Prior to my initial viewing of Poetic Harmony, Lewis Bond’s intimidatingly-titled but excellent video essay on the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, I had only seen a couple of the Russian director’s films. The first of these, Solaris, was so long ago that I had only the vaguest recollections of it. It took me three attempts to make it through the other, Stalker. Word to the wise - it’s definitely not a good one to start watching late at night and/or while feeling sleepy!
On finally watching it to the end my feelings were a peculiar cocktail of bemusement and muted admiration. If the combined response of the presenters of sci-fi podcast Please Don’t Send Me into Outer Space is anything to go by, my reaction was hardly atypical.
As a big film fan, but in no way a proper student of cinema, I didn’t really know quite how to process Stalker. I haven’t seen a sufficient number or range of films and I’m not familiar enough with Tarkovsky’s ideas on film-making to get a firm grasp on what he was up to. His way of doing things is just too darn different from nearly everything else I have seen from other directors. But as you'll hear in the video, that was part of what Tarkovsky was aiming for.
Mr. Bond’s (can I really write that in a Russia-themed blog and get away with it?) articulate, thoughtful analysis gave me a lot of things to bear in mind when watching Tarkovsky’s films or thinking about them. It also helped allay my occasional faint suspicion that perhaps Tarkovsky was some kind of cinematic Loki having a very elaborate and extremely deadpan joke at the audience’s expense.
More importantly, Bond’s purposeful selection of images, music and audio clips from interviews with the director and cast members made me really want to go back and re-watch the Tarkovsky films I’d already seen and catch up with the ones I hadn’t. And I suspect I won’t be alone in that either.
