Got a chance to watch this long documentary on Tarkovosky at work in Sweden, during the making of ‘The Sacrifice’. watched it over two sessions as it’s a long almost two hour long documentary.
Fascinating to watch how the filmmaker you like actually created- seeing him lay out the shot design to Sven Nykvist his cameraman, you can see Tarkovosky’s basic philosophy of the individual shot being a complete unit. He doesn’t want to do the classical cut and counter-cut to make his point- he wants to convey his meaning within the shot. Each shot becomes a sort of ‘tableau’, a near complete entity on its own. And yet when he’ll put in the final film, the meanings will be magically transformed.
At the same you can see that Tarkovosky is not moving the camera just for fun, its essentially to reveal more and more of the scene. The way he was adding elements to a scene to enhance the look and meaning of his moving shot was simply ‘magical’. The most interesting part is how aware he was as a filmmaker of holding his audience’s attention- he’s doing it by adding layers of visual complexity into his basic shot. He’s not saying now this is my subject, audience should pay attention because it’s a ‘serious subject’. He’s working towards holding your attention as an audience, very much like a classical filmmaker in Mumbai or Hollywood. His aims-in terms of where he wants to take the audience might be very different- but in the ‘construction’/’design’ of the shot and unfolding his story, there is a firm hand of the master creator.
That house burning sequence on screen and the episode on its making was fascinating. To see Tarkovosky as the very much Andrei Roublov like artist who wants to create his world precisely as he wants, not a frame this way or that way as his wife put it- that’s a lesson. Though of course it may not always be possible for all of us to pursue such a line of action. How much we need to flow with the moment and how much to be rigid is of course a big area in filmmaking/ the arts and we probably need to write about it separately.
Then there was the attention to detail- the way Tarkovsky kept the stool, the way he argued over the angle, showed up so beautifully in the final frame. But it appeared that no one seemed to have understood his work or method earlier. That was something interesting because in the classical filmmaking we are taught about planning and preparation and here was improvisation on properties. It maybe that Tarkovosky worked like that- figuring out his shot taking with everything in place. But then the Art Director/designers should have kept a few extra properties as they do in Mumbai, (just-in-case-props). But yes, Tarkovosky’s precise placement of the property was just spectacular.
‘The Sacrifice’ was produced by the Swedish Film Institute, so the unit was very European in size and method of working- everyone was doing multiple jobs. Even the great Sven Nykvist seemed to have only two assistants, plus the trolley and the lighting guys. That lent a certain intimacy to the whole group and perhaps the actors benefitted the most.
They difference between Tarkovosky directing Erland Josephson and the other actors was vast- he seemed to direct Erland very physically, give him the marks to do this or that. With the others, he was more inclined to direct all parts of the performance- giving them motivations as well. But directing without knowing the language seemed interesting- OK it was in a different league from my Somali venture for UNESCO.
His wife read a bit from the script and we saw the same clip in the finished film and it was quite uncanny how much of the ‘feel’ of words and literary language was up on screen. I guess that’s where the masters differ, they know how to put their visions on screen with great precision.
This was not really a film, it was like the Kurosawa documentary, an insight into how a master filmmaker organised himself into physical spaces and actions and instructions to crew. How does Tarkovosky preserve his vision faced with the reality of a unit and everyone wanting to know what to do next, that’s really the subject of the documentary and its lesson. I guess that’s where we all get lost!
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