http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7084788.stm
Guillermo Del Toro, director of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone and Cronos to write and direct a film of 1960s camp classic TV series The Champions.
This is just weird! A bit like hearing David Cronenberg has signed up to direct an episode of Tellytubbies. Or Clive Barker planning a film version of Minder.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s birth, which is being marked with a brief retrospective of the late director’s works in London. The website features this quote from Ingmar Bergman:
“My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly I found myself standing at the door of a room the key of which had, until then, never been given to me. Tarkovsky for me is 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”.
High praise, indeed, from the late Swedish auteur. But is his work really meritous of such high praise? He is certainly one of the most difficult directors for modern audiences to get to grips with, and beyond his two magnum opi, Solyaris and Andrei Rublev, his works are not generally well known or easily commercially available. His output was hardly prodigious: only seven feature films in a career spanning 24 years puts him closer to Terence Malick than Woody Allen.
The difficulties with watching a Tarkovsky film are no better illustrated than with a viewing of Solyaris. Mark Kermode a couple of weeks ago, rightly praising Steven Soderbergh’s excellent reimagining of Solaris (2002), described the original as ‘boring’. It is certainly true that the pacing is practically snail-like, and comparing the running time of 165 minutes with the details of the narrative structure does tell you that there are huge chunks of the film where very little happens. Tarkovsky is also famous for his long shot-lengths; The Sacrifice apparently has an average shot length of 72 seconds. When one compares that with Michael Bay’s famously jumpy Armageddon, which weighs in with an ASL of less than 2 seconds, we can see the contrast. ASLs of over 10 are generally considered to be high, so 72 really appears almost excessive.
With his deliberately slow pacing, and rather dreamlike shooting, it is easy to understand why many find Tarkovsky inaccessible. It doesn’t help that Solyaris also features other rather baffling elements, in particular a bizarrely long five-minute sequence of a car journey through a Japanese metropolis which seems out of place and completely unneccesary. This, apparently, was inserted to give Soviet viewers a feeling of futuristicness, though to the foreign viewer it is plain irritating.
A little about the story. Solyaris is technically an adaptation of a wonderful novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, though the screenplay takes great artistic licence with the source material. Occupants of a research station orbiting the planet Solaris have been sending rather erratic mesages back to Earth, so scientist Kris Kelvin is sent there to investigate. When he arrives, he discovers that it has descended into disarray, that one of the crew has committed suicide, and that the other crew members are behaving very strangely. It emerges that strange visitors from the crew’s past have been appearing, and soon enough this happens to Kelvin in the form of his dead ex-wife, Hari.
The film does not satisfy on a purely science fiction level: although the space station is fairly believably created, there are very little special effects, and those there are pale in comparison to those found in Stanley Kubrick’s earlier epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. These are very different films, though, although Tarkovsky’s apparent desire to completely diverge from the Kubrick film is not entirely satisfied. The core of the film is not the protagonist Kelvin but ultimately Hari, his dead wife, superbly played by Natalya Bondarchuk. She is not stricly real, but a composite of Kelvin’s memories and feelings about his ex-wife. Details are not completely fleshed out, gaps are not satistactorily filled, and she cannot exist without his presence.
The film, therefore, is looking at human relationships, and our ideas and feelings towards other people, even people we feel completely intimate with. That Steven Soderbergh managed to also satisfactorily film this in 99 minutes does not mean that Tarkovsky’s adaptation is too long-winded; it merely means he is giving the ideas, themes and persepectives of the film enough time to breathe. For me, Solyaris is a truly great film not for its technical perfection, but for its ability to make us think about what other people really mean to us, and in that sense it is true to Lem’s extraordinary novel.
My recent flurry of NASA-related posts have been inspired by this great little documentary about the history of the Apollo program.
Maybe I am more than a little behind the times, but I am still not entirely convinced by the need for documentaries getting cinematic releases. Perhaps my doubts are at least partially raised by the horrific sight of large posters advertising Michael Moore’s new gurn-fest, Sicko, featuring the rotund shyster brandishing a rather menacing rubber glove. One can’t help but feel that he, as well as fellow shock-doc manufacturer Nick Broomfield (another pet hate of mine, i’m afraid) are responsible for this new wave of ‘factual’ content breaking through the cinema doors.
This reservation aside, the other problem I have is that many of these documentaries are simply not cinematic. More worthy efforts such as Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and No End in Sight are fine if you were watching them on BBC4 from the comfort of your sofa, but is there any need to pay £6 to see them on a bigger screen with the THX booming in your ears?
Thankfully, with In The Shadow of the Moon, there is no such problem; cinema has always had a fascination with space travel and exploration, thinking in particular of the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, so it is a subject which lends itself much more naturally to these confines.
The documentary, somewhat inevitably, contextualises the story by beginning with JFK’s speech predicting the USA putting man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Here, and throughout the film, we are given glimpses of the domestic situation America faced in the period: Vietnam, Nixon, various assassinations, the Russians and the Cold War. What is also provided, though, is little glimpses into the popular culture of the time; one particularly funny moment occurs when coverage of the Apollo 11 mission cuts to a rather unsubtle advert for program sponsor Kellogg’s.
Interviews with the astronauts are unfailingly interesting, and they certainly seem to be an articulate, down-to-earth (sorry) bunch. Particularly engaging is Michael Collins, ‘the loneliest man’ as Karl Pilkington would have it, whose dry self-deprecatory sense of humour shines through throughout the film. ‘Mr Rendezvous’ Buzz Aldrin comes across as a complete geek, and one who relieved himself on the ladder down to the moon’s surface at that. There is the notable absence of a certain Neil Armstrong in the interviews, but this is inevitable given his rather reclusive nature.
The astronauts’ varying reactions to their achievements is also interesting; for some it seems to have strengthened their faith, while others seem to have come away with a sense of the Earth’s insignificance and fragility. It is also noteworthy that these men were naturally all pilots in the USAF, and if they weren’t doing what they were doing, they would inevitably have been flying jets over Vietnam – a fact that is easy to forget.
One particularly haunting part of the film is the speech that had been prepared and filmed in advance by President Nixon in case of the eventuality that Armstrong and Aldrin did not make it off the surface of the moon alive, describing their ‘sacrifice’ for scientific endeavour. Michael Collins is typically dry about this: “It’s what any PR man would have written”.
Read the speech is in full here: http://watergate.info/nixon/moon-disaster-speech-1969.shtml
The film could so easily have been an overly-patriotic chest-beating love-in for Uncle Sam, and in the run-up to the first landing we do get a sense that it is a purely American mission. However, after the Apollo 11 astronauts return to earth, there is much footage of the international sense of achievement, reinforcing the idea that, as Neil Armstrong’s words so fittingly implied, this was for all mankind.
There’s an interesting article in this month’s Sight and Sound about the late director Ingmar Bergman, which mentions this painting by the Swedish painter Albertus Pictor, which depicts Death playing chess. Now where’ve I seen that before?
Criterion‘s 15 hour seven-disc box set of Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s Berlin Alexanderplatz looks a little excessive, though my rather fetishistic collecting of their DVDs means that this will probably be winging its way onto my film shelf sometime in the future. Still, it makes that 5-disc Blade Runner special edition look a little half-arsed, doesn’t it?
Serene Velocity 