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If you have some time, watch "Stalker". It's pretty amazing this twisted-reality dreamlike film was made in 1979. It feels right out of 2010.
"Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it."
- Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, pg. 71 Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006
Edit: as others have pointed out, my surprise at this parallel may tell you less about the uniqueness of Tarkovsky's world view, and more about my ignorance of Orthodox Christianity.
If you have some time, watch "Stalker". It's pretty amazing this twisted-reality dreamlike film was made in 1979. It feels right out of 2010.
If you are a fan, I strongly recommend Weird Studies' 2-part episode on Stalker. Phil and JF generalize the concept of "the zone" and discuss other examples of zones in art.
There are some movies you think about for years.. The Sacrifice and Stalker were like that, for me. Tarkovsky's advice to young people is also something I think will ring true with the Hacker News crowd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Vvdtaaprzw
The crew wanted to work with a model but that didn’t happen. They built the life-size structure and burned it.
The barn scene in The Mirror [1] remains one of my favourites in cinema history. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dA60D-j290
If you have some time, watch "Stalker". It's pretty amazing this twisted-reality dreamlike film was made in 1979. It feels right out of 2010.
And The Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky brothers is an incredible read. The movie is loosely-ish based on that but both stand on their own. The book is tightly written and profound in its exploration of human condition when facing pressure of money and exploitation of something we don't understand.
Tarkovsky was an Orthodox Christian, but his ideas about the irreducibility of experience parallel Zen: "Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response migh…