Mon Cafe with Andre

An Essay on Andrei Tarkovsky

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  Stalker (1979)

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  Ivan’s Childhood (1962)

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  The Sacrifice (1986)

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  The Mirror (1975)

– Art knows. He said, with emphasis, steadying his hand from spilling the black coffee. The effect is expressed as shock, as catharsis. From the very moment when Eve ate the apple from the tree of knowledge, mankind was doomed to strive endlessly after the truth.

He lay on the hospital bed. In the cramped, dirty hospital. A thin blue blanket covered his thin skin covered his jutting bones, like a thin-stretched tent. The cancer had his body, naught else.

I’d travelled to Paris to see him – he’d told me he was dying.

He’d fled his home country long ago.

He dozed off. So I sat by him and thought about his films. I drank my own black coffee and stirred and thought.

His movies had been a mystery to me. They were almost silent, perfectly capable of image sustained alone. Stalker especially. What sounds he’d have were of mud and fire, and rain in wells, and bombs and an old organ and metal on metal clanking, steam and muttered Russian poetry. What was I to make of that? Was I too to doze? Or muse?

I recall a time I’d stolen into a third-rate theatre in Petersburg to watch Andre Rublev his great film the Sovs had marked ‘third-rate’ because of its perfect Christian religion. The Sovs had recoiled like a bull and stamped the movie into the dirt. And that meant the film got no money and, money being very important to the Sovs, could only play in the cheapest of theatres and I was in one to watch it with the frayed screen the unclean projector the dim light the burnt popcorn the stained carpet the gummy torn seats sticky with spat plugs of tobacco and the clung dirt and lung-matter of Beloms.

Maybe three people were with me? I don’t remember.

But the fat muzhchina who’d slumped into the seat next (why the one next ??) had fallen asleep pat on the part with the boy making the brass Church bell (at risk of his own life, tolling for he), the best part of the slowest picture.

– Faith, faith, faith. Ephebe, perish utterly. Muttered Andrei, half alive and clinging.

I think he was poisoned by the Sov’s because he’d made films abroad and they couldn’t stamp that out – they hated that their best wasn’t them, not really. Not in the way that Totalitarianism wanted. Which is to ‘Banish once and for all the neutrality of chess’…

Totalitarianism also wanted to finish once and for all the neutrality of cinema. All films for the Party. All for the Big Lie that everyone clucked on the Animal Farm.

But Andrei had made a movie called Nostalghia in Italy and in it a man walked a candle from one end of a ruined, Roman, waterless bath to the other and it was one take (one shot) and it took twelve minutes because the candle kept snuffing, and he had to keep starting over at the beginning but finally he got to the end. He got frustrated but he kept going. There was a spot of white in his black hair.

– With man’s help the Creator comes to know himself. Said Andrei, sipping his coffee which pained him. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death. To plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

– Of course, Andrei, that’s very good. I said sadly, not really listening but thinking about the movies.

Ah the movies! The movies! Could our frenzied minds but still and sit to these profound flickers! How much we might learn! Under panoramic sleights! Were we not so pushed to tap our fingers, flick our eyes, stamp our feet and distract, distract ourselves from our own pulse. What purchase there might be for us on our weary climbs, falls and swerving clinamens.

The Sacrifice: The nuclear war is nigh. The family man makes a bargain to God; I will sacrifice, and You will delay the apocalypse. He burns his house down. The bombs do not fall.

Stalker: The three men steal into the forbidden Zone, a place where tanks rust mid fire and water flowing everywhere, and in the center? (the blank the beginning).

Ivan’s Childhood: The Russian Boy goes behind the German lines, again, and again, and again – he remembers a well where his mother reflected.

The Mirror: The house burns a-flame under rain. The poet is dying of disease on the bed. He holds a sparrow in his hand, yet to release the last flying thought.

Andrei Rublev: The boy’s bell is cast. Its ring is loud and clear and true. Andrei embraces him. Andrei paints; we see his paintings in bright color and harmony.

– The thought is brief. The image, absolute. Said Andrei Tarkovsky, as he dies on the hospital bed.

The World goes with him. I drained the rest of my coffee and rented The Mirror on the way home and I watched it with a friend and it kept us awake all night.

Cheers to your Sunday morning…

JCL

Courtesy of the ‘Movies in 5 Minutes’ YT Channel

Adam and Eve, Andrei Rublev, Art, Cafe, Cigarettes, Creator, Essay, Faith, Film, Film Criticism, Ivan's Childhood, J Christian Lawrence, JCL, Logophrasis, Movies, Nostalghia, Paris, Poetry, Russia, Solaris, Stalker, Sunday morning, Tarkovsky, The Mirror, The Sacrifice, Totalitarianism

Andrei, Tarkovsky and Kitty Hunter-Blair. Sculpting in Time. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Print.