Vimeo of the Day: "The wet images of Andrei Tarkovsky"
By Michael J.W. Stickings
Of all the great film directors, the most enigmatic to me is perhaps Andrei Tarkovsky. His movies, simply, are starkly beautiful and existentially unsettling.
If you ask me, Andrei Rublev is one of the greatest films ever made, an astonishing depiction of one man's artistic obsession in medieval Russia, but his six other feature films are similarly impressive. Indeed, it was his final film, The Sacrifice, a Bergmanesque masterpiece made in Sweden, that first drew me to him, posing questions about the human condition, within a bizarre story that appears to make little narrative sense, that I found profoundly disturbing but also profoundly important.
And yet it's never really clear what his films are about, beneath the surface, and for that reason he was not just an enigmatic filmmaker but a fascinating one as well. (One of his five Russian films, Solaris, was remade by Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney. It's a fine effort, but the original is much weirder and rather less accessible.)
Anyway, the point here is not to delve into Tarkovsky's work (and I encourge you to do that; three of his films are available at Criterion -- I highly recommend Ivan's Childhood, his first film, which along with Solaris has been gorgeously remastered; I'm waiting for the Blu-ray special edition of Andrei Rublev) but to introduce a wonderful Vimeo called "The wet images of Andrei Tarkovsky." It captures some of the beauty of Tarkovsky's work, and here it is. Enjoy!
1+1=1 | The wet images of Andrei Tarkovsky from Luis Enrique Rayas on Vimeo.
Of all the great film directors, the most enigmatic to me is perhaps Andrei Tarkovsky. His movies, simply, are starkly beautiful and existentially unsettling.
If you ask me, Andrei Rublev is one of the greatest films ever made, an astonishing depiction of one man's artistic obsession in medieval Russia, but his six other feature films are similarly impressive. Indeed, it was his final film, The Sacrifice, a Bergmanesque masterpiece made in Sweden, that first drew me to him, posing questions about the human condition, within a bizarre story that appears to make little narrative sense, that I found profoundly disturbing but also profoundly important.
And yet it's never really clear what his films are about, beneath the surface, and for that reason he was not just an enigmatic filmmaker but a fascinating one as well. (One of his five Russian films, Solaris, was remade by Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney. It's a fine effort, but the original is much weirder and rather less accessible.)
Anyway, the point here is not to delve into Tarkovsky's work (and I encourge you to do that; three of his films are available at Criterion -- I highly recommend Ivan's Childhood, his first film, which along with Solaris has been gorgeously remastered; I'm waiting for the Blu-ray special edition of Andrei Rublev) but to introduce a wonderful Vimeo called "The wet images of Andrei Tarkovsky." It captures some of the beauty of Tarkovsky's work, and here it is. Enjoy!
Labels: film, movies, Vimeo of the Day
posted by Michael J.W. Stickings at
10:00 PM
1 Comments:
Thanks for sharing. I, too, love Tarkovsky. He's one of those directors whose work takes some effort to appreciate---but it rewards that effort in spades.
I think Russian cinema is still strong to this day. One of the best directors in the world currently is Alexander Sokurov, who directed the mind-boggling "Russian Ark."
By
Marc McDonald, at 11:00 PM
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