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Tim Cawkwell

~ currently publishing my poetry and verse. Blog entries on film and painting going back to 2014. My main website is www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Tim Cawkwell

Tag Archives: Tarkovsky

FIRST REFORMED, SCHRADER REINVENTED

17 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Bible on film, Bresson, cinema of hyperbole, Creation, crucifixion films, Doubt, God, metaphysical film, Pascalian cinema, predestination, redemption, spiritual cinema

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apocalypse, Bergman, Bresson, Schrader, Tarkovsky

Paul Schrader was born in 1946, so he is 72 years old and maybe feeling the chariot of death pressing on behind. While there is time he needs to make not just another film, but to revisit his youth in all its intensity: the rigour of his Calvinist upbringing, the life-changing discovery of moving images, the heady atmosphere of radicalism engendered by US involvement in the Vietnam War.

So, obviously, he must go back to Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman, art-house deities of his youth. Schrader belongs to that cine-literate Hollywood generation that emerged in the 1970s – Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Lucas and others – only his cine-literacy was as much in the European arthouse film as in commercial or pulp film-making. As a measure of his precocious obsession, he published a book on Dreyer, Bresson and Ozu in 1972 at the age of 26, and when he got down to script-writing and later directing, their intensity informed his narratives. His main protagonists are ulcerous, and it seems in character that Schrader started his script for Taxi Driver while hospitalised for ulcer treatment in 1972. Travis Bickle wrestles on behalf of us all.

First Reformed draws on two particular films, Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne/ Diary of a Country Priest and Bergman’s Nattvardsgästerna/ Winter Light, and the Reverend Toller is in a lineage that begins with the young curé of the Journal, and moves to Pastor Ericsson in Winter Light. (Bergman claimed to have been tremendously fond of Bernanos’ original novel, and had seen Bresson’s film of it seven or eight times before he made Winter Light.) Watching First Reformed, I felt blissfully happy to see that this noble line had not been extinguished.

First Reformed

So – First Reformed consciously, deliberately and imperiously starts from Bresson and Bergman, and in the Facebook age, Schrader asserts a deeper historical continuity about human corruption and the compelling need for salvation. The film is Pascalian just when I thought we had forgotten how to be so. Big question: do you believe in the environmental apocalypse to come? Big answer: it is better to say yes, since if you’re right you will do something about it. Anyway, can you dare bet it won’t happen in view of what we are doing to the planet? This is a version of Pascal’s Wager, and, as Bresson said in 1965, “Pascal is for everyone.” We are predestined for destruction, and although Toller argues that humans cannot predict the future, you have a sense that having wrestled like Jacob with the angel in the person of the young environmental activist Michael, he cannot get rid of the idea that the future is determined for us, and it is grim. This engenders not doubt about the existence of God (as with Pastor Eriksson), but doubt that he can ever forgive us.

For a Hollywood film, it is extremely spare. Admittedly Ethan Hawke plays Toller, well known to audiences from a lot of films, especially those of Richard Linklater, but, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he manages to offload this baggage. At any rate to me the rest of the cast are unknowns, and certainly unfamiliar. Although Schrader is closer to the Bergman mantra, “Actors are trained to express complexities” than to Bresson’s idea of the actor as ‘model’ who is “involuntarily expressive”, yet with his small cast of characters Schrader manages to echo in an authentic manner the whole society Bresson conjures up in Journal.

I watched the film wondering whether it would end with Bernanos’/Bresson’s “All is Grace” but Schrader steers it convincingly in his own non-slavish direction. And the boldest, super-contrarian move he makes is to film his story in the 4:3 format of classical cinema, which in an age of hyperbolical wide-screen film-making especially catches us out, reminding us that this format has not been bettered for allowing the intense, microscope-like gaze of the camera.

The big theme of the film is apocalypse. The narrative not just reinvents the curé’s psychosomatic cancer in Journal, but Michael’s pessimism about the environment rhymes with Persson’s fear of nuclear destruction in Winter Light. It rhymes too with the central idea of Bresson’s most pessimistic film, Le Diable probablement / The Devil Probably, which in the face of man-made environmental catastrophe rejects the church, Marxism, outright libertarianism – and other nostrums – in favour of suicide. Is this too melodramatic? But then so many powerful dramas and films hinge on a melodramatic premise, and in First Reformed the idea makes for compelling viewing. It poses too a central challenge for theists. A director as Bible-literate as Schrader manages deftly to bring in the counter-arguments to outright pessimism: the apostle Paul’s “The whole of creation is groaning for release from bondage” (Romans 8.22) and God’s words in Job chapter 38.4: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” But are they a sufficient counterweight?

How all this comes to a climax should be discussed as well, but I shall refrain for fear of revealing the ending. Suffice it to say that Schrader unexpectedly moves into Tarkovskian territory with the levitation from Offret / The Sacrifice, but then goes beyond it, and miles too beyond the Bressonian universe, with a magical sequence of digital film-making. You almost wish he had done the whole film in 3-D.

Bresson, Bergman and Tarkovsky are central figures in my New Filmgoers Guide to God, published by Matador in 2014, available on Amazon.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

Dachas on film 2 – Burnt by the Sun

30 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Russian cinema

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Burnt by the Sun, Mikhalkov, Mirror, Stalin's Terror, Tarkovsky

Image result for Burnt by the sun

Of course, Mirror (see previous post), is not the only film about dachas, families, the Russian summer and the intersection of private lives and public events. So is Burnt by the Sun, made over twenty years later. That film, made after the fall of Communism, is a bitter story about how Stalin’s Terror intrudes on the life of a family gathered in their dacha – if you are unfamiliar with the film see the plot summary on Wikipedia. It is not a corrective to Mirror, nor even an antidote, but it is a striking contrast. Personally, I am of the opinion that Mirror is the greater film, but many would prefer Burnt by the Sun.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Dachas on film 1 – Mirror

22 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in biopics, metaphysical film, spiritual cinema

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Brexit, Mirror, Natasha Synessios, Tarkovsky

The measured unrolling of a Tarkovsky retrospective in arthouse cinemas has been one of the pleasures of this summer, at least in the UK, and no film has been more welcome to watch in a darkened chamber on a large screen, with an appreciative audience creating a rapt mood, than Mirror.

Mirror 1

Tarkovsky strikingly said that he knew this private, sometimes baffling film – to the reason, if not to the eye – would strike a deep chord in a Russian audience. So it proved. This intersection of the intimate life of a family with public Soviet history (the episode at the publishing house in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, crossing Lake Sivash during WW2, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, clashes on the Soviet-China border at Damansky Island in 1969 etc.) is a way many of us experience great events: where were you when Kennedy was shot, when the Berlin Wall was breached, when the Charlie Hebdo offices were attacked, when the UK voted Brexit? But as important is the film’s re-creation of the Tarkovsky dacha, this plot of memory-freighted space, this bit of bourgeois property-enjoying, this summer refuge from winter misery. This element is instantly appealing to anyone who has had a family holiday cottage or a regular family holiday destination, the pleasure of first acquaintance being reinforced by subsequent encounters and renewal of the magic. I feel it especially acutely at the moment because I am editing (digitally) my 8mm film diaries from the late 60s and 70s in which Scottish holidays regularly feature.

What baffled me when I first saw the film was a failure to unravel the relationship between the different generations of the family; I learnt on subsequent viewings that Maria is mother, wife and grandmother, that the narrator is looking back to childhood before the war and boyhood during it, and then as father of a boy. Get some sort of a handle on this and you can open a door to the time layers in the film. It is all beautifully explained in Natasha Synessios’s study of Mirror (IB Tauris 2001) which also includes photographs by Lev Gornung of the Tarkovsky family at their dacha in the 1930s. Even when ropily printed, you can see what evocative photographs they are, the potency of which the making of the film has doubled.

Mirror - Gornung's photo

Gornung’s photo of T’s mother, Maria, in 1932 (above) Mirror - NS's book

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MARKETA LAZAROVA and ANDREI ROUBLEV

29 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Uncategorized

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Andrei Roublev, In the Fog, Loznitsa, Marketa Lazarova, Mosfilm, Rublev, Tarkovsky, V Tumane, Vlacil

Filming the Middle Ages is a difficult thing to do, to my mind. I think of the fantasies of Ken Russell’s The Devils and Laurence Olivier’s confected Henry V. Perhaps the British are bad at it. Or perhaps it shouldn’t be done in colour, but I then think of Rossellini’s Age of the Medici which works well. Even so I do think black and white is better. The most notable example is Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, which finds a visual essence for the period that does not detract from the main Passion narrative. Or think of Orson Welles’s depiction of the Battle of Shrewsbury (1403) in Chimes at Midnight: a mass of scrawling, heaving armour in a muddy field – surely this is a real insight into the Middle Ages.

This train of thought, trivial as it is, was prompted by watching Marketa Lazarova, a film made in Czechoslovakia in 1967 and directed by Frantisek Vlacil. This is a black and white film revelling in the awful cruelty of mediaeval Czechoslovakia, although whereabouts exactly I never found out: wet when it wasn’t snowy, and of course murderous. It even had hungry wolves roaming about. God knows what was going on – if you see it I strongly recommend having the synopsis from Wikipedia to hand. Despite this narrative incoherence it was compelling, or rather ‘hallucinatory’ (in the words of the Time Out Film Guide). What is more Vlacil makes astonishingly clever use of his letterbox format, often having a figure in the centre balanced with other action within the frame.

Seeing its black and white quality, its visual ambition and its narrative discontinuities made me think of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev, but I don’t think there is any question of influence one way or the other. The first script for Roublev was published in ‘Isskustvo Kino’ in 1964 and approved for production, but the film’s troubled post-production meant it was not shown at Cannes until 1969. As Robert Bird remarks: “[Early-Muscovite Russia] is shown mired in cruelty, famine and internecine strife, with a repressive church cajoling the fun-loving pagan masses.” Apart from the Church bit (although it does have an obnoxious bishop), Marketa Lazarova could well be described in the same terms. Could Vlacil have been inspired by reading the script in ‘Isskustvo Kino’, or as a fraternal Czech was he in the know with Mosfilm who were responsible for Roublev? I was very taken with his horse in the forest, a very Roublev-ian image.

Marketa Lazarova 1

Somehow none of this is very convincing, and in fact Marketa Lazarova stands on its own feet without reference to Roublev. What they both share, apart from both being very long, is a common memory, that of the struggle on the Eastern front in World War II where you either resisted or collaborated, and anyone in the middle got crucified. This is well brought out in Loznitsa’s In the Fog, and it is true also of the situation in the Czech film. Marketa does survive because she’s a woman. In Tarkovsky’s film Roublev survives because he’s a monk and a painter, and Tarkovsky is keen to emphasise how religion and art can transcend suffering.

A signpost to Tarkovsky’s conception of the film is the working title given initially to Andrei Roublev: ‘The Passion According to Andrei’. This is in the end a film about the redemption of the world, whereas Frantisek Vlacil’s purpose is to portray a Darwinian struggle for competitive advantage. At the end of it, the narrator comments on Marketa’s life beyond the ending of the film: her two sons, one natural and one adopted, “grew up to be fine boys but love and certainty fought with cruelty and doubt for their souls”. This suggests something unresolved, which was a conclusion emphatically avoided in Andrei Roublev.

[My ‘New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’ has a chapter on Tarkovsky and also a passage on Loznitsa’s In the Fog, pages 123 to 127]

© Tim Cawkwell 2015

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