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ONE
DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANDREI ARSENEVICH (TV)
7/10
Une journee d’Andrei Arsenevitch : France 2000 : Chris Marker : 55mins (made for TV)
“He buries himself in Russia: the map becomes the territory
– and history, in turn, is an element.”
(Marker on Tarkovsky’s Boris Godunov)
A heartfelt, thoroughly engrossing tribute to one of the key figures of 20th
century cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky, by another: maverick French avant-gardist
Marker. In less than an hour, we are guided through an enthralling tour
of Tarkovsky’s entire output, incorporating brief extracts from his first
student film (an adaptation of Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’) all seven of
his features, and even
video clips of his staging of the opera Boris Godunov.
Marker intersperses his film with two strands of invaluable documentary footage:
Tarkovsky on location in Sweden, executing the nightmarishly ambitious
six-minute “metaphysical” tracking shot at the climax of his final film,
The Sacrifice (1986);
and, only a few months later, lying in bed during his final illness in
Paris where he greets friends and family shortly before his death.
It’s very hard to fail with such strong material, but Marker deserves credit
for cutting together such a superb ‘greatest hits’ compilation of indelible
Tarkovsky moments – One Day is an ideal introduction to a director
whose name remains, in some circles, a byword for highbrow inaccessibility.
Marker concentrates on certain recurring images (horses and dogs; houses;
trees; paintings), techniques (camera placement; use of music) and themes
(passage between ‘zones’ of existence; Russia itself), building a strong
argument in support of Tarkovsky’s stated claim that he tried to “place
cinema on a par with the other arts.”
The tone is deliberately hagiographic - with the exception of the masterpiece
Mirror, Tarkovsky’s
films are seldom without their serious flaws, but there’s no room for
nay-sayers in Marker’s movie. The Soviet authorities are roundly (and
rightly) castigated for the obstacles they so often placed in Tarkovsky’s
path, but it might have been helpful if Marker had found room for one
or two commentators who might put the filmography in a wider context,
or examine it with more objective eyes.
Marker’s enthusiasm is persuasive, but once or twice his voice-over (spoken
by Alexandra Stewart) comes up with incongruously prosaic lines, or oddities
that sound like something has been lost in translation from the French:
surely there’s a better way to sum up Tarkovsky’s achievement that to
say he is “the only film-maker whose entire work lies between two children
and two trees” (a reference to the first shot of his first movie, Ivan’s
Childhood and the last of The Sacrifice). And the film
deserves a stronger title than Marker’s limp echo of Solzhenitsyn’s One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
It’s also
very frustrating to be told about, but not shown, the catastrophe which
befell the director during his first attempt to film the six-minute Sacrifice
shot. But apart from this inexplicable omission, Marker has crafted
an original, intelligent and sensitive contribution to film criticism
in general and Tarkovsky studies in particular. One Day is both
the record of a singular artist, and the record of a singular man. A nagging
question remains, however: why didn’t Marker show us it until 14 years
after Tarkovsky’s death?
1st January, 2003
(seen on video, same day)
by Neil
Young
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