My thinking tonight is that one way of looking at Tarkovsky's films is that they express the desire for order in the fundamental chaos of life. Or, to be human means to oscillate between chaos and order: both are beautiful. Life is chaos, this is a very modern view (especially since the twentieth century). The desire for order is a classical pursuit.
In Tower's films, the elements that create chaos are: the random sequence of events ("Mirror"), an elusive consciousness ("Solaris," "Stalker"), dreams of garbage and waste ("Homesickness", "Stalker"). Sacrifice”), the opacity of the plot that every movie feels at first glance, and the digressions that partly contribute to that opacity. These factors make Tower's film a lot like collage, or collage. The beauty of collage art, that is, the beauty produced by the piecing together of seemingly unrelated things, is the legacy of surrealism to the sensibility of modern people. Another part of this legacy is that modern people have learned to find a melancholy beauty in the ruins of ordinary things that have been worn down and withered, in the traces they have been eroded by time, and in the ruins. Worn still lifes and combinations of still lifes are heavily featured in Tower films (on tables, walls, windowsills).
On the other hand, the humanistic values conveyed by the tower's films and the religious beliefs that support such values are the most classical and traditional. His films appeared in the 1970s and 80s, when monumental art had become unthinkable; when people felt it was outdated and awkward to talk about "the timeless beauty of art". Tower's film is a perfect fusion of modern sensibility and classical values, in which matter is fleeting but beautiful, and spirit is invisible but omnipresent.
In terms of accessibility, Tower's films may be elitist and "undemocratic," but as Brodsky said, implementing democracy in the arts is tantamount to treating trash as masterpieces and ignoring ignorance. For Transcend. Most of the time we think a return to the classics is both impossible and ridiculous, but... Bergman is right, Tarkovsky's films are true miracles. I think he's talking about miracles in the literal sense. In addition, I rewatched "Mirror" last year, just like after watching it several times before, I have never forgotten the Spanish siblings. I imagined their fate and wrote these paragraphs:
In 1936, when the Führer led his army into Madrid, we were forced to leave Spain. The train station was overcrowded, and parents pressed their right hands to their hearts, kissing their children's faces, and their panic-stricken eyes.
At that time, my brother had just become a bullfighter and had a bright future. I'm still young and don't know what a goodbye is. He held me, his palms wet, and said: Don't be afraid. Mom is sick in bed. Papa came to see us, worried about the Republic, and his face was ashen. I watched in amazement as a hot air balloon (it said: USSR) gradually floated high into the sky and disappeared.
Forty years later, we live in Moscow, sharing an apartment with a divorced poet. I am married, and my two daughters are neither good nor bad. Fernando never married, spoke Spanish with strangers, and always forced Martha to learn flamenco. If you don't dance well, slap you in the face. I let myself turn a blind eye, but also often slammed out the door.
Sometimes I see him like a father, slumped on the worn sofa, his right hand resting on his forehead. On TV, bulls blow dust, over and over; forgotten gunmen, reviewing and shuddering. On the day the newspapers announced Franco's death, he was walking restlessly around the room, stopping suddenly, leaning on the window sill, weeping.
He said that in the end, only moments and ruins are left to us, the moments that will surely become the land of ruins, and the ruins that the moments themselves collapse into. All of this, we call it memory, not without melancholy.
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