The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, even more so than those of most revered auteurs, cre­ate a real­i­ty of their own. Watch­ing them, you might even believe that Tarkovsky him­self lived in his own real­i­ty as well, one made only of the sub­lime and the tran­scen­dent, impos­si­bly far from the mun­dan­i­ty of every­day life and com­mer­cial enter­tain­ment. Per­haps he did, to an extent, but the direc­tor of Andrei Rublev, Solaris, and Stalk­er cer­tain­ly did­n’t become and exist as a film­mak­er in iso­la­tion. He had pre­de­ces­sors in cin­e­ma who inspired him as well as col­leagues he admired, and in the clip above from the 1983 doc­u­men­tary Voy­age in Time, shot in Italy dur­ing pre-pro­duc­tion of his film Nos­tal­ghia, he reveals who they are.

“If you had to talk to today’s and yes­ter­day’s great direc­tors,” screen­writer Toni­no Guer­ra asks Tarkovsky, “for what rea­sons would you thank each of them for what you feel they gave you?” Promis­ing he won’t take long to answer the ques­tion, Tarkovsky begins with Sovi­et mon­tage pio­neer Alexan­der Dovzhenko, sin­gling out his 1930 film Earth. He then con­tin­ues on to Robert Bres­son, who “has always aston­ished and attract­ed me with his ascetics. It seems to me that he is the only direc­tor in the world that has achieved absolute sim­plic­i­ty in cin­e­ma. As it was achieved in music by Bach, art by Leonar­do. Tol­stoy achieved it as a writer.” Sim­plic­i­ty, as it emerges over the course of the con­ver­sa­tion, may well rank as Tarkovsky’s most esteemed artis­tic virtue. If that sounds iron­ic, giv­en how aes­thet­i­cal­ly com­plex Tarkovsky’s own work can seem, he also prais­es Fed­eri­co Felli­ni for the same qual­i­ty.

“I like Felli­ni for his kind­ness, for his love of peo­ple,” he says, “for his, let’s say, sim­plic­i­ty and inti­mate into­na­tion.” He describes a Felli­ni pic­ture he calls Pale Moon Tales (by which he may have meant La Dolce Vita) as “astound­ing in its sim­plic­i­ty, ele­gance, and won­der­ful noble­ness of pic­ture and act­ing.” To Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, anoth­er Ital­ian but one pos­sessed of a strik­ing­ly dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty, he cred­its his real­iza­tion that “the mean­ing of action in cin­e­ma is rather con­di­tion­al. There’s prac­ti­cal­ly no action going on in Anto­nioni films, and this is the mean­ing of ‘action” in Anto­nioni films” — or at least in the “Anto­nioni films that I like the most.” Tarkovsky does­n’t neglect French cin­e­ma, nam­ing Jean Vigo, whom he remem­bers “with ten­der­ness and thank­ful­ness” as “the father of mod­ern French cin­e­ma,” the film­mak­er who “found­ed the French movie, and nobody has gone far­ther than him.”

Final­ly, Tarkovsky ends his list as he began it, by pay­ing trib­ute to one of his Sovi­et coun­try­men. Sergei Para­janov, he says, has not just a para­dox­i­cal and poet­ic way of think­ing — words many a crit­ic has sure­ly applied to Tarkovsky him­self — but an “abil­i­ty of lov­ing the beau­ty” and the “skill of being com­plete­ly free inside his own cre­ation.” Para­janov, whom we recent­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, had in the 1970s endured the per­se­cu­tion of the Sovi­et author­i­ties. Nobody cham­pi­oned the cause of his lib­er­a­tion as stren­u­ous­ly as Tarkovsky, who wrote that, “artis­ti­cal­ly, there are few peo­ple in the entire world who could replace Para­janov.” Now both of these irre­place­able auteurs are gone (as are all the oth­ers named here), but in their cin­e­ma will open the path of artis­tic lib­er­a­tion for gen­er­a­tions of film­mak­ers to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Pho­ny” Film “With Only Pre­ten­sions to Truth”

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

A Poet in Cin­e­ma: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Film­mak­ing and Life

Free Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably the Most Respect­ed Film­mak­er of All Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

We all remem­ber our ear­ly encoun­ters with the work of Char­lie Kauf­man, though few of us knew at the time — or even know now — that it was the work of Char­lie Kauf­man. Now acclaimed as a screen­writer and the direc­tor of the films Synec­doche, New York and Anom­al­isa, he brought his pen­chant for the inter­sec­tion of the philo­soph­i­cal and sur­re­al even to the first projects he worked on. These include episodes of tele­vi­sion shows like Get a Life, the ear­ly-1990s sit­com known pri­mar­i­ly for its weird­ness, and the more sub­tly askew Ned and Stacey a few years lat­er. But only at the end of the 1990s did Hol­ly­wood and its audi­ences taste Kauf­man’s writ­ing in its purest form in Being John Malkovich.

Direct­ed by Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich, a film about a pup­peteer who dis­cov­ers a tun­nel into the mind of the tit­u­lar actor, launched a cin­e­mat­ic explo­ration of Kauf­man’s sig­na­ture themes: con­trol, con­nec­tion, iden­ti­ty, mor­tal­i­ty. That explo­ration would con­tin­ue in Kauf­man and Jonze’s next film, Adap­ta­tion, as well as in his col­lab­o­ra­tions with direc­tor Michel Gondry, Human Nature and Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind. “Writ­ing with Hon­esty,” the Chan­nel Criswell video essay above, shows us how Kauf­man has approached those themes in the films he has writ­ten for oth­er direc­tors as well as for him­self.

In Kauf­man’s work, says Chan­nel Criswell cre­ator Lewis Bond, “the craft and strug­gle of the writer is ever-present with the raw sin­cer­i­ty with which the angst of every per­son is put on dis­play.” This has required Kauf­man not just to break long-estab­lished rules of screen­writ­ing but to put him­self into his screen­plays in unusu­al­ly direct ways (as evi­denced by Adap­ta­tion’s depic­tion of screen­writ­ing guru Robert McK­ee and use of a screen­writer main char­ac­ter named Char­lie Kauf­man). His “explo­ration of the human con­di­tion” neces­si­tates “plac­ing his own anx­i­eties at the cen­ter of his work. His naked ego is com­plete­ly exposed to the audi­ence, to the point of unbri­dled self-scruti­ny.” In oth­er words, “the fur­ther he probes into his char­ac­ters, the deep­er he actu­al­ly delves into him­self.”

This may sound self-indul­gent — and nobody acknowl­edges that more than Kauf­man him­self — but Bond describes the process as “test­ing his own per­sona as he’s plac­ing him­self in sit­u­a­tions that he does­n’t know how to over­come. He watch­es oth­ers watch­ing him­self, giv­ing him the lib­er­ty to write as he dis­cov­ers.” He dis­cov­ers, as his writ­ing takes him into the realms of the abstract, the metaphor­i­cal, and the sym­bol­ic, that he and his view­ers share an inner self. “Por­tals to the head of John Malkovich, a fake twin broth­er he writes as real, a the­ater the size of a city tak­ing pri­or­i­ty over the end of the world: all these are clear peeks into the soul of Kauf­man, his attempts to rec­on­cile his per­son­al foibles, and through this we rec­og­nize our own frail­ties and anx­i­eties in his.” Hence, per­haps, the mem­o­ra­bil­i­ty of our encoun­ters with Kauf­man’s work: they’re also encoun­ters with our­selves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Film­mak­ers Tell Their Sto­ries: Three Insight­ful Video Essays Demys­ti­fy the Craft of Edit­ing, Com­po­si­tion & Col­or

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

Watch a Video Essay on the Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“Who­ev­er tries to imi­tate me is lost,” said the Sovi­et film­mak­er Sergei Para­janov. Not so long ago, who­ev­er tried to imi­tate him would also be in deep trou­ble. Per­se­cut­ed by the Sovi­et author­i­ties for the “sub­ver­sive” nature of both his work and his lifestyle, he spent four years of the 1970s in a Siber­ian hard-labor camp. Noth­ing could speak more high­ly to his artistry than the fact that, even before his sen­tenc­ing, Andrei Tarkovsky wrote a let­ter in his defense. “Artis­ti­cal­ly, there are few peo­ple in the entire world who could replace Para­janov,” argued the direc­tor of Mir­ror and Stalk­er. “He is guilty – guilty of his soli­tude. We are guilty of not think­ing of him dai­ly and of fail­ing to dis­cov­er the sig­nif­i­cance of a mas­ter.”

Alas, Tarkovsky’s protes­ta­tions fell on deaf ears, as did those of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truf­faut, Luis Buñuel, Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, and oth­er cre­ators besides. Para­janov had earned their respect with two fea­tures, 1965’s Shad­ows of For­got­ten Ances­tors and 1969’s The Col­or of Pome­gran­ates, clips of which you can see here.

The pow­ers that be actu­al­ly looked kind­ly on the for­mer, prais­ing its poet­ic adap­ta­tion of a clas­sic nov­el by Ukran­ian writer Mykhai­lo Kot­si­ubyn­sky. But the lat­ter, a life of the 18th-cen­tu­ry Armen­ian singer Say­at-Nova (the Geor­gia-born direc­tor was him­self of Armen­ian her­itage), seems to have gone too far in its break from the state-approved style of Social­ist real­ism in which Para­janov once worked.

“Even when he was released, Para­janov was ‘silenced,’ as he said,” writes Messy Nessy. “He tried to get back on his movie mak­ing, but strug­gled for anoth­er ten years until the Sovi­et Union col­lapsed in the 1980s. When he died in 1990 at only 66, he left his final work unfin­ished, leav­ing the world to won­der what oth­er visions of his were lost to time.” As the world has since slow­ly redis­cov­ered the visions Para­janov did real­ize, his influ­ence has here and there made itself felt. “I believe you have to be born a direc­tor,” he says in the inter­view clip above. “A direc­tor can’t be trained, not even in film school.” Direct­ing, to his mind, “is basi­cal­ly the truth, trans­formed into images: sor­row, hope, love, beau­ty.” And as all those respect­ed auteurs under­stood, no oth­er film­mak­er has ever seen the truth quite like he did.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 70 Movies in HD from Famed Russ­ian Stu­dio Mos­film: Clas­sic Films, Beloved Come­dies, Tarkovsky, Kuro­sawa & More

Watch Earth, a Land­mark of Sovi­et Cin­e­ma (1930)

The Film Posters of the Russ­ian Avant-Garde

A Crash Course on Sovi­et Mon­tage, the Russ­ian Approach to Film­mak­ing That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Cin­e­ma

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Imag­ine you’re a “hyper­e­d­u­cat­ed avant-gardist in grad school learn­ing to write.” But at your grad school, “all the teach­ers are real­ists. They’re not at all inter­est­ed in post­mod­ern avant-garde stuff.” They take a dim view of your writ­ing, you assume because “they just don’t hap­pen to like this kind of aes­thet­ic,” but actu­al­ly because your writ­ing isn’t very good. Amid all this, with you “hat­ing the teach­ers but hat­ing them for exact­ly the wrong rea­sons,” David Lynch’s Blue Vel­vet comes out. Not only does it belong to “an entire­ly new and orig­i­nal kind of sur­re­al­ism,” it shows you that “what the real­ly great artists do is they’re entire­ly them­selves. They’ve got their own vision, their own way of frac­tur­ing real­i­ty, and that if it’s authen­tic and true, you will feel it in your nerve end­ings.”

This hap­pened to David Fos­ter Wal­lace, as he says in the clip above from his 1997 appear­ance on Char­lie Rose, one of his very few inter­views on video. He went on the show, seem­ing­ly under duress, to pro­mote his col­lec­tion A Sup­pos­ed­ly Fun Thing I’ll Nev­er Do Again, which among its long-form essays on the cruise ship expe­ri­ence, the Illi­nois State Fair, and pro­fes­sion­al ten­nis con­tains a piece on the man who made Blue Vel­vet.

“Lynch has remained remark­ably him­self through­out his film­mak­ing career,” Wal­lace writes in the ver­sion of the arti­cle that first ran in Pre­miere. Whether “Lynch has­n’t com­pro­mised or sold out” or whether “he has­n’t grown all that much,” the fact remains that he has “held fast to his own intense­ly per­son­al vision and approach to film­mak­ing, and that he’s made sig­nif­i­cant sac­ri­fices in order to do so.”

Else­where in the piece, Wal­lace describes the adjec­tive “Lynchi­an” as “refer­ring to a par­tic­u­lar kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mun­dane com­bine in such a way as to reveal the for­mer’s per­pet­u­al con­tain­ment with­in the lat­ter.” When Rose asks Wal­lace about the mean­ing of the word, Wal­lace explains that “a reg­u­lar domes­tic mur­der is not Lynchi­an. But if the police come to the scene and see the man stand­ing over the body and the wom­an’s 50s bouf­fant is undis­turbed and the man and the cops have this con­ver­sa­tion about the fact that the man killed the woman because she per­sis­tent­ly refused to buy, say, for instance, Jif peanut but­ter rather than Skip­py, and how very, very impor­tant that is, and if the cops found them­selves some­how agree­ing that there were major dif­fer­ences between the brands and that a wife who did­n’t rec­og­nize those dif­fer­ences was defi­cient in her wife­ly duties, that would be Lynchi­an.”

A few years ago Youtube chan­nel Dom’s Sketch Cast turned Wal­lace’s vision of an ide­al­ly Lynchi­an scene into the ani­ma­tion above. Lynch’s visions exist, Wal­lace says to Rose, at “this weird con­flu­ence of very dark, sur­re­al, vio­lent stuff and absolute, almost Nor­man Rock­well-banal Amer­i­can stuff, which is ter­rain he’s been work­ing for quite a while — I mean, at least since Blue Vel­vet.” Though Lynch may owe cer­tain styl­is­tic debts — “to Hitch­cock, to Cas­savetes, to Robert Bres­son and Maya Deren and Robert Wiene” — noth­ing like the Lynchi­an exist­ed in any tra­di­tion before he came along. Lynch has his detrac­tors, but “if you think about the out­ra­geous kinds of moral manip­u­la­tion we suf­fer at the hands of most con­tem­po­rary direc­tors, it will be eas­i­er to con­vince you that some­thing in Lynch’s own clin­i­cal­ly detached film­mak­ing is not only refresh­ing but redemp­tive” — and, as a young David Fos­ter Wal­lace found in the the­ater that spring of 1986, rev­e­la­to­ry.

The full Wal­lace-Rose inter­view appears below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

The Sur­re­al Film­mak­ing of David Lynch Explained in 9 Video Essays

David Fos­ter Wal­lace on What’s Wrong with Post­mod­ernism: A Video Essay

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Sur­pris­ing List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clan­cy

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.