Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about Tarkovsky. He is certainly profoundly important. His sensuality is unmatched. Whether it's the perfect use of sound (endless dripping water, the ringing of a fallen cup), the incredible imagery or the beautiful stories (I think about the bell story in Andrei Rublev a lot), Tarkovsky is the king of making you feel the movie.

That said, I don't worship at the altar of Tarkovsky. I don't love that his movies have this impenetrable length. I don't love that his movies inevitably have some long philosophical lecture by a male character while the women stay to the sides, often silent. I will sound like a petulant digital native, but I have been bored by a Tarkovsky.

Too often Tarkovsky is used as this unquestionably brilliant artist. To appreciate him is to be a true cinemaphile, while to hate him is to indicate your pedestrian tastes. I don't agree. There should be no shame in being bored by Stalker, in not getting Andrei Rublev, in finding The Sacrifice a little too navel gazing.

If I had to explain Tarkovsky to someone who doesn't watch art movies, I'd say that he's like the Velvet Underground. Unless you have a particular taste, you probably won't enjoy songs like Heroin or Venus in Furs. But you'll definitely enjoy the music made by people who did like Heroin or Venus in Furs. You don't have to enjoy Tarkovsky. But watch some of his movies, and you'll start to have flashes of recognition in movies like Arrival, La Cienaga, The New World, etc.

My thesis is that people have troubles connecting with Stalker because they are accustomed to movies being a very voyeuristic and pornographic experience, with in-your-face exposition at every corner and the producers making sure there is nothing ambiguous happening ever. Stalker is not made for you to be a spectator. It's filmed as if you're getting on the journey of the characters. A lot of time they rant alone, they're speaking to you. They asks questions and nobody answers, because that was addressed to you. People either "get into" that movie and it's one of their favorite ever, or they don't and it's extremely boring, which is normal. I think it should be approached with that in mind, that you have to actively take part in the story to appreciate it.

Well said. When I recommend Stalker to someone I tell them to make sure they don't have anything else to do. Hide your phone. Prepare yourself as if you are preparing to meditate. Slow way down, notice how the scenes make you feel. They're the antithesis of American films where something is blowing up or crashing every minute or so. In some sense you have to detox from American cinema in order to appreciate a Tarkovsky film. The problem isn't Tarkovsky, it's our frenetic pace. Tarkovsky's sense of time is much different than ours.

His appreciation of painting and goal to make film as valid of an artistic medium as painting really exposes this. It also takes most of us a significant investment of time and perspective to engage with a painting as an object of contemplation rather than condensing it down to set of symbols and moving on to the next image in rapid succession.

When I recommend, it is for the long train car ride in silence during which the film imperceptibly switches from black and white to color. And, for the long shot looking down at the stream...

The rest is a bonus on top of these experiences.

;)

I understand what you're getting at with the quite different, immersive style of Stalker. I don't necessarily agree that the lack of connection is necessarily due to people being accustomed to "voyeuristic and pornographic [experiences]". Sure, there's plenty of movies like that and many who would dislike Tarkovsky are devotees of that style.

But one can be a lover of subtle, beautiful cinema and still find Tarkovsky boring. I can easily sit through Nashville or Beau Travail or La Cienaga and still find Tarkovsky boring. Indeed, attributing dislike of Tarkovsky to being unsophisticated in one's taste is precisely what I was critiquing in my previous comment. Tarkovsky is not the arbiter of one's film taste.

It's really not about sophistication, it's about approaching these movies from the wrong angle. I'm pretty plebeian in my taste myself!

>Impenetrable length.

Please consider, that Stalker, for example is 2h 42min. Compared to say, the 2h 15min runtime of The Force Awakens, which is intended for wide public consumption, it does not seem that excessive to me.

Rythm also affects perceived length; a Barry Lyndon minute is not a Modern Family minute.

The Force Awakens is an onslaught of sensory attacks, it holds you attention for 2 hours whether you want it to or not.

2hr+ of art cinema takes strong focus or experience to stay awake and watch. I could watch about 20mins of the movies from my cinema studies classes before my eyes were dropping, almost 3 hours would be a brutal slog.

I guess you somehow missed the film "Mirror" (1975). It's my favorite of his works. It is only 1h47m, has a female main character, and I don't feel like it's trying to teach morals. Oh, and it has stunning visuals and cinematography. The fire scene, the interiors, the colors... Now I have to re-watch.

Some of the action in the hyperactive cold-war thriller 'Atomic Blonde' takes place in a cinema showing a screening of Stalker [0].

I always wondered whether this was an intentional contrast in tempo given that the other cultural references in Atomic Blonde are music-based [1] and much more contemporary with the late-80s setting of the film

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)#Influence_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde#track_listing

A good line about Tarkovsky, from an essay about Metal Gear Solid of all places:

> But there’s a serenity to Myst that you can’t really find in any major videogame today. It’s videogame Tarkovsky, really: The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking at everything. So Myst is boring, but only in the way Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn’t that they’re slow. The problem is that the world has made you too fast.)

https://ew.com/article/2015/09/04/metal-gear-solid-strangest...

For me it matters extremely when and in wich mood I watch a film of Tarkovsky. In the wrong mood I cannot stand watching through any of his films. Im the right mood they are pure magic of the kind that will stay with you forever.

Tarkovsky movies are boring, so I would ask someone if they minded boring movies before recommending him. It's just that lack-of-boringness is not the only axis by which to judge or enjoy a movie. I can put up with being bored for 2 hours if I get something else out of it. I don't think you need to like Tarkovsky -- I don't think you need to like anything -- but Tarkovsky is a good examples for the pleasures of cinema orthogonal to the boring-not-boring axis.

I like the way you put it about feeling the movie. When I try to picture what it was like to live in the Middle Ages, I usually end up picturing something like Andrei Rublev.

To me a boring movie is one that is mostly a constant flux of extremely predictable events with near zero content to analyze (e.g. a Marvel superhero movie). Tarkovsky is nothing like that, in fact I think his movies are the exact opposite of that.

I didn't say I was necessarily bored. But most people find art movies boring, and Marvel movies exciting. I can try to get the world to adopt an idiosyncratic definition of "boring", or I can use words in their public meaning. Movies with easy-to-follow plots and lots of excitment are not boring. Dreamy movies with messages that can't be summarized in five messages are boring. Fine. But sometimes boring movies are still good.

What is your definition of boring? The concepts explored, for example, in Solaris and Stalker are far from boring. If you rely on a cliffhanger every 15 minutes, your taste might be boring to many cinephiles.

Yes, but there are many great film makers, whose work isn't generally considered 'boring', like much of David Lean, or Milos Forman's Amadeus.

I don't understand how you can read my comment as anything other than pro-Tarkovsky. I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek by calling them "boring". I hope the cinephiles of the world can someday forgive me.

The real tragedy is that in our hyper-attention-seeking society that calling a movie "boring" is such a terrible insult. A movie that is strategically boring defeats our expectations. Movie makers know what we're expecting, and when we're expecting it, and delaying or flouting the fulfillment of those expectations can be part of the movie-making art. It's been a long time since I've seen Solaris, but I just recently rewatched 2001, and that's a movie that definitely uses boringness strategically. It has long sequences that communicate how long it takes to get around space, so that when you finally get to the Discovery One you can feel how far away and isolated Bowman and Poole are.

I appreciated the idea of an intelligent planet. (But yeah, 2:47, mostly dialog? NOt so much.)

The soundtrack was in part created on a synthesizer (the ANS) heard in several AT films. Its tones are based on patterns drawn on glass. That part of the film survives (at 38m) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrF1PSoTN3A

How it worked: http://www.theremin.ru/archive/ans.htm

"Boring" is a description of a thing's effects, not the thing itself. Tartovsky's movies are not boring for me, so I find your description completely inaccurate. There is nothing inherently boring in them, just things that don't appeal to all audiences. A lot of people might find them boring (and that's fine), but that's a description of their response, not the movie.

It's better to describe the movie as "slow", "having no action", or "driven by dialog and long scenes of nature", or, if you must, "a movie most people would find boring". These are objectively true.

Saying the movie is "boring" not objectively true. It is a subjective description.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com