“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” (Kilgore Trout) – Kelvin is a psychologist sent to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris, which in a startling pre-biblical way is covered by a raging, formless sea. Something has gone awry on this scientific mission, and Kelvin is tasked with investigating the crew before […]
Over at Extravagant Creation, Michael McIntyre has a very interesting post interacting with responses to Bird’s somewhat recent book on Tarkovsky. McIntyre is a great resource for Tarkovsky scholarship, and is often interested in the lack of well-reasoned religious response to his films, asking this time around: Where can one find books or articles that […]
One of the interesting routines I have enjoyed this year is tracking the distribution progress of Dmitri Trakovsky’s documentary Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky via his twitter feed. There have been some reviews and discussions of the documentary cataloged at a website for the film, and the Claremont Courier ran a brief and informative piece on the […]
Andrei Rublev might be considered the Mount Everest of spiritual film. It is intimidating, imposing, remote, yet sooner or later every cinephile with an interest in exploring the furthest reaches of faith and art will mount an inevitable expedition. For those who persevere, the film yields an extraordinary perspective on the world below.
By stripping down his camerawork to such bare elements, he also undoes a lot of the patterns and conventions we usually expect from science fiction. Whether it is intentional or not, Canary makes a lot of the same points as Sontag, who criticized her era of science fiction filmmaking as a fantasy that we use to cope with the terrors of the technological age.
In Times and Winds, we follow three children who are trying to cope with their difficult parents, their changing worlds, and their own turbulent adolescence. Their adventures play out in the Turkish village of Kozlu, a landscape alive with color and clamorous with the bells of livestock, a place as punishing as it is beautiful. All three live in fear of the adult world. … And there is no wonderland of wild things into which they can escape, no benevolent Totoro to lift their spirits.
Few films in my moviegoing experience have conveyed the hardships of growing up with such piercing eloquence.