Tarkovsky – Daniel Binns

I couldn’t stop watching it. Again.

Like, the film is two hours and forty fucking minutes long.

It’s also been a solid two years or so since the first time I saw it. And it’s not the same.

I thought it would feel slower. That I would be made to feel each agonising camera movement again and again.

But honestly: it felt speedy. It felt measured. It felt right.

Yesterday I watched Dave Grohl’s Sound City, and in that they get a bunch of musos to define ‘feel’.

Essentially ‘feel’ is that moment where everything else fades away, where it’s just you and the music, where everyone is just on the same wavelength.

I was feeling this film today. It was just me and the film. I was on its wavelength (I promise I’m not high, though can you imagine).

This time I thought about the doggo. This time I thought a lot about Annihilation (and I’m not the first).

I came in thinking eco-cinema, and once again that narrowness of vision was devastated.

What. A. Film.

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Sometimes it’s the movement. Just the movement. As the light hits a blade of grass, or a leaf — something that’s completely out of a cinematographer’s control.

Sometimes it’s the perfect placement of a vaguely recognisable object — like a syringe, or a coin, or a calendar page — just below the surface of a liquid such that it shimmers ethereally.

Sometimes it’s the way you’re cued to recognise each of three craniums at varying stages of baldness.

Sometimes it’s the crease of a wrinkle, the way a brow furrows, the tiniest glimmer of a smirk.

It’s a character breaking the fourth wall an hour into a film and it somehow feeling like the most natural thing in the world.

It’s rain falling completely out of nowhere, indoors, for no reason.

It’s a little girl, apropos of nothing, moving a couple of glasses with her mind.

And sometimes, just sometimes, it’s all of these things.

Daniel Binns

Tag: Tarkovsky

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