Just watched...

…”The Mirror,” from 1975 by Andrei Tarkovsky.

After I watched this today, I was marveling that through my years of being a film major (among other majors) in college, and through my many, many hours of sitting in a darkened theater on campus watching films, I did not encounter the amazing work of Tarkovsky. The first time I came across Tarkovsky was a showing of “Solaris” on a local PBS station in the mid-90s. How could the film program at my college--and my professor--NOT have shown any Tarkovsky, or even spoken of him for that matter?

Well, thankfully, I discovered him that fateful evening while watching “Solaris” and I have given myself a class in his works over the years. (I often give myself classes in subjects. The first time was when I was a teenager and heard Woody Allen talk about the "Zelda Fitzgerald Emotional Maturity Award" in his 1979 fim “Manhattan.” I had heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but who was this Zelda and what was funny about her emotional maturity?)

“The Mirror” was made after “Solaris” but had been in the works since at least 1964 when Tarkovsky got the idea to make a film about the memories and dreams of a man without the man appearing in the film. Wiki sums up the structure of the film perfectly by noting that it “is discontinuous and non-chronological, without a conventional plot.” In this way, it is one of the most impressionistic films I have ever seen, although I do acknowledge that there are a handful of other films that use this technique and have done so successfully.

This gorgeous film is sort of like watching a snowglobe of the contents of a man’s head. It has been shaken and we watch the fragments swirl around. Episodes from direct experience, memory, imagination, and dreams exist side-by-side. We see his life in three time periods: childhood/ pre-war, war, and adulthood. And we begin to see patterns. There are links between past and present, cause and effect, sometimes rippling both directions. In what is surely some kind of Freudian admission, the same actress plays both our main character’s mother and wife. I want to stress that although this film may be layered, nuanced, and rich, and although it is an interpreted film, it is not confusing or incomprehensible, as some film essayists have claimed.

In “The Mirror,” we see Tarkovsky exhibit the same interest in setting up stunning yet simple tableaux, and lyrical or introspective imagery as in his other films, but compared to something like “Solaris,” the editing and pace feel not as languid, not as dreamy. A few moments and camera pans recall some of Fellini’s thrilling moments, the way the camera sweeps across a location, the way the wind blows. There is a purpose to this kaleidoscope of memories. Actual newsreel footage of the evacuation of Moscow, the Spanish Civil War, and Soviet-era events serves to ground this cognitive exploration. Tarkovsky’s screenplay is autobiographical to an extent and stars his actual wife, mother, and father, the famous Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky. In sections of the film, the elder Tarkovsky reads his own poems over the soundtrack.

Trying to think of and write about this film is rather difficult because of the spell it casts. I like the simultaneous way the information was transmitted and depicted. I like how it left me feeling: a little spacey and ponderous. Although each scene is straight forward enough and is about what it is about, the effect is cumulative, hypnotizing, and lulling… possibly what it is to have one’s life “flash before one’s eyes” upon death. It is a magical film too, with the presence of imagination and dream given as much importance as actual events. Our brains cannot tell the difference between reality and active dreaming, after all. Mysterious moments come and go in this film, a strange localized wind sweeps over a field, a tea-drinking woman disappears from a room leaving behind a condensation ring from her tea cup, an oil lamp turns itself on and off, a bottle falls from a table for no reason with no one around it. It feels enigmatic, holy, and beyond “film,” beyond everyday comprehension. Like a dream (or a David Lynch film) "The Mirror" is best understood and appreciated through direct experience. One must sit and absorb it. Distilled to its essence, it is really about all of us, all who have had lives, memories, dreams…

Recommend? Absolutely. It is very special.

Just finished reading...

...THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY and NOCTURNES FOR THE KING OF NAPLES by Edmund White.

I suppose I should have read NOCTURNES FOR THE KING OF NAPLES first, followed by THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY. But I didn’t.

They both cover the same stories, characters and events from White's life. But THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY, whose title references a Haydn piece where each orchestra member stops playing and leaves the stage one by one until only two muted violins remain, is much more autobiographical. Pioneering gay author Edmund White tells us about losing his lover to AIDS in Paris while intercutting to memories throughout his life—memories of loves and losses, parents and family and friends, traveling and writing. But especially losses. The early years of AIDS, the seemingly unending deaths of friends, and the weekly or almost daily funerals are all told with heartbreaking starkness. Each friend, each orchestra member leaves one after the other, the sound of life growing smaller and dimmer with each exit.

Names of prominent people have been changed and, he tells us, some characters are composites, but we still get the sense of White’s life just the same. When presented in this way, his life seems restless, maybe even aimless, funny in places, often unlikely, but sad and lonely. He carries with him throughout his life a motif of loneliness, somewhat resulting from the institutionalized and publicly sanctioned scorn and derision of gay relationships and gay life in general. But some of this loneliness comes from himself, choosing partners whom he knows, even at the time, are not the best for him—he pines for men who are indifferent, unavailable or simply not interested. I suppose this is not so unusual—people of all persuasions seem to make such mistakes, especially in youth when experience has not caught up to longing.

He is quite unapologetic—and rightly so—about “cruising” for sex on the docks and piers in New York City or in parks in Rome or in the dunes of Fire Island. The sex is described with the same starkness as his description of lost love and death. He speaks at length and often about the attitude fostered by gay liberation of the 60s and 70s (he was present at the historic Stonewall Riot!). This frank treatment of sex and an affirmation of oneself as a sexual being is one I appreciate and agree with, but after a while, White’s need for cruising and sex starts to seem a bit compulsive and I wondered now and then, “When did he have time to write anything?” He is aware of this himself and rolls it into the mix with everything else.

I must confess that it was sometimes a bit difficult to remember all the men in his story. Names and personalities bled together. It was a bit like reading ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, with nearly everyone named Aureliano Buendia, but Marquez was making a point: “The more things change the more they stay the same.” Or “Meet the new boss—same as the old boss.” Or even better: “The more time goes by, the more everything becomes alike—interchangeable.” I mention this because I suspect that White had a similar idea in mind. Men come and go, love comes and goes. And I know it is like this for everyone. We look back on our lives and it often appears not as a pattern, but as solid mass.

NOCTURNES FOR THE KING OF NAPLES was all this but in a slim volume of gorgeous, embellished and highly ornate prose. It was dream-like meeting the same people and reading about the same events and circumstances but told to me through a veil of silk, in the golden light of sunset or the tenebrous otherworldly light of dusk. Had I read NOCTURNES first, its enigmatic feeling would have impressed itself upon me as truth, but hearing the unadorned, gossipy version first in THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY takes away the mystery. Which is not to say that NOCTURNES is not worth reading, because it certainly is. Despite the fact that it appears to be a slim volume, it is a surprisingly slow read. The baroque form of his sentences, the curlicues of his logic and the delicacy of description requires one to read slowly, take it in, digest it.

Recommend? Yes. But if you are going to read them both, do it the other way around.