Friday, March 21, 2008

Dept. of Tarkovsky

"In a non-developing, constant state of tension, passions reach the highest possible pitch, and manifest themselves more vividly and convincingly than in a gradual process of change."
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4 comments:

konrad said...

Who is being quoted and what is being referred to by "a gradual process of change" in this quote?

Is this actually about or by AT or is the title just a reference to his famous practically static narrative style?

12:32 AM
rodney k said...

Hi Konrad,

It's a quotation from Tarkovsky's "Sculpting in Time." I don't have the page number at hand, but it's from the second or third chapter.

By a "gradual process of change," I took him to mean both a narrative style that shows us a character's development through time, and an emotional or psychological state in which energies build by means of a long stasis, then WHAM-O! The glacier shears off, or the glass slides across the table or something.

2:00 PM
rodney k said...

Wait...in that last "emotional/psychological" bit I meant (Tarkovsky means) exactly the opposite.

3:03 PM
konrad said...

yeah, to me the grammar appears to oppose "non-development" as "more vivid and convincing" than a "gradual process." So change is not supposed to occur within the film. I was going to say there are so many lesser known filmmakers that work with almost or actually static narrative all the time (James Benning, Bela Tarr to name a couple).

However and funnily enough, your first explication about perfectly describes one historical aspect (the WHAM-O) of the film we're showing on Thursday about the collapse of the Soviet Union, An Anagram, as the filmmaker describes it, a portrait of "a society that had it's belief system knocked out from under it."

8:51 PM

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