(I see this is blocked from uploading outside of YouTube, so the link here: https://youtu.be/pRtcu-7BCLE)
Music by Eduard Artemiev in tribute to the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky with whom he worked on several films. Most of the footage is taken from the film Mirror. The quality of the audio upload leaves a bit to be desired. I’d consider Tarkovsky probably the one true genius in terms of filmmaking - using ‘genius’ in its very exclusive or elitist sense! Given the very solitary nature of genius, and its extreme rarity; and the extremely communal and logistically complex nature of film-making, this environmental conflict makes the meeting of those two worlds, the genius and filmmaking, very, very unlikely. And it’s not like there’s all these geniuses either wandering about wondering what to do with themselves!
One quick effort to encapsulate something of what I mean by genius. Of course it includes extreme intelligence, but it is not something which can be measured, like an iq test. That is simply a scale of some kind of intelligence which can be measured and understood by other intelligences. It is within the realms of reasoning.
Think of hydrogen and oxygen. The two coming into contact with each other, in terms of reasoning, intellect, should simply mean there they are together in the same vicinity. That a completely other energetic form arises, water, is not a rational process. Reason, from a position of naked ignorance of the phenomenon of water, couldn’t possibly deduce its arising, no matter how much knowledge one possessed about hydrogen and oxygen . A mysterious spirit of deep genius, and endlessly deeper than reasoning is involved. Something of this same spirit is alive in the genius - and with some regularity. Tarkovsky was certainly imbued with it - which though isn’t to say his films are necessarily flawless creations - and given the, we’ll say, structural complexity of films is also pretty inevitable. Tarkovsky was undoubtedly alive as a genius in the sense of the visual, though allied to total integrity towards truth. And so while his films may contain astonishing images and sequences, these images are never sensual ends in themselves, but rather inner, spiritual truth is always the higher end. And Tarkovsky actually, despite his visual mastery, even called colour in film a dead-end, as I think he considered it a temptation towards a wallowing in beauty at the expense of truth.
On the other hand though in terms of the overall art of film, unlike say a traditional artist can simply be a master in the visual sense, but there is very much a narrative element to films also, and here Tarkovsky is not so much in his natural domain, and compared to his genius for image, here he has to wrestle with this comparatively alien element.
Anyway, blah, blah, blah . . . Below the composer of the linked musical tribute, Artemiev, talks of working with Tarkovsky.
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