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ARSENY TARKOVSKY
IGNATYEVO FOREST
The last leaves’ embers in total immolation
Rise into the sky; this whole forest
Seethes with irritation, just as we did
That last year we lived together.
The path you take’s reflected in our tear-filled eyes,
As bushes are reflected in the murky flood-lands.
Don’t be difficult, don’t touch, don’t threaten,
Don’t offend the forest silence by the Volga.
You can hear the old life breathing:
Clumps of mushrooms growing in damp grass -
Though gnawed to the very core by slugs,
They still inflame the skin.
All our past is like a threat -
Look, I’m coming, watch, I’ll kill you!
The sky shivers and holds a maple, like a rose, -
May it burn still stronger - right into your eyes.
‘I waited for you yesterday since morning’
I waited for you yesterday since morning,
They guessed you wouldn’t come,
Do you remember the weather? Like a holiday!
I went out without a coat. Today came, and they fixed for us
A somehow specially dismal day,
It was very late, and it was raining,
The drops cascading down the chilly branches. No word of comfort, tears undried…
FIRST MEETINGS
We celebrated every moment
Of our meetings as epiphanies,
Just we two in all the world.
Bolder, lighter than a bird’s wing,
You hurtled like vertigo
Down the stairs, leading
Through moist lilac to your realm
Beyond the mirror. When night fell, grace was given me,
The sanctuary gates were opened,
Shining in the darkness
Nakedness bowed slowly;
Waking up, I said:
‘God bless you!’, knowing it
To be daring: you slept,
The lilac leaned towards you from the table
To touch your eyelids with its universal blue,
Those eyelids brushed with blue
Were peaceful, and your hand was warm. And in the crystal I saw pulsing rivers,
Smoke-wreathed hills, and glimmering seas;
Holding in your palm that crystal sphere,
You slumbered on the throne,
And - God be praised! - you belonged to me.
Awaking, you transformed
The humdrum dictionary of humans
Till speech was full and running over
With resounding strength, and the word you
Revealed its new meaning: it meant king.
Everything in the world was different,
Even the simplest things - the jug, the basin -
When stratified and solid water
Stood between us, like a guard.
We were led to who knows where.
Before us opened up, in mirage,
Towns constructed out of wonder,
Mint leaves spread themselves beneath our feet,
Birds came on the journey with us,
Fish leapt in greeting from the river,
And the sky unfurled above…
While behind us all the time went fate,
A madman brandishing a razor.
LIFE, LIFE
1 I don’t believe in omens or fear
Forebodings. I flee from neither slander
Nor from poison. Death does not exist.
Everyone’s immortal. Everything is too.
No point in fearing death at seventeen,
Or seventy. There’s only here and now, and light;
Neither death, nor darkness, exists.
We’re all already on the seashore;
I’m one of those who’ll be hauling in the nets
When a shoal of immortality swims by.
2
If you live in a house - the house will not fall.
I’ll summon any of the centuries,
Then enter one and build a house in it.
That’s why your children and your wives
Sit with me at one table, -
The same for ancestor and grandson:
The future is being accomplished now,
If I raise my hand a little,
All five beams of light will stay with you.
Each day I used my collar bones
For shoring up the past, as though with timber,
I measured time with geodetic chains
And marched across it, as though it were the Urals.
3
I tailored the age to fit me.
We walked to the south, raising dust above the steppe;
The tall weeds fumed; the grasshopper danced,
Touching its antenna to the horse-shoes - and it prophesied,
Threatening me with destruction, like a monk.
I strapped my fate to the saddle;
And even now, in these coming times,
I stand up in the stirrups like a child.
I’m satisfied with deathlessness,
For my blood to flow from age to age.
Yet for a corner whose warmth I could rely on
I’d willingly have given all my life,
Whenever her flying needle
Tugged me, like a thread, around the globe.
‘And this I dreamt, and this I dream’
And this I dreamt, and this I dream,
And some time this I will dream again,
And all will be repeated, all be re-embodied,
You will dream everything I have seen in dream. To one side from ourselves, to one side from the world
Wave follows wave to break on the shore,
On each wave is a star, a person, a bird,
Dreams, reality, death - on wave after wave. No need for a date: I was, I am, and I will be,
Life is a wonder of wonders, and to wonder
I dedicate myself, on my knees, like an orphan,
Alone - among mirrors - fenced in by reflections:
Cities and seas, iridescent, intensified.
A mother in tears takes a child on her lap.
STEPPE
Earth swallows herself
And, knocking her head against the sky,
Patches the gaps in her memory
With humankind and grass. Grass hides under the horse-shoes,
Soul in an ivory box;
Only word beneath the moon
Looms in the steppe Which sleeps like a corpse.
Boulders on burial mounds -
Tsars playing at watchmen -
Drunk stupid on moonlight.
Word is the last to die.
When the drill of water pushes up
Through the subsoil’s tough integument,
Sky will stir
And burdock’s eyelash sigh,
Grasshopper’s saddle flash,
Bird of the steppe comb,
Sleepy, its rainbow wing.
Then up to his shoulders in blue-grey milk
See Adam enter the steppe from paradise,
Restoring both to bird and stone
The gift of intelligent speech;
He recreated while they slept
Their palpitating names,
And now he breathes delirium of consciousness,
Loving, like soul, into grass.
EARTHLY
If I’d been destined at birth
To lie in the lap of the gods,
I’d have been reared by a heavenly wet-nurse
On the holy milk of the clouds. I’d be god of a stream or a garden,
Keeping watch over graves or the corn, -
But no - I’m a man, I don’t need immortality:
A heavenly fate would be awful. I’m glad no one stitched my lips in a smile,
Remote from earth’s bile and salt.
So off you go, violin of Olympus,
I can do without your song.
from oskarlewis/weblog
The Mirror By Andre Tarkovski
The Mirror By Andre Tarkovski
The Mirror By Andre Tarkovski
Mirror is Andrei Tarkovsky's visually transcendent, artistically revelatory autobiographical film on lost innocence and emotional abandonment. Presented as a languidly paced, achronological cinematic montage of modern day life, personal memories, historical news footage, and dreams, Mirror is an introspective journey through the course of human existence, hope and despair, success and frailty: a television broadcast of a young man seemingly cured from stuttering through hypnosis; a neglected wife (Margarita Terekhova) humoring a village doctor who has lost his way; a custodial argument between a faceless narrator (Innokenty Smoktunovsky) andhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.bold.gif his ex-wife; a precocious young man trying the patience of his military instructor (Yuri Nazarov). To attempt to conform these images into some coherent plot or universal conclusion is meaningless. After all, Mirror is a reflection of Tarkovsky's haunted soul: his search for spirituality, connection, Truth - exposed through indelible images that inevitably define our own imperfect lives, however trivial or mundane.
In collaboration with filmref.com
The Mirror By Andre Tarkovski
Earnest Himingway
The Killers is the first cinematic work of Andre Tarkovski co-directed with Alexander Gordon and Marika Beiku in 1956 since their third year of studying cinema at National Russian Institute ( VGIK) .
Nearly all works of Earnest Himingway were published for the first time in the Soviet Union and Tarkoski suggested to adapt the killers , a short story by Himingway, to shoot it with his colleagues as a short -film . According to Andre ,The killers is a dramatic and a truthful story particullarly deep.
VGIK agrees officially the project and authorizes for the firtst time its students to shoot this foreign adaptation.
The killers : Synopsis.
The Killers a short movie by Andre Tarkovski Beiku and Gordon
The story, at surface level, is straightforward. Two hired killers, Al and Max, dressed in long coats and derby hats and described as looking like "a vaudeville team" (219), walk into a small-town diner. The two proceed to question, taunt, and psychologically terrorize George, the establishment's operator; his friend Nick Adams, the sole customer at the moment; and Sam, the African-American cook. Al takes Nick and Sam to the kitchen at the rear of the diner and ties them up, and Max reveals the gunmen's plans to kill Andreson. The killers finally leave, giving Nick time to run up the street to Hirsch's rooming-house, where the Swede is a boarder. Nick, against the advice of the scared but pragmatic Sam, frantically warns Andreson of the impending arrival of Al and Max. But the Swede, described as lying on a bed too small for the body of a former heavyweight, insists that any efforts on his part would be futile. He refuses to take action, and offers a cryptic explanation-his crime, and impending punishment, relates to a mistake in judgment made a long time ago. He says he fell in with a bad crowd: "I got in wrong" (221). For the last act, Nick and George, back at the diner, bemoan Andreson's fate. George suggests that the Swede must have "double-crossed somebody" in Chicago (222), and Adams vows to leave Summit.
"The Killers," like many of Hemingway's short stories, gains maximum dramatic impact from the minimum. Al, Max, George, Nick, Sam, Andreson, and Mrs. Bell, the manager of the boarding house, are the sole characters. The story's four scenes are bolstered by very little physical description, of either characters or locales, as demonstrated by a passage regarding the exterior of the diner: "Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window" (215). The dialogue, particularly that between the killers and between the killers and their hostages, relies on notably short, clipped sentences, offering the sensation of words being spit out and exchanged rapidly, like machine-gun fire. The technique was common to the era's hardboiled fiction.
in collaboration with indarticles.com
The Killers a short movie by Andre Tarkovski Beiku and Gordon
Tarkovsky's films are characterised by Christian and metaphysical themes, extremely long takes, and memorable images of exceptional beauty. Recurring motifs in his films are dreams, memory, childhood, running water accompanied by fire, rain indoors, reflections, levitation, and characters re-appearing in the foreground of long panning movements of the camera.
Tarkovsky included levitation scenes into several of his films, most notably Solaris. To him these scenes possess great power and are used for its photogenic value and its magic inexplicability. Likewise water is also used by him for its photogenic value and its beauty, in particular in the form of brooks or running water.
Tarkovsky developed a theory of cinema that he called "sculpting in time". By this he meant that the unique characteristic of cinema as a medium was to take our experience of time and alter it. Unedited movie footage transcribes time in real time. By using long takes and few cuts in his films, he aimed to give the viewers a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship of one moment in time to another.
Up to and including his film Mirror, Tarkovsky focused his cinematic works on exploring this theory. After Mirror, he announced that he would focus his work on exploring the dramatic unities proposed by Aristotle: a concentrated action, happening in one place, within the span of a single day.
Several of Tarkovsky's films are shot both in color and black and white, including for example Andrei Rublev which features an epilogue in color, and Solaris and Mirror, which feature several black and white sequences. In 1966, in an interview conducted shortly after finishing Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky dismisses color film as a "commercial gimmick" and doubts that contemporary films meaningfully use color. He claims that in everyday life one does not consciously notice colors most of the time. Hence in film color should be used mainly to emphasize certain moments, but not all the time as this distracts the viewer. To him, films in color are like moving paintings or photographs, which are too beautiful to be a realistic depiction of life.
(Wikipedia )
Andre Tarkovski at wor
