Andrei Tarkovsky
"Tarkovsky for me is the greatest (director), the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream."
Ingmar Bergman
Sergei Eisenstein's films where rooted in brute psychology. The Russia school of film theory and the Russian montage it produced where rooted in the idea that men where meat machines. That matter was all there is. That the laws of nature could be used to control men by implanting the ideas of the grand Communist state in their heads without them knowing it. The Russian montage, in this respect, failed. But, after Eisenstein would come a much different Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky.
Tarkovsky's films had nature, but the also transcended that. They had the physical and the metaphysical. In a word, Tarkovsky had God in his films. For a Soviet director at his time this was scandalous at best, dangerous at worst. Ultimately this would lead to him defecting from the Soviet Union and making his last two films in Italy and Sweden. I want to look at Tarkovsky's interaction with the physical and metaphysical in three of his films; Andrei Rublev, Solaris and The Stalker.
Andrei Rublev
Andrei Rublev begins with this scene
http://dai.ly/xkenhz. Tarkovsky's camera, along with his monk, transcend the world below. They rise above, but at the end of the scene the "metaphysical" and "physical" come crashing together. If your only taking this scene from a physicalist perspective this scene seems disconnected from the rest of the film (other than it being a Middle Ages monk). But if you take this scene in a theistic, even Christian, way you can ground the scene in the art of Andrei Rublev, the crude jokes of the jester, the making of the bell, and God creating man in his image. Transcendent.
But, Andrei Rublev, and all Tarkovsky's, work is rooted in not only transcendent, but in the physical. The man in the balloon comes crashing down. The caricatures aren't above it all, separate from the environment. Their down in the earth and the mud, the mocked, they laugh, they suffer injustice. Take this scene
http://youtu.be/FAuVQ1gVdEU.
Andrei Rublev is in many ways a brutal film. It's caricatures suffer. It's protagonist suffers. And after over 3 hours of stark black and white the film ends like this
http://youtu.be/FsEbrhv2jGY. We see Andrei Rublev's art, not in black and white but in all the glory of color. And not new. Centuries old. And Tarkovsky ends on the face of Christ and horses in the rain. The metaphysical and the physical. Transcendent.
Solaris
Tarkovsky's next film would go from Middle-ages Russia to Russia in the future. But it would start like this
http://youtu.be/ZfUjBUX0wrM. The film then spend the next thirty minutes in the country at the main characters childhood country home. Contrast this with Steven Soderbergh's remake, who's main caricature lives in an apparent in the city before arriving at the space station circling the plane Solaris in an elaborate docking sequence. Tarkovsky takes us from the lush country to here
http://youtu.be/rswYl7RLRNE. The scene is drawn out. It lasts for the nearly five minutes. Tarkovsky is talking us from God's nature, to man's city, to man's space station around God's planet. But the film is ultimately about what it is to be human. Kris, the main caricature, finds when he gets to Solaris that the planet itself seems to be alive, and it brings those you've left behind back to life. In Kris' case it is his wife who killed herself. His "new" wife can't cope with what she is (human or not human, his wife or something else, why she killed herself) and kills herself over and over again only to be brought back the next day. Watch here how Tarkovsky brings together the physical and metaphysical in his characteristics existential problem
http://youtu.be/FcglyhUre4w. Tarkovsky ends the film like this(
http://youtu.be/Jorf-2o5YfU) . Contrast this with Soderbergh's, which ends in the main caricatures apartment questioning his humanity. Tarkovsky's highlights Kris' humanity, provides forgiveness to his father and highlights nature well providing questions of the nature of what it is to be human.
Stalker takes place in a future in which a chemical and/or nuclear disaster has made a large area "unlivable". This area is called The Zone. People named Stalkers will take you in The Zone so you can find out its great mysteries and more so about yourself. There's a million ways different directors might depict the city and The Zone. None would be like Tarkovsky's vision. The city was shot in washed out sepia
http://youtu.be/PG0Ycueti7c. But The Zone looks like this
http://youtu.be/JcevEw1vczQ. The city they live in is less than real, but The Zone is hyper real and full of invisible dangers. One could say the city could be the repressive Soviet Union and The Zone the west which the Soviet Government is trying to keep their people from. The Stalker the one who knows the ways of sneaking the Soviet citizens to the west and his companions, who upon entering the west, are lost forever. But I think what is clear is that in The Zone there are things going on which are transcendent of the physical world. This is summed up in this film more than any of Tarkovsky's film is the final scene here
http://youtu.be/dNiVFCWMrqI. A distant train rattles the cups on the table, and then the little girl, with her mind, pushes the glasses across the table on to the floor.
