Tarkovsky

[grizzleb]

http://www.openculture.com/2010/07/tarkovksy.html

"Thanks to the Film Annex, you can now watch the complete collection of Tarkovsky films online – for free. Each film is listed in our Free Movie collection, but here you can access each major film in the order in which they were made."

Great post! Cheers for the link. Got to love free stuff.

Found this the other day, but I don't know how many of the films are actually still up. Free public domain films (some potentially decent stuff in here too, not just rubbish)

http://imovies.blogspot.com/

 

[drilla]

that's excellent... anyone who hasn't seen Mirror.. do that. do them all.

 

[michael]

Watched Stalker last night at the movies and really enjoyed it.

Some fairly shit subtitles going on, though - bits where I could clearly hear words I recognised which didn't come out in the translation, other bits where there weren't any subs at all being the most egregious.

There's a part where they all rest for a bit, after which the Stalker gets up and does a monologue, which was completely without subtitles. I think he's just repeating what he's heard in the dream (Bible quote) but it was a bit of an ask that the not-Russian speakers in the audience recognise the stream of muttering as just a repeat of what's come before. If anyone knows the bit I'm on about I wouldn't mind a quick summary.

There were a number of bods who make ambient-ish music in the audience last night, so it's interesting to return to this thread after almost 5 years and see comments re: sleepiness and reference to ambient music. Also surprised to see my own comment in this thread and realise it took that long to get around to watching another of his movies.

 

[zhao]

the music during the beginning of Stalker, where they are on the hand operated car and heading into the zone, mixing with the sound of the train tracks... so amazing.

 

[michael]

Yeah amazing scene, the camera kept close on the people rather than on the terrain, the increasingly synthetic noises... should be textbook, maybe is?

What I was thinking really, re: ambient stuff, is more about audience / reception side of things. Seemed v clear to me that Stalker was a pretty focused and well put together movie, which is how I would describe good ambient stuff. But in both cases I'd also fully expect most people to find it all equally boring and maybe kinda crazy to imagine some of it as focused (and some of it unfocused or badly put together).

Similar terms might be used, critically, is I guess the extent of where I was going. Whoopee.

 

[linebaugh]

I just saw Stalker for the first time. would love to hear what people here have to say about it.

 

[catalog]

I watched it quite recently, really liked it, but can't say I properly understood it when it starts to go weird in the zone. But something about that long opening and how it matches up with the ending was very satisfying. I really enjoyed the precision of the cinematography, its not expensive looking but especially those shots in the very beginning, where there's very little camera movement, I kept thinking that almost all of the shots were like paintings. The people were so still and the frames so well composed.

 

[linebaugh]

I watched it quite recently, really liked it, but can't say I properly understood it when it starts to go weird in the zone. But something about that long opening and how it matches up with the ending was very satisfying. I really enjoyed the precision of the cinematography, its not expensive looking but especially those shots in the very beginning, where there's very little camera movement, I kept thinking that almost all of the shots were like paintings. The people were so still and the frames so well composed.

the precision of the framing was what immediately struck me as well. The first scene in the bar that coordinates this glacial paced zoom with the blocking and dialogue, ending with a perfectly framed image of the stalker after maybe 15 minutes of consistently paced camera movement was really impressive. I could only imagine the actors nailing the take, 15 minutes of perfect focus, only to redo because the pace of the zoom was off by just a fraction.

 

[catalog]

And all the perfectly art directed detritus and peeling walls, the cup of water etc. All very meticulous in its studied shabbiness. The colours also very washed. That opening, it sort of announces that you're going to enter a completely different world. It's like a play in that sense, more than a conventional movie. I think you start to see through it a little more in the next sequence, you work it out a bit, are less carried or sent, when they are entering the zone, cos there's so much missing, you lose that suspension of disbelief.

 

[linebaugh]

I took the zone to be some kind of malicious zen space where the man/nature split is shown in its true light as a continuum, a feedback system. Man and nature as the "same essential reality, the producer-product." Its the increased pace of the flux and flow in the zone system that reveals this and creates a perpetual now that distorts past and future (time was funky in the zone, right?).

 

[linebaugh]

And 'the zone' might be a misnomer- the humans take on the roll of environment in the zone. Theyre the only constant; the zone lives on them.

 

[linebaugh]

And all the perfectly art directed detritus and peeling walls, the cup of water etc. All very meticulous in its studied shabbiness. The colours also very washed. That opening, it sort of announces that you're going to enter a completely different world. It's like a play in that sense, more than a conventional movie. I think you start to see through it a little more in the next sequence, you work it out a bit, are less carried or sent, when they are entering the zone, cos there's so much missing, you lose that suspension of disbelief.

felt the same. the sense that its a stage performance is there, and the sepia-fabrication association is made explicit when it returns during the stalkers dream sequences within the zone.

Im thinking back on time again, as the standard experience of time is one of the many things 'missing' in the zone. Theres a belief/desire-time connection implied. In the pre-zone portions, time is central focus: the painstakingly tedious depiction of the stalkers morning routine; the argument between stalker and wife on the weight of past mistakes and future consequences, what the wife once was and what she will become in 5,10 years. Once they enter the zone, and desire and belief is thrown into question, time and causality become wonky.

 

[linebaugh]

The big question of course is why didn't they enter the room. It looks like they didnt want to end up like Porcupine and have the room reveal them as simple and shallow beings, which would suggest they want to continue living with their own fabricated world of belief, but this is contradicted right after when the stalker has a crisis at home and accuses them of being unable to believe in anything.

Similar contradiction is played out and exemplified by the post-zone moment after they leave the bar for a second time. The sepia pallet is lost for the first and only wide shot of their derelict town- in full technicolor we see an expansive industrial zone. A grim image considering the movie spent the past 3 hours making out humans as hopelessly imbued with the environment, but the full color spectrum defies this association with a sense of life.

 

[catalog]

I think i need to watch it again, i sort of drifted off in the whole middle bit, cant really remember any of it. Perhaps we need to do a group watch on a tarkovsky film, maybe mirror or nostalgia, ive not seen either of those.

His early films are worth checkingoyt, the steamroller and the violin and his version of the killers. And my favorite tarkovsky, certainly the one ive seen the most and enjoy more each time, is andrei rublev, its very straightforward.

 

[linebaugh]

Ive only seen Solaris, which has one of my favorite movie moments ever when the space captain immediately without hesitation straps the clone wife on a rocket and blasts her into space

 

[luka]

I just saw Stalker for the first time. would love to hear what people here have to say about it.

Sometimes I think it's even better than the matrix. I'm not interested in cinema but that film smashed me to bits. I totally believe in it like I totally believe in the matrix. It's a magical artefact.

 

[luka]

"I am often asked what does this Zone stand for. There is only one possible answer: the Zone doesn't exist. Stalker himself invented his Zone. He created it, so that he would be able to bring there some very unhappy persons and impose on them the idea of hope. The room of desires is equally Stalker's creation, yet another provocation in the face of the material world. This provocation, formed in Stalker's mind, corresponds to an act of faith"

 

[luka]

For my part, I want to say that the zone is real, that it is the imagination as commons, which is why you can walk together on its grounds. But it's tricky. Maybe it's only as real as you can make it. That's why the end goal of dissensus must be a sustainable group psychosis. Into the zone and no return.

 

[luka]

the world is too rubbish in its cardboard shared reality aspect, that's what we all are sure of. So we have to dream it better, expand its parameters, knock out some of the tedious constraints

 

[luka]

I'm the stalker, Mr Tea is the scientist. Craner is the depressed writer. I'm leading them into psychosis. They're grumbling and drinking vodka out of a thermos.