to detox from American cinema in order to appreciate a Tarkovsky film. The problem isn't Tarkovsky, it's our frenetic pace. Tarkovsky's sense of time is much different than ours.

His appreciation of painting and goal to make film as valid of an artistic medium as painting really exposes this. It also takes most of us a significant investment of time and perspective to engage with a painting as an object of contemplation rather than condensing it down to set of symbols and moving on to the next image in rapid succession.

When I recommend, it is for the long train car ride in silence during which the film imperceptibly switches from black and white to color. And, for the long shot looking down at the stream...

The rest is a bonus on top of these experiences.

;)

I understand what you're getting at with the quite different, immersive style of Stalker. I don't necessarily agree that the lack of connection is necessarily due to people being accustomed to "voyeuristic and pornographic [experiences]". Sure, there's plenty of movies like that and many who would dislike Tarkovsky are devotees of that style.

But one can be a lover of subtle, beautiful cinema and still find Tarkovsky boring. I can easily sit through Nashville or Beau Travail or La Cienaga and still find Tarkovsky boring. Indeed, attributing dislike of Tarkovsky to being unsophisticated in one's taste is precisely what I was critiquing in my previous comment. Tarkovsky is not the arbiter of one's film taste.

It's really not about sophistication, it's about approaching these movies from the wrong angle. I'm pretty plebeian in my taste myself!

I guess you somehow missed the film "Mirror" (1975). It's my favorite of his works. It is only 1h47m, has a female main character, and I don't feel like it's trying to teach morals. Oh, and it has stunning visuals and cinematography. The fire scene, the interiors, the colors... Now I have to re-watch.

A good line about Tarkovsky, from an essay about Metal Gear Solid of all places:

> But there’s a serenity to Myst that you can’t really find in any major videogame today. It’s videogame Tarkovsky, really: The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking at everything. So Myst is boring, but only in the way Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn’t that they’re slow. The problem is that the world has made you too fast.)

https://ew.com/article/2015/09/04/metal-gear-solid-strangest...

Ah, Stalker and Adrei Rublev are among my favourite movies. Contrary to what some may feel, I find their pacing to be a nice, almost meditative experience. The others of his movies came to me as more pretentious, although also nice in their way (maybe I need to give them another watch).

For a similar kind of experience, but more down to earth, I would recommend the movies of Béla Tarr.

“Meditative” is exactly the word I’d use as well. Which also brings up parallels with meditation itself: meditating might seem boring, but when fully engaged in (and with some practice) can be a transformative experience.

In undergrad, I went to the library once and watched Andrei Rublev on laserdisc. I had been "into" films before, but this was quite unlike anything I had seen up to that point.

Anyways, there's a scene in the film with a pagan ritual that is shot with such dreamlike perfection. I remember seeing something from the corner of my eye and noticed there were three other film-obsessed laserdisc enthusiasts standing behind me mesmerized.

Andrei Rublev is on Criterion blu-ray now as a flawless restoration. Watching it recently, it's a bit heavy-handed, but still magnificent if you watch the film on it's own terms.

I think many of the visual techniques pioneered by Tarkovsky are now commonplace, but the meandering dreamlike pace and tone is still rare. Apichatpong Weerasethakul comes to mind as a director who can pull-off the dreamike stuff as well as Tarkovsky. See Uncle Boonmee Who can Recall his Past Lives (https://youtu.be/gqlD_VnsM-k).

This brings back memories from the early 2000s. I was in high school and got very interested about Andrei Tarkovsky but it was very hard to get copies of his works anywhere. Finally I was able to order couple of VHS's to my local library from some library quite far away. Watching The Sacrifice after school alone in our house was more frightening than any scary movies I saw afterwards (not too many tbh...). Also I grew deep respect to Andrei Rublev. Still have a copy of his Holy Trinity on my wall.

As a human being he wasn't perfect, but I come back to images from his film in my head time and time again and they help me look up from my work and consider bigger things on an ongoing basis. His films create space in my head which I go to for help when I need it most.

Scenes from his films stick in my head much more than scenes from other directors except maybe Malick.

An extremely distracting aspect of Tarkovsky's cinema is something he shares with most Soviet cinema, which is that all sound is recorded and mixed in during post-production. All environmental sound is accomplished through foley work. All lines are dubbed in, sometimes by completely different actors. There are no mics on set whatsoever. It makes his movies (as great as they are) feel like Looney Tunes cartoons.

Amazingly, this approach to cinema did not end with the fall of the USSR, and most Russian movies continue being recorded the same way.

Tangentially, neither did the tradition of dubbing foreign films by just having a single guy read every character's lines without even removing the original audio track, but just trying to talk louder than the actors' original audio.

I can’t say I’ve noticed that - I saw most Tarkovsky movies in the late 80s before I knew about these details.

When it comes to Stalker (which I recently rewatched) I’d imagine the sound would add to the strangeness.

> Tangentially, neither did the tradition of dubbing foreign films by just having a single guy read every character's lines without even removing the original audio track, but just trying to talk louder than the actors' original audio.

There's another reason for that I think. The first movies pirated to USSR were dubbed in "underground" conditions by enthusiasts (and their translations were in many cases more exact, closer to the original than "official" ones made later). Some people get used to that style and really prefer a single voice, but proper translation with much of an original sound, intonations to a hollow "official" "professional" dubs.

Italian films recorded dialogue after as well, no? I'm not sure whether it's all sound, but you can clearly tell that the dialogue is dubbed. In Truffaut's Day for Night, the Italian actress Valentina Cortese mentions that with Fellini, the actors would recite numbers instead of lines. The most egregious instance is Antonioni's Red Desert, which stars Richard Harris, who I'm pretty sure did not speak fluent Italian with a perfect accent.

> did not speak fluent Italian with a perfect accent

Speaking of which, here's an American production where Schwarzenegger's voice was dubbed over, for what I assume are similar reasons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p3nmyTICo0

The IMDB plot synopsis is pretty great:

Hercules is sent to Earth where he finds true love and starts a promising career in the bodybuilder business.

I suppose this is the benefit of not knowing Russian and having to watch it subbed. It ends up being hard to notice (I certainly didn't).

The article mentions Chris Marker’s film on Tarkovsky, “One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich” which I very much recommend, especially if you are a fan of both filmmakers. It contains a lot of behind the scenes footage from the filming of The Sacrifice, and is a deep and insightful appreciation of Tarkovsky’s contribution to cinema from an artist of comparable impact. There’s a copy on YouTube here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=35lETmPDypI

I will never forgive him for butchering Solaris, he changed the ending from one of the most beautiful, tragic and haunting in all sci-fi to a simple and idiotic twist. Lem, who wanted to make sci-fi into serious literature was a harsh critic of american pop sci-fi and especially such twist endings.

BTW, if you are ok to listen in Russian, I'd recommend to try to listen 2007 radio-version with Armen Dzhigarkhanyan as Snout. It's just awesome. Listened it at least 4 times over a years and always found something new in it.

I had the opposite reaction. I read Lem's Solaris and was underwhelmed. But seeing Tarkovsky's Solaris seemed like a big improvement over the book.

I like Lem and think he succeeded in his mission, I see Tarkovsky as intellectually inferior (he is a mere intellectual, while Lem is a philosopher and it shows in the depth of concepts).

he is not a nice person. apart from the horses killed filming rublev, look at how many people died so he could entertain his narcissistic fantasies

Not sure I've ever had heard this, ehh, how many people died?

He is probably referring to the death of several people from cancer after the filming of Stalker, because some scenes were filmed at an industrial facility in Estonia where actors and crew were exposed to pollution. But to blame Tarkovsky personally for this is a bit of a stretch.

Gee, I hadn't heard that. The sound designer said:

"We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn ["the Writer"] too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when [Tarkovsky's wife] Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)#Production...

And Tarkovsky himself died of cancer likely from that exposure.

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