hi yall! weird and arty movies used to be a massive part of my psyche for a brief, intense time when i was younger. but then i had a particularly bad depressive slump that killed the habit. now i wanna get back into it. each day for the next week, im gonna watch one Andrei Tarkovsky film (i found a free collection on archive.org!) and post my initial reaction afterward. i saw one of his movies, Stalker, when i was about 15, and while i liked it, i know i was too young and stupid to actually appreciate it, so im hype for a rewatch when i get there ^_^

https://archive.org/details/6.-nostalghia

Andrei Tarkovsky: The Complete Filmography : Andrei Tarkovsky : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Included films:Ivan's Childhood (1962)Andrei Rublev (1966)Solaris (1972)Mirror (1975)Stalker (1979)Nostalghia (1983)The Sacrifice (1986)

Internet Archive

IVAN'S CHILDHOOD FIRST REACTION

yeah this was a great idea, this was exactly the energy i needed rn

im genuinely suprised at how basically no time felt wasted to me, considering how old it is and how slow stalkers felt to me years ago

many of my favorite bits were very tactile depictions of wartime logistics, like getting hot water in two pails with history and pouring them into that metal tub. i believe the audience already thinks they understand war and regardless of how gung ho or anti u are u gotta snap them out of it by aggressively leaving stereotypical war shit behind in ur war depiction as much as possible. obviously true for lots of other stuff but especially for war.

this has gotta be the most basic film-watcher thing to say ever, but the black and white definitely made me feel the textures of everything more. i want to touch all the skin and stone and wood in this movie. david_lynch_favorite_textures.jpg

i knew masha wouldn't get any characterization cause she's a woman in a movie of this time and direction but she got to drink in the beauty of nature and get away from all the scrub ass guys tryna hit and i can feel that

the part with the apples spilling from the truck and the horses running up sent me to heaven and im mad i can't find the screenshot of it online i want

ANDREI RUBLEV FIRST REACTION

found it tricky to follow at points. for starters, its really big and ambitious compared to ivans childhood, maybe too big. i feel like there's a lot of cultural context that would improve this film for me. could be primarily an english subtitles issue cause the ones on there sometimes made me wonder if they were cutting out.

this film has a spiritual relationship with nature that i actually really prefer over ivans childhood, develops how that movie did it, especially considering the subject.

im both stirred by how this film's more willing to engage with the swamps of christian philosophy than all evangelical culture put together, and also kinda tired with thinking about jesus shit altogether, ive had to see too much.

i really admire when directors can keep massive crowd scenes from looking like a mess, let alone get them painterly, and tarkovsky does that so much in this film!!

shoutout to the skomorokh he was really hitting that shit, 10/10 would get my problematic comedy and anti establishment social commentary from him over joe rogan ain't even a contest

im sorry but the part where andrei says goodbye to daniil is really gay. im not the only one seeing this shit right

witches sabbath scene was hard. i should run around naked in the wilderness with my homegirls and a torch one day, seeing both this movie and the vvitch this year is a sign!

i love wide shots of horses and riders along the horizon so much omg

this film's soundtrack clears tf outta ivans childhood's, but it prominently features russian orthodox choir and that's cheating

the shot of andrei alone in the church after all his work for it got burned is a favorite. also he got much hotter when he had blood running down the side of his face, but then again so do most people. kinda hard to fuck that up lol

i was about to say that this film and the previous are both on the same level, really fucking great in mirrored ways, but this ending won me over. this film has higher highs and that was one of them <3

SOLARIS FIRST REACTION

yippie he has color now! opening with similar botanical waves as andrei rubilev but with the new dimension. that blue jacket was really punchy, would it look that punchy with a modern camera?

jesus christ the entire opening sequence on earth felt needlessly slow, and i don't think it's just my fried zoomer attention span. long static exposition dumping, including info we don't need till later. the core isn't even that they need to compromise on info or complexity, it's that id expect tarkovsky to jump at the opportunity to do more visual storytelling. the driving in japan got me like ooh cool then after a while i was like okay we get it. it isn't changing enough and this isn't one of the times soaking it in hits. the long stretches of no soundtrack exacerbated this problem.

the lack of foreplay and climax with regards to blasting off has me curious. seems like such a good opportunity to bring viewer and character together, all the inherent apprehension with the unknown and all the effort beforehand for this moment. is it cause they're so used to rocket flights now? wouldn't solaris still have them feeling that? though such things would only hit if they were built up by a better opening.

fortunately the film gets full tarkovsky magic the second its on the station. thank FUCK that one corridor looks like a beat up bus, tarkovsky gets it there. also love the personality of each crew member room. sci-fi's refreshing after the historical settings, the soviet feel is charming, and the colors are beautiful. id love to see how he'd have colored andrei rublev. the plot gets actually intriguing too, characters talking at eachother is made engaging and dynamic more like most of the last two films. wasn't expecting this many psych horror elements! wonder how much this started or influenced tropes (like staring into the void, for example.)

also one day imma wear hari's retrofuturistic tradwife fit lol

don't ask how this compares to the book or other movie this is my only solaris so far

MIRROR FIRST REACTION

I can't tell off a first viewing how I feel about this as a whole, but it has multiple of my favorite moments from Tarkovsky's filmography I've seen so far. This was the new one I was most excited to watch cause I saw a screenshot of the part with the house burning down, after all.

I've long had a thing for nonlinear avant-garde and surrealist films cause I honestly... relate to most of them. They are my realism. My experience of reality doesn't cohere from moment to moment or look clear. It's all just a detached present and some vignettes.

I can't tell if the colors, and the textures this camera seem to ascribe to them, are elevating a film I otherwise wouldn't be into as much. Earthy, tactile, and hypogeal. So many scenes have an apperance I connect to my most real and unreal moments. When I'm awake in the early morning, in a field beside the small wooden hotel in the mountains of Czechia, and the sublime beauty of everything only reinforces how disconnected from it I feel.

The Wikipedia page says this is his most popular film in Russia. It's weird, but i feel like I understand that. The present day scenes felt contemporary to me too somehow. I could see someone without fancy knowledge of film, yet within the culture this is embedded in, being able to hold it in their hand.

something about the part with the women walking through the printing press building grabbed me, especially the factorylike parts. something about how specific the setting is makes it beautiful more than the actual content

damn why's that one lady such an asshole to maria don't tear into people like that without a good reason

not the andrei rublev poster 😭

im increasingly unable to tell when tarkovsky is collaging in actual historical footage as opposed to doing a good job making his own look that way

weird final note: i know this is supposed to be the memories of a dying poet, but the film lowkey feels like it's putting me more in the psyche of maria

STALKER SECOND? REACTION PT. 1

Fuck it, by my tastes, this is by far his most visually beautiful movie. Literally every moment in the zone's so beautiful it makes my heart ache that's my happy place frfr. And I always love abandoned buildings so fucking much. i gotta get into exploring them irl somebody link me up and teach me how to not inhale toxic fungus in the basement of baltimore md

Is it just recency bias or is this the most sonically interesting of his films? Like the soundtrack is just one good song but the SOUNDSCAPE

his poor wife

do all russian guys socialize by drinking and attempting philosophy? that's one big thing im getting from these movies

crazy ass subtitle moment when she blatantly called him a cretin and it was translated to idiot 😭 the way she drove off with the hat on the car was hard asf tho

im interested in the sneaking scene's prominence. i like it cause its more flavorful than certain parts of solaris, but it's not really conveying the emotions of what they're doing, and i don't think it's trying to, and there's more efficient ways to convey what it conveys without losing it's good qualities, so i wonder if there's some deep reason tarkovsky did it this way besides flavor i just didn't catch like is argued with solaris

writer's monologues sometimes feel surprisingly relatable, which isnt a thing i get much from these films. prolly cause im more burnt out and lacking creative will and direction nowadays.

Vegans DESTROYED with FEELINGS and EMOTIONS

love the long moment of just their faces as they rode their lil train into the zone, really makes u feel like ur apprehensive with them

interesting that the normal world's without color and the zone introduces it. feel like most directors would do the opposite. i prefer it this way cause it better aligns with how id be emotionally experiencing this shit lol

shot of him lying still nothing but the lil bug moving on his finger is tuff

STALKER SECOND? REACTION PT. 2

some of these scenes i neeeed in higher res

im smarter than when i was 15? wtf? im actually following along with the zone exposition properly?

personally if an ambiguously sourced voice told me to stop id curl up in a ball and ugly cry

im rooting for the zone. make of that what u will

whym i starting to get kinda into the stalker despite how he treated his wife in the beginning. ena not beating the dogshit taste in men allegations yet

lol the insults

unfortunately professor and writer half-awake arguing section feels too twitter debate, like just don't generalize so much u bitchass roman statue pfps

poem whispered by the female voice is my fave thru all these movies so far shoutout to andrei's poet dad

bro i feel music as passionately as u but sound isnt removed from context

the icicle tunnel was what sent me over the edge in saying this was his prettiest, im just watching them talk about how it's this sacrificial meat grinder like 😍

i wish for an alt version of this film where that woman actually came along just so the perspective isn't so mancanned

them all sitting together in the stillness hit harder than every other tarkovsky long shot so far

while im iffier on some points of this film's writing than i was with mirror and andrei rublev, i think im connecting with it more. let's just say it's sorta giving blue rose ;)

hooray they brought the dog back!!!

oooh the world got a color scene in the form of the ending what does it mean

remember my brother and i joking about the bit where they walk with the dog under the massive reactors being the most russian thing ever. basically the only substantial memory i have from first watch.

"their capacity for faith has atrophied!" idk maybe ur talking more about the process of traversing the zone, but it's not that they didn't believe, they had valid concerns about how it's used

free this poor woman oml this isn't the only way to have an interesting life

final shot is amazing

NOSTALGHIA FIRST REACTION

white horse. women in shawls aesthetically arranged around foggy landscape. im happy already ^_^

how do filmmakers find these perfect locations

ever know just from a characters first minute on screen youll be setting ur pfp to her afterwards

"I am fed up with all your beauties" kys shes right and literally me

her scarf and shit are so prettyyyyy

making part of a characters hair another color is a cheat code fr

tarkovsky dad namedrop like hes maya angelou or some shit 😭

the problem with "art films" is most put the best shit ever in between bits consisting of wealthy intellectual ingroup signifiers. distribute stopping and smelling the flowers, even with the convincing it'll take, even with the perpetually skewed nature of that.

oh shes quirky

if framing and lighting that circular mirror in the bedroom shot so that it looks like a moon is intentional then tarkovsky is goat

tarkovsky might be a fan of mentally ill trans girls if he met some idk

fetus in the dark was tuff

as a whole this feels sorta mid, though it could be either cause im not really in the headspace recently or cause tarkovsky films in general, at least in the light of the time since this and everything my zoomer ass has been exposed to, arent as ✨️thought provoking✨️ as i heard beforehand, which is what this one seems most focused on

maybe i just struggle to relate to homesickness. im the most spiritually homeless person on earth.

abandoned building yummmm

dont hit her bro i already dont like u

beautiful earthy colors strike again and again

hes better when swaying and smoking and looking a lil manic

an-gela!!!

love when an aerial shot of a city reminds me of gaziantep as seen from our old apartments kitchen window

speech from the guy on top the statue scene is my favorite part of this movie

i knew the walking-across-the-pool-with-the-candle scene from playing the witness back when it was free on epic games in 2019/20. its like this film, gorgeous even if kinda bullshit in points, even tho i get the point

@detondev have you seen Nostalghia yet? Tarkovsky x abandoned or little-used buildings and dripping water is *chef's kiss*
@MediumWasTedium that's next on the list ive been doing his whole filmography in chronological order as u can tell by what comes before in the thread
@detondev cool, I did not actually notice you were doing them chronologically as I did not watch them chronologically