Something about the films of Adrei Tarkovsky makes you think he was a white haired man when he shot them. Every one seems like the last statement of ancient mystic, and yet he made films for decades. Watching these old clips of Tarkovsky today, you see a handsome fellow, never mind his similarity to the deposed governor of Illinois.
The first Tarkovsky film I ever saw was Sacrifice, during the 1980s in a cold, wet German university, where we all smoked and worried about nuclear war.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRBIJR1d5mc&feature=related
What language barriers there were for a Russian to direct Swedish actors. A nice lady translates, and Tarkovsky breaks into English with a slip into French. The slow tracking shots of Sacrifice are here filled with a Babel of directions, “My right or yours?” “Right for the camera, left for you.” The set is as noisy as a kindergarten or a construction site, and yet the film is hauntingly silent. All sorts of chatter ‘til everyone agrees to have lunch after this shot. The exquisitely subtle movement of the camera on the screen is shown here to have been set up with Tarkovsky riding like a boy on a choo-choo train.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c8TPVib-Kw&NR=1
What a contrast between the happy play of shooting in the Nordic sun and the film’s on screen apocalyptic tone. Another reason to delight, and to take another look. These documentary snippets make you rethink existentialism, like when you first heard that Kafka thought his stories were comical.
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