Andrei Tarkovsky was a 24-year-old film student when he co-wrote and co-directed, along with fellow student Aleksandr Gordon, this gripping, suspenseful, philosophical version of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 “The Killers,” a short story that consists almost entirely of dialogue—dialogue so craftily repetitious and, given the deadly situation in which it arises, piercingly comical that one wonders about Hemingway’s influence on the postwar tragicomedies of Beckett and Ionesco. Regardless, Tarkovsky’s film seems less absurdist than the story, which is perhaps the finest thing that Hemingway wrote; it is more attuned to the story’s sense of imprisonment, people’s solemn incapacity to escape the confines of dead-ended lives. Tarkovsky directed the long first scene in the diner and the brief concluding one there; the scene in between, in Ole Andreson’s threadbare hotel room, was directed by Gordon. In this trapped middle, Andreson is lying in bed, his face up against a wall; his back is to the camera as the door closes on him. Nick Adams, his friend, had come to warn Ole that two hit men are looking for him; but Ole is tired of running. He will wait for the strangers to execute his fate. The room he is in is indeed one to die in.
In the closing scene Nick and George, the counter person, talk. Nick has just returned from warning Ole. “I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick announces. George encourages him to do just that; and George’s tone of voice, his depleted spirit, suggests that he once, and often, encouraged himself to do the same. But he is still stuck in the same place; and his example helps us to realize, shatteringly, that Nick isn’t going anywhere either.
For Tarkovsky, one must wait for death to “leave” Soviet Russia.
Posts Tagged ‘Tarkovsky Grunes’
UBIYTSY (Andrei Tarkovsky, Aleksandr Gordon, 1956)
June 26, 2009NOSTALGHIA (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983)
November 3, 2007Self-exiled from the Soviet Union, Andrei Tarkovsky went to Italy. In a highly symbolical, elliptical form, Nostalghia refers to this visit. Consider, for example, the glorious opening: a long-shot, in soft black-and-white, in which female figures, apparently peasants, rendered tiny by distance, their backs facing us, move farther away from the camera at a dreamily slow pace. This reflects the nostalgia of two Andreis for their Russian homeland, from which both are separated: the film’s protagonist, Russian poet Gorèakov, who is in Italy on a mission of academic research; Tarkovsky himself.
Longing and guilt are conjoined in Nostalghia. Gorèakov’s translator, Eugenia, herself Italian, represents Italy, its seduction of the poet away from homeland and spouse. Gorèakov longingly dreams of his wife as Eugenia pursues him sexually. (“You’re a kind of saint,” Eugenia tells him disparagingly.) Meanwhile, Gorèakov is drawn to Domenico (Ingmar Bergman’s Erland Josephson, superb), who has imprisoned his own family to protect them from evil. What kinship does Gorèakov feel for this madman? Perhaps he regrets having left his own loved ones alone, and for years, in the nation that the other Andrei, Tarkovsky, associates with evil. Watching the film, we sense that one Andrei flows in and out of the other.
Incessant wetness (rain; dripping water), patient, subtle camera movements, mirrors and human reflections, church bells, bursts of Beethoven on the soundtrack: here is another of Tarkovsky’s poetic achievements that draws us into a highly subjective experience, as though it were very gradually submerging us in a dreamscape. Candles symbolize spiritual illumination (Tarkovsky is Orthodox Christian and devout), and a stunning scene of public immolation—it is Domenico who goes up in flames—symbolizes Gorèakov’s fierce desire to purge himself of guilt. Tarkovsky is mining his own soul.
Giuseppe Lanci lends magnificent, barely color cinematography.
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SOLARIS (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
October 9, 2007The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solyaris, from Stanislaw Lem, opens with tentacles of grass swaying in a stream—an insinuation of the unconscious just below the surface. The image is part of a lush landscape whose natural beauty is nourished by falling rain: water. The land is attached to the dacha of Kris Kelvin, a psychologist still mourning the loss of his wife, Khari, seven years earlier. Kelvin is recruited to join the Solaris mission, one of whose cosmonauts has committed suicide; he is to investigate what is happening. “What am I expected to find there?” he asks. The response: “That may depend on you.”
The planet Solaris is “out there” somewhere; but the vast, churning sentient ocean covering it, above which the space station hovers,—more and more water,—connects outer space to Earthly cottage, the mind of the ocean to Kelvin’s mind. The remaining two cosmonauts have already grappled with the ocean’s capacities; the ocean can birth forms—false appearances rooted in an individual’s deepest wish. His “wife,” Khari, now appears to Kelvin—only, he knows it/she isn’t really Khari (but how can one be sure?), as does it/she know. “Khari” is a phantom conjured by Kris’s heart’s desire. Is the ocean tempting Kris to the flood with his own yearning? Or is the ocean a projection of this yearning? Kris and “Khari” fall in love. Or do they? Is it his wife’s death that has conjured Kris’s memory of love?
Tarkovsky’s space station is as (elegantly) sterile as the one in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), to which many think Solyaris is providing a humane, humanistic response. Just below the surface, though, is Tarkovsky’s critique of Soviet totalitarianism, which taints everything, including the most intimate aspects of a person’s existence, turning even love into a question mark.
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MIRROR (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
October 9, 2007The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis
“And I can’t wait to see this dream/ In which I’ll be a child again/ . . . everything will still be ahead/ Still possible.” — Arsenii Tarkovsky, Andrei’s father
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo interweaves three time frames, the 1930s prior to the Second World War, wartime, and the 1960s, color and black and white, waking reality and dreams. Margarita Terekhova, superb, plays Masha, young Aleksei’s mother, and Natalia, the grown Aleksei’s wife; one actor plays young Aleksei and the grown Aleksei’s son, Ignat. This double imaging conforms to the metaphor of mirrors, which accumulates a sense of transaction, at times a quarrel, between past and present. An elderly woman appears to be approaching the camera, which is to say, us; approaching her is the young mother, who has just been abandoned by her spouse. When the two face one another close-up, young Masha smooths the mirror right in front of her, revealing that she is—or we are—glimpsing her future self. Aleksei dreams he is watching his mother wash her hair as his father leaves the frame; the day the father walks out, a barn burns down—a borderline image, one as real as it is dreamlike. Throughout, shots of successive doorways suggest mirrors that characters pass through. Even a television screen appears to Ignat as a kind of mirror.
The abandoned Aleksei becomes an abandoning father; the grown Aleksei, kept off-screen, has become a disembodied voice, absent even when present. (Tarkovsky’s actual father, another disembodied voice, reads his poetry, and the film has an unseen narrator besides.)
Tarkovsky’s haunting evocation of childhood and time-elastic symbolical autobiography blossom into a meditation on Soviet history, implying an antitotalitarian dialectic between personal and national histories wherein individuals become the prism through which a society is best understood and judged, thereby reversing the Soviet dogmatic telescope.
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THE KILLERS (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
June 26, 2009Although it pales beside Andrei Tarkovsky’s version of the same 1927 Ernest Hemingway story, “The Killers,” ten years hence, Robert Siodmak’s version is entirely different. Whereas Tarkovsky’s film conforms to the story, exhausting it and being exhausted by it, only the opening of Siodmak’s film conforms to the text, which is a springboard for the rest of the film, which finds an insurance investigator trying to answer the question why two hit men murdered Ole (here) Andersen (Andresen in the story). Whereas Tarkovsky’s film is existential, Siodmak’s is a film noir structured as a series of flashbacks—flashbacks, one must add, that show us many lies, four years before Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, but without dusting up outrage and controversy.
Siodmak’s direction is stunning, somewhat justifying the Oscar nomination that Siodmak won for it; but he has applied visually imaginative filmmaking to essentially mediocre material. The extension or expansion of Hemingway’s story always feels instead like something grafted onto the story. Nowhere does it seem to be penetrating the story, discovering a reality of treachery and double-dealing behind the execution of Ole Andresen, “the Swede.” It’s all convoluted nonsense; the final flurry of twists and revelations feels irrelevant, a blast of hot air.
Still, one cannot say about many films that they made overnight stars of the magnitude of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, neither of whom is particularly good, mind you, but whose generic roles—dupe and femme fatale—provide them with the appropriate emotional marks to hit. Indeed, the only good acting comes from Edmond O’Brien as the indefatigable insurance investigator, Jim Reardon.
Perhaps what is most intriguing here is Kitty Collins’s ambiguity, how her treachery to one man, through the other end of the morality telescope, becomes her loyalty to another man.
Tags:Siodmak/Grunes, Tarkovsky Grunes
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