Bergman on Tarkovsky

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djross
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Bergman on Tarkovsky

Post by djross »

Ingmar Bergman is often quoted as saying of Andrei Tarkovsky:

[Discovering Tarkovsky's work was akin to] a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how. Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.


I am quoting here from the introduction by Patrick Bureau to the 2006 book Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, edited by John Gianvito. Bureau says he is quoting from The Magic Lantern. But turning to Bergman's autobiography yields instead the following passage, which I will quote at greater length than strictly necessary, just because it is interesting:

The rhythm in my films is conceived in the script, at the desk, and is then given birth in front of the camera. All forms of improvisation are alien to me. If I am ever forced into hasty decisions, I grow sweaty and rigid with terror. Filming for me is an illusion planned in detail, the reflection of a reality which the longer I live seems to me more and more illusory.

When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure – The Serpent's Egg, The Touch, Face to Face and so on.

Fellini, Kurosawa and Buñuel move in the same fields as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness. Méliès was always there without having to think about it. He was a magician by profession.

Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness.


Leaving aside all there is to discuss regarding this quotation, what is obvious is that this passage must have been the source of Bureau's quote, yet the specific differences between the two seem to go beyond what can be accounted for by the possibility of varying translations from Swedish. In the Penguin edition of The Magic Lantern I have just cited, for example, there is no mention of Tarkovsky "inventing a new language", nor is there any suggestion that discovering Tarkovsky was a kind of "miracle".

Assuming that Bureau is the source of the oft-cited quotation mentioned at the beginning, it seems likely he was quoting from a French translation of Bergman's autobiography, then translated into English for the book of Tarkovsky interviews. In the "Chinese whispers" from Swedish to French to English, it is no doubt possible to traverse a fair semantic distance, although the gap between the two quotations seems to suggest that one or more translators involved (or Bureau himself) was perhaps a little too "free". Unless there is another explanation that I have failed to imagine.

karamazov.
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re: Bergman on Tarkovsky

Post by karamazov. »

hmm, nice sleuthing.

I don't remember where I got that [seemingly spurious] quote from for my 'mini-review' of "Mirror" [1975]. I vaguely remember taking it from the back of a DVD case [It's possible it was a bootleg/counterfeit DVD, cos it was unwatchably shit] I had of the movie.

djross wrote:Assuming that Bureau is the source of the oft-cited quotation mentioned at the beginning, it seems likely he was quoting from a French translation of Bergman's autobiography, then translated into English for the book of Tarkovsky interviews. In the "Chinese whispers" from Swedish to French to English, it is no doubt possible to traverse a fair semantic distance, although the gap between the two quotations seems to suggest that one or more translators involved (or Bureau himself) was perhaps a little too "free". Unless there is another explanation that I have failed to imagine.

Seems plausible.

iconogassed
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Re: Bergman on Tarkovsky

Post by iconogassed »

Off-topic but related: I highly recommend Stan Brakhage's account of his meeting with Tarkovsky, whom he cited more than once as the greatest narrative filmmaker alive. Tarkovsky saw Brakhage's work for the first time in 1983 and was provoked into actual hysterics:

Next comes Untitled No. 6 of the Short Films of 1975 and I thought this might move him because it's based on a Mandelstam poem. The poem was my source of inspiration. In the film you see light moving slowly over different household objects and the rabbit's eye and the chicken with the bloodied wing and all these are in a stretch of purely metaphorical combinations. But that threw him into an even greater rage. Now he's yelling! He's standing up in his chair, he's sitting down, he's looking at the film out of the periphery of his eye as he's yelling things at Zanussi, and he won't look at me at all. My shoulder's up against him but he doesn't look at me and he's about the level of my navel.

In the mean time, Jane and his wife are laughing and they're holding hands, and smiling, like "isn't this a wonderful cock fight!" Because I must say I gave for everything I got. I ran through my whole repertoire of any kind of answer I'd ever given in the briefest and simplest way I've ever done. I've had twenty-five years of practice in being beat up in public. At one point he lashed out in a diatribe against innovation itself, which I haven't heard before and maybe the only place you could hear it from would be Russia. The Avant-Garde crowds I've played to never thought of that one.

I said, "What do you think Cézanne would say to that?" To which the answer came back, "I'm sure Mr. Brakhage knows perfectly well what Cézanne would say to that. However what I say is, innovation is reckless and destructive."


I can laugh now but my heart was absolutely breaking for the films. At that point I was feeling that I had rather it had not occurred at all, than these films running against this absurd wallpaper, with all these angry aesthetics...

But still, I'm not giving up. The next film was going to be Arabic 3. I remember saying, wait a minute, just like I had after Window Water Baby Moving, I have some pure music coming. Because he's arguing, this isn't music, it has symbols, things that are nameable. It was a very intelligent argument, maybe one of the most intelligent I've ever had, but it's totally dedicated to destroying the possibility of my kind of films.

paulofilmo
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Re: Bergman on Tarkovsky

Post by paulofilmo »

that's amazing! reminds me of composer feuds. the only tarkosaur story i knew was when he got sloshed with kurosawa and they sing karaoke together, but I like this brakhage business.

here's my filmmaker friend patrick on solaris:


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