rain, mist, fire, wind and grass. too hot for God

Eminentemente físico e sensual... um processo narrativo de crescente envolvimento com tudo o que está para além dos dados imediatos da consciência e, em última instância, remete para o sagrado. Daí que, na sua teia misteriosa e sedutora...

...Os verdadeiros acontecimentos não são tanto os que se podem medir por sobressaltos mais ou menos factuais, mas sim os que nos remetem para as dimensões menos visíveis do comportamento humano... para ele, observar o real é descortinar as camadas dos seus sucessivos enigmas.

The director's serious moral concerns and probing scrutiny of spiritual malaise have inevitably prompted comparisons with Bergman, an admirer who proclaimed him "the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream"
For all its Northern melancholy, Tarkovsky's cinema resonates with a radiant, redemptive optimism.
In Andrei Rublev, the atrocity-haunted artist breaks his silence in wonderment at a novice bell-maker's leap of faith.
Mirror begins with the remarkable curing of a stutter and
Stalker ends, not in enveloping despair, but with Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and a disabled young girl's telepathic movement of three glasses.
In The Sacrifice, nuclear holocaust is averted by a seemingly mad religious conviction, while the single most abiding image is of a boy planting a tree. The quite astonishing visual and aural imagery (rain, mist, fire, wind and grass rendered unmistakeably, inimitably "Tarkovskian") repeatedly makes the mundane miraculous, everyday elements and objects divine.

And through Faith humankind can literally take flight.

With all seven features currently available on video, the auteur's rapturous, challenging, complex world - of witches, Tatar hordes, symbolic horses, mysterious stray dogs, forests, rivers, meadows, Brueghelesque snowscapes, Renaissance paintings, balloons, space stations and levitation - can be studied and enjoyed..

rain, mist, fire, wind and grass, witches, symbolic horses, mysterious stray dogs, forests, rivers, meadows, snowscapes, Renaissance paintings, balloons, space stations and levitation, numa teia misteriosa e sedutora eminentemente física e sensual um processo narrativo de crescente envolvimento com tudo o que está para além dos dados imediatos da consciência e, em última instância, remete para o
sagrado

I Miss You I am Lilith

Grandmother of Mary Magdalene

I am Lilith

Whose sexual fire was too hot for God

I am Lilith

The first woman

Who chose the rage of exile

Over the cancer of servitude

I am Lilith

Mother to the motherless
I am Lilith

Whose blood covers the moon

I am Lilith

Standing on owl’s claws

At a woman’s crossroads

I am Lilith

The Great Whore

Whose charm lured the warrior

Into my Goddess’s final warmth

That’s my aim, that’s the ground my chariot will cover:

that’s the post my thundering wheels will scrape.

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.

"...it seems to me that the individual today stands at a crossroad, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large..." - Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986


Andrei Tarkovsky was buried in a graveyard for Russian émigrés in the town of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Île-de-France, France. The inscription on Tarkovsky's grave reads "To the man who saw the Angel".

textos: joão lopes DN Domingo, 13 de Fevereiro de 2005; John Davies MovieMail, Ovídeo "Ars Amatoria", anónimo, wikipedia