The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky | Hacker News Reader

The Drenching Richness of Andrei Tarkovsky

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118 pointsdrjohnson79 comments

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

Fun fact, when filming the fire in Sacrifice, the camera failed. Tarkovsky had them build the building again, and burn it again, this time filming with two cameras.

The crew wanted to work with a model but that didn’t happen. They built the life-size structure and burned it.

These English subtitles are masterpiece indeed.

The barn scene in The Mirror [1] remains one of my favourites in cinema history.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dA60D-j290

To me this is the dog in the hotel room in Nostalgia. Mixing dream and reality in such an incredibly simple way is beyond genius.

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 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.

You say "but" as if Orthodox Christians are contrary to this. Put another way, there is a greater overlap between the thinking (and feeling, and believing) embedded in religions than we can garner just from reading.

Came to write just that. In fact had just finished my comment when I saw yours :-)

>Tarkovsky was an Orthodox Christian, but his ideas about the irreducibility of experience parallel Zen

Let's add that this is not by chance: the irreducibility of experience (especially divine experience) is a core motive of Orthodox Christianity as well (which also has a long tradition of mystics).

The idea that experience is not irreducible is rare. Who thinks they can analyse consciousness into more fundamental elements?

Max Planck: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."

Reminds me of James Jeans, another idealist physicist, which I feel like is becoming slightly more popular again of a view.

"The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter...we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter."

> Who thinks they can analyse consciousness into more fundamental elements?

I do. Considering consciousness, a property of animals on a planet in a star system, irreducible and more fundamental than, say, quarks and bosons, seems laughably wrong to me. On the same level of wrong as medieval "geocentric" world views. I have a hard time imagining how those accomplished physicists think this way..

> Who thinks they can analyse consciousness into more fundamental elements?

About half of HN, who think that we will be able to manufacture some form of AGI that should have the right to be treated as the equal of humans.

I pre-commit to supporting AI and automaton rights. I am an ethical vegetarian.

I consider people with that mindset to be an enemy of humanity. And I love animals. Some of them are cute, and some of them are delicious.

That's a personal failure of empathy. Any reasoning beyond need is a rationalization. Humans can survive without killing animals.

Nice try though.

Billions of people all around the planet both love some animals, and eat others. They are the majority and your view is in the minority. Do you consider all of them to have a personal failure in this regard too? Nice attempt to try and single someone out personally though.

Yes, I do consider that a failure by the majority. I'm not sure if it's just your hesitation to truly consider the experience of suffering in other creatures, or laziness, but majority views don't always align with moral correctness.

I am singling you out personally because you felt an overwhelming need to brag about your pride in dismissing the suffering of other creatures.

> overwhelming need to brag

> moral correctness

The only brag here are these plain and simple examples of virtue signalling. But putting the discussion about animal suffering to one side here, since it is irrelevant in regards to the original point regarding A(G)I - sure they may become useful in the future, but deserving of rights equivalent to animals, let alone humans?

They are tools created by man, nothing more, I would not feel the slightest hesitation about hitting the power switch, disconnecting the battery, or unplugging the power cable at the end of the day if it has outlived its utility, or has malfunctioned in a way that could potentially negatively affect humans (or animals for that matter). Neither should you. There is no sentience there, just simulation. No matter how charming you might find the simulated conversation or sex acts with them.

There's no way to verify that any other mind is actually experiencing what you interpret as consciousness. We can only ever measure signals, leaks in the form of behaviors. We are reducible to chemical reactions, even as the emergent properties of those reactions are unimaginably complex and impressive.

We all should expand our moral circle. That is the opposite of narcissism and tribalism. We can expand our intuitions to non-human animals, to non-carbon based life forms. It takes imagination. It takes work. The stakes are high, because if we get it wrong with AI, we may unintentionally produce beings that can suffer in amounts that we as individual humans cannot imagine. An AI may experience multiple experiences at once, feel many feelings at once, live many lives at once, all within the span of a second.

The potential for suffering, if nothing else, is reason enough to seriously consider automaton rights as on the same scope as animal and human rights.

A person who thinks that animals are nothing more than colonies of abnormally cooperative eukaryotes may still dislike animal cruelty on the basis that anyone who is capable of it would be capable of cruelty to humans, or that practicing one prepares you for the other. I imagine the same argument could be made to apply to robots, even if you wanted to sidestep the machine consciousness question.

P.S. this argument is a very familiar one if you recognize it - if you have ever heard the advice not to date anyone who's mean to waiters, that's the same idea - that whatever causes cruelty, causes it against all targets.

I feel like your comment is entirely gibberish. In the real world, nobody mistakes autism for intelligence.

That's not really Zen though. Zen is expanding your awareness of the present moment to experience it without interpretation, including emotional interpretation, to experience it as it is. Zen is freedom from the constant need to assign meaning and experience feelings about where you are right now. Zen is the calm eye of the storm without attachments to thoughts or emotions, especially those that we use to identify who we are. Zen is a hot cup of tea and the sounds of birds singing.

I might be missing a nuance in what you're saying, because it seems like the way you are describing Zen is indeed similar to what Tarkovsky is describing above. Specifically, he says, "If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it." As you describe Zen, it is "freedom from the constant need to assign meaning and experience feelings about where you are right now". I.e., not interrupting your experience of Tarkovsky's films by attempting to assign meaning.

Andrei Tarkovsky:

> If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens

> What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be.

That's great and I like introspective and symbolic films, but arousing feelings is not Zen. Tarkovsky wants us to think less and feel more, which I think characterizes most art. Some people might say something like "I feel good about cats but I feel bad about dogs" (as an example) or "there is a special melancholy in the dawn fog." This is all well and good and what it is to be human, but feelings are subjective and about personal identity and experience. There is nothing inherently good or bad about one or the other when you compare cats and dogs. That's about you, not about cats or dogs. Likewise, there is nothing melancholic about morning fog. Other people might feel intense joy at they way it burns off as the sun rises. Others might feel sad and go back to sleep.

Zen not only gets under the thinking, it gets under the feeling, to experience reality as it is without judgement or processing. Zen is seeing things clearly and calmly. It's clarity without the filter of thoughts and feelings.

I can't know how other people experience the world so I can't tell if my way of achieving clarity is the way other people, such as a Japanese Zen master, experience clarity. Tarkovsky may have achieved his clarity through emotional intelligence and that's what he puts in his films. I'm grateful to have found a way that works for me. It's really no concern of mine that other's have a different way. There is no one way but that's an opinion of mine. When in doubt, I meditate and wait for the clarity to return.

>Zen is seeing things clearly and calmly. It's clarity without the filter of thoughts and feelings.

Based on my my understanding from practitioners, zen is not characterized by absence or elimination of feelings, but not letting them control your behavior or your thoughts. You don't have to feel like a robot, but you might choose to react like one. There are things in life that are beautiful, happy, and sad. The point is not to deny this, but experience it without forming Attachments and reactions. To this end, I have heard of zen masters that can go from laughter to tears simply by shifting their focus. Similarly, there is a rich tradition of very evocative zen Buddhist art.

The film maker may differ in that he wants to inspire a reaction, or maybe not.

Elimination of feelings is not a desired outcome and if extreme can be classed a disorder such and depression, dissociative disorder or psychopathy.

I found Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT and Wise Mind) very helpful in dealing with troublesome emotions and then Zen which, as you say, is about not letting them control your behavior or your thoughts but calmly observing them come and go. This is also part of ancient Greek and Roman philosophies such as Stoicism and part of what ancients like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus were getting at.

https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/marcus-aurelius-quotes

https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/epictetus-quotes

Feelings, for the most part, are intertwined with thoughts. This is what makes CBT and its ilk so valuable. For example...

I'm feeling panicked because I've been given a new manager. I think the new manager may not see the value of my role. Turns out, the new manager is impressed with my experience and has heard good things about me from others. They believe me to be an important asset to the team. My feeling of panic evaporates.

I'd venture that at least 80% of what accounts for 'stress' in the 21st century can be chalked up to the stories we tell ourselves.

In CBT worksheet terms it would look like this:

Automatic Thought Record

When you notice your mood getting worse, ask yourself, "What's going through my mind right now?" As soon as possible, fill in the table below.

Situation:

I've been given a new manager

Automatic Thoughts:

I think the new manager may not see the value of my role

Emotions:

I'm feeling panicked

Adaptive Response:

What thinking styles did you engage in? Disqualifying the Positive, Jumping to Conclusions, Emotional Reasoning, Magnification. See OLDJEMMAPS.

Outcome:

Turns out, the new manager is impressed with my experience and has heard good things about me from others. They believe me to be an important asset to the team

OLDJEMMAPS acronym:

Over-generalization: Make a comprehensive, negative conclusion that is beyond the current situation.

"I failed the cognitive psychology exam. I'm not working with a psychotherapist."

Labeling and Mis-labeling: The extreme form of overgeneralization. Use fixed, comprehensive, and emotional language to label yourself or others.

"I am an idiot." "He is a bad guy."

Disqualifying the Positive: Unreasonably believe that positive experiences, behaviors or qualities do not count.

"I did a good job on that project, but it doesn't show that I am capable, it's just a fluke."

Jumping to Conclusions: Making a conclusion before having all the evidence.

"I see a cloud on the horizon. I'm bringing my umbrella because it's going to rain"

Mind-reading: in the absence of evidence, thinking that other people's reactions to you must be negative.

"He must think I can't do the job on this subject."

Emotional Reasoning: Draw conclusions from your own feelings, because what I think is what the facts are.

"I think I am like an idiot, so I must be an idiot."

Mental Filter (selective summary, partial generalization). Only pay attention to a certain negative detail, without seeing the whole picture.

"Because of the low scores in several items in my clinical internship evaluation, my clinical internship is over"

Magnification/Minimization: enlarge/reduce. When evaluating oneself, others, or a situation, unreasonably exaggerate the negative aspects and narrow the positive aspects.

"Getting a moderate evaluation shows how incapable I am. Getting a good score does not show that I am smart."

All or Nothing Thinking: (also known as black or white thinking). You can only look at two extremes, but you cannot see a continuum band.

"If I can't do everything well, I'm an incompetent person."

Personalization: Others treat you badly because you have problems without considering other possibilities.

"That colleague is very unkind to me. I must have offended her in some way."

Should and Must statements: There is a precise, fixed expectation of one's own or other people's behavior, and if the behavior does not meet the expectation, it is too serious or bad.

"That person should have said hello to me. They didn't so they must be irritated with me"

I really agree with this. I find it so superficial when people attempt to find a singular “meaning” to a film. A film is not about one thing. It’s an experience. Reducing it down to one idea removes the complexity and nuance of that experience.

According to the article he was agnostic.

If you want to truly watch and dive into a tarkovsky (and auteur cinéma in general) film I highly advise you to watch them in your local cinémathèque/cineteca. I've watched the films years ago on a laptop but when I recently saw some during the retrospective at the kinemathek in Berlin it was an incomparable experience.

Edit: plus you'll see the films with their lovely original laser subtitles.

On YouTube in good quality from the film studio itself, may not work in some countries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-4KydP92ss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXa6XpaxBS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGRDYpCmMcM

Tarkovsky is a genius. The original novel for Stalker is a must read (esp. if you can read Russian). But I cannot watch some of his movies after I learned that he _cruelly_ killed a horse in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Rublev_(film)#Depiction.... I cannot justify this for the sake of art.

Can you justify it for the sake of food?

Probably, if killed responsibly. The scene in the movie is just animal cruelty in my opinion (edited my comment for clarity).

I certainly can, though I have some ambivalence. If you’re referring to the statement that the horse was eventually sent to a slaughterhouse, it doesn’t address the central ethical question of purposely torturing a horse to get a good shot.

Ah i hadn't noticed the cruelty part. Thanks

I believe the horse was going to be killed anyways in a slaughterhouse.

Tarkovsky may perhaps be the pioneer of slow cinema that consisted of long shots observing subjects like a thousand-yard stare. In Nostalghia (spelled in the Russian transliteration), the final scene consists of a man carrying a candle for 10 minutes. While detractors may be appealed by the hostile nature of slow cinema, their champions like Bela Tarr, Theo Angelopoulos, and contemporary ones like Bi Gan and Apichatpong Weerasethakul embrace long shots for their ability to convey the atmosphere of bleakness. Bela Tarr even made an 8-hour film called Santantango, which Susan Sontag praised as a film she would watch every year.

Tarkovsky was not appreciated in Soviet Russia, where distribution depended upon the whims of the censors. When censors criticized not his politics (his films were apolitical) but the lengthy content, he would respond that his films were intended for viewing by "Bresson, Bergman, and Dreyer" (in which order I forget). His films would be given minimal circulation and screened briefly at venues, like in worker's pubs for a week. He would even fight the bureaucrats until he had it with the forced cancellation of The First Day, which thereafter he burned all remaining film and set. (The project purportedly commented on the state's official atheism that were at odds with his deep Russian Orthodox Christianity.) After he defected, he collaborated with his favorite Bergman actors and crews until he died of cancer, possibly caused by exposure to harmful substances during the filming of The Stalker.

In Japan, Akira Kurosawa championed Tarkovsky and promoted his works. Today, there is almost always a screening of Tarkovsky in an arthouse cinema every year. While the content of his films eluded me on first viewing, I now observe the silences ripe with meaning. His films transcend time, imparting an experience that lasts briefly and eternally. There is nothing more exciting in film than his characters staring lengthily into the abyss of the human condition.

I loved Roadside Picnic and this had anticipated watching stalker for years (just never made it happen). When I finally did watch it, recently, I found it relentlessly boring. The questions it raised for me were more of the nature "why is this shot going on for so long" and "do all three of these grown men really think a puddle is the best spot for a nap? Why did you put your foot, still in your shoe, partially into the water?".

If some one feels up to the challenge of explaining what they got out of it and why it is critically acclaimed, please do. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some perspective I had failed to consider that made it a compelling experience.

The very first impression I have of Stalker [seen on a projector] is being stunningly beautiful. Very few films [including all of Tarkovsky's, with maybe the best being Mirror] manage to create this sense of stunning beauty so that's something that needs to be mentioned.

Other than this, the film simply hypnotized and drew me in. I wasn't analyzing or thinking about the story, rather observing and experiencing, which allowed the magic to unfold. There are scenes that freeze time, the only words that maybe do justice to them are "bewitchingly intense". His philosophical magnum opus [1], Mirror, is even more powerful.

Tarkovsky was not only an artist extraordinaire but a supreme genius, the kind of person that appears once every few centuries. His films are full of something that you certainly won't find in any movie today [especially American], which is called "soul", and a full appreciation of him and his work entails opening up that part of yourself and allowing it to engage with Tarkovsky's as expressed in his output.

[1] I use "philosophy" here to mean meditations on the human condition that are understood / made real through praxis, i.e. its original definition.

> Watching it [The Mirror] is like attending a séance of the twentieth-century Russian soul.

Very well put. I would agree. The Mirror is my favorite Tarkovsky film. I wouldn't even call it a film, it's more more like a poem in movie form.

Oh I like Tarkovsky. Nothing puts me right to sleep like his films do. Set up a 1h off-timer and sweet dreams!

The people paid for this film stock, we're going to use the film stock!

Careful what you say about movies that put you to sleep like that. I thought the same thing when I first watched Koyaanisqatsi... now I've seen it upwards of 30 times, probably :)

Yeah, it does take an active mind to not be put to sleep by such films. They're not for the passive consumer who awaits to be entertained with plot twists and/or explosions. In general, they're not there to entertain anyone...

That's so funny. For years I couldn't watch Stalker because I would sleep.

The Pandemic gave me the time to finally watch it during the day.

If it doesn't put your body to sleep, then it will put your soul to sleep... forever!

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.

What is a good translation?

I read Russian natively but wife does not and she was satisfied by the Bormashenko work. see https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4s4bv7/is_there_a_be...

When I try to describe the book to someone, I start with the containers that have ends but no sides. That piques a person's interest.

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.

Never heard of that, thanks for the recommendation!

The central parts involving the Zone were filmed in and around Tallinn, Estonia [1, 2].

EDIT: Ugh, looks like some people may have died because of the lengthy filming sessions near a chemical plant. Wikipedia quotes one of the crew members [3]:

"We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris."

1: https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/andrei-tarkovsky-stalker-loc...

2: https://dobraszczyk.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/tallinntarkovsk...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)#Production

Tarkovsky was truly one of cinema’s great directors. His films aren’t simple or easy, but they are gorgeous to behold and if you put in the time, you’ll be richly rewarded. As others have mentioned, Stalker and Solaris are his two great sci-fi films, easily on par with Kubrick’s 2001. For history buffs, Andrei Rublev is fantastic too.

I definitely think that Solaris is a bit of an underrated gem. It's a very long movie that I can't watch all the time, but occasionally when I'm in the mood for a slow, cerebral movie I pop that one on.

If you want a more "abridged" version of it, "Memories" by Satoshi Kon is also pretty great. It's unique enough to be its own thing, so I'm not accusing it of being a "rip off" or anything, but it has similar themes about how memories can influence our perception of people, and it's shorter.

EDIT: Sorry, Memories is the name of the anthology movie. Magnetic Rose is Kon's segment.

Some of my favourite movies. They are now in good quality on youtube, but only in russian.

If anyone knows where to get the german (or english) synchro in decent quality pls tell me. I bought them on dvd but the quality is so bad that it hurts the art

https://www.filmingo.de/

Watched Nostalghia yesterday :)

if you ever need to make A Decision in Life... watch "The Sacrifice" ("Offret" in swedish, it's filmed there)

p.s. Now that i read the article... pfff how come the only things noticed are sex and wars and all that shallow headline-making jazz.. One has to go way beyond that to see anything worth..

I don't think his work travels particularly well in the West. It is steeped in symbolism, deep metaphysics and calm, meditative, photography. All attributes that have been essentially banned from the fast food production/consumption chain that has conditioned audiences.

Its a bit like pop music. If all you've ever heard is (basic) western harmony and suddenly get exposed to some weird oriental stuff it does not even register as music..

There are directors in the west that have similar ideas and even see some mainstream success, for example Terrence Malik.

Wow that's a big statement, about the west. I just watched Nine Days (US, https://ninedaysfilm.com) which was rich with Tarkovskian references. I could name hundreds of western films that are deeply moving and affecting beyond their words. Where to start.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_film#Timeline_of_notable_f...

You say that even though Tarkovsky is absolutely worshipped by Western film fans?

Sure, cinephiles, but most people in the US haven't heard of Tarkovsky. Even fairly educated people I've suggested a Tarkovsky film to will give me a blank expression and say "who?"

His name is better known across the former USSR, but I really doubt his viewership is any broader.

I was introduced to Tarkovsky by a Russian co-worker in the late 90s. She said that during the soviet times Tarkovsky movies were only allowed to be seen by the elites (her family fell into that category) and were thus not widely viewed then.

I'm not sure if he's as good as Tarkovsky or as important, but Alex Garland reminds me a lot of him. Annihilation had a very soviet sci-fi feel to it, and there's a scene in Ex Machina that funnily enough mirrors the discussion at the top of the thread about interpreting art.

> It is steeped in symbolism, deep metaphysics and calm, meditative, photography. All attributes that have been essentially banned from the fast food production/consumption chain that has conditioned audiences.

Whoa... this is a bold claim. I can think of western films that use techniques like this: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Thin Red Line, Breathless, anything by Bergman, and The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, and many more that employ some of those traits. Additionally, implicit in the suggestion that not having those things somehow makes it "fast food production" (and thus of low quality), is rather unfair to the many western and non-western artists who have honed they're storytelling craft in a variety of styles. I love Tarkovsky and Solaris remains one of my favorite films, but I also like suspense films like Alien or action movies like Enter the Dragon, and many others which are frenetic, scary, fun or exciting.

Not GP, but I think by "fast food production/consumption chain that has conditioned audiences" they are taking a potshot at the swathe of superhero movies being very formulaic rather than any West vs. Soviet Russia argument and how only Soviet Russia makes meaningful films.

For example, every superhero gets 30s of screentime and a few sarcastic quips. The story is black and white, because you know who the good guys and bad guys are. The dominance of franchise movies has vastly restricted the opportunities for other kinds of films to be seen in cinemas. In his essay [1], Martin Scorcese makes a much better case for it than I can, but the gist of it is that while before there were high-brow and low-brow films, now Hollywood is taking the cynical approach that the low-brow films make the most money in a low risk way rather than art for art's sake.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-m...

There are ofcourse both filmmakers and films in the West that explore similar domains. And I generally love them (for the same reason I love Tarkovsky's work).

But when I check what audiences say about said work (and even well known art critics) in 99% of the cases I am left with the impression they live in an another planet. The analogies, metaphors and other symbolism fail to trigger recognition of the "multiple levels" involved and thus also to elicit the emotional response that follows from linking to our current realities.

It is almost as an old story appreciation ability has been lost...

Perhaps not in the American West - I could be wrong - but certainly so in the European West.

By "West", do you mean the US ? He's always been extremely popular with cinephiles in Western Europe. If anything, he's closer to Dreyer than Eisenstein (which is hinted at in the article) and fits well in the lineage of European film-makers.

this tarkovsky worship has to stop.

...why? If we like his movies then what is the harm of analyzing the hell out of them?

its kinda becoming like an entry in a website called 'what white people like'

>A dark aspect of Tarkovsky’s critique of industrial modernity manifests itself: the reversion to a pre-modern order brings with it a reinforcement of male dominance.

Yeah, it wouldn't be the New Yorker without at least a touch of cliché 2022 preoccupations and Zeitgeist, no matter how tacked on and forced it is...

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