Stalker – The Koboi Project

Hugo: Well…that’s wonderful, Niranjan, now you do give us the chance to agree with you (or otherwise), and I’m pleased to fully embrace what you write about the nature and purpose of art in your Second and Third Criteria, and respect your renewed heartfelt claim for Tarkovsky. However I’d have to question a lot of what you write in the First Criteria, starting with your new sweeping statement (much harder to forgive) that all art mediums were decadent by the end of the 19th century.

So this is how Hugo Moss’ begins his reply to my justification of my claim that Andrei Tarkovsky was the greatest artist of the 20th Century … in any medium! (see Tarkovsky Monument and Tarkovsky Monument 2) I had cited Ingmar Bergman’s statement that Andrei Tarkovsky was the greatest auteur in the film medium, “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 had taken Bergman’s judgment on Tarkovsky as the basis of my own and estimation of him in the world of film and augmented it with the controversial premise that film was the medium of the century and that therefore, and by definition Tarkovsky was, well … the Greatest of all his contemporaries in all mediums!

Hugos’s continues …

Hugo: Even if I accept your unusual use of the word “decadent”, you’re still asking me to consider as “redolent” the work of folk who were producing some pretty extraordinary and groundbreaking stuff (as defined by your Second and Third Criteria), well into the 20th century, using several means of expression other than film. Then your sweep continues with an attempt at laying down the law: “Any artist not practicing his art in the film medium misses (…) the right to be considered the greatest artist of this time.” You’re certainly tidying up the floor nicely here, but it seems to me that in doing so your broom inadvertently knocks over quite a lot of important other stuff, no?

Hugo is right, indeed, I am tidying up, but in my own mind, it is with a benign broom … one that separates by genre in order to aggrandize Tarkovsky, without besmirching the great masters of the … I stand by it … ‘redolent’ arts …. Yes, while I am willing to withdraw my apparently overstated adjective ‘decadent’, I stand by my use of ‘redolent’ to characterize the fragrant ripeness of the other arts in the 20th Century …. (More on this in Tarkovsky Monument 4)

Hugo: Although I think I see what you’re getting at, I agree neither with the claim itself nor with the attempt at establishing such a litmus test for greatness. Academia spends a lot of its time in this sort of activity, but inevitably ends up making extraordinary over-simplifications about this very great, beautiful and complex world. What is being achieved by heaving Tarkovsky (or anyone else) onto a pedestal based on such a narrow idea? It seems to be to be a supremely Ahrimanic (Ahriman is the power that makes man dry, prosaic and philistine. It ossifies him and brings him to the superstition of materialism.) exercise, whereas I feel we artists should be seeking to keep things flowing. I love hearing/reading about your passion for Tarkovsky and others without having to place them on anything or even anywhere in particular. They continue to move through time as we all do. Your love for and the inspiration you’ve gained from artists like Tarkovsky are far more important to me than anything Mount Olympus can provide. No, let us leave these attempts at fixing things in stone to others and keep the flow going.

Again, Hugo is right, but like the good Stalker (the lead character in Tarkovsky’s film of the same name) that he is, it is my dear friend who set the trap that led me deeper into the the ‘zone’ by asking for the justification that I had instinctively eschewed in my very first post on Tarkovsky … Indeed, while my praise of Tarkovsky is Mazdian (Ahura Mazda is goodness, light, and free of all evil) in intent, Ahriman may, indeed, have been lurking therein, as hyperbole limits movement, and can not be justified without an attendant ossification! I acknowledged this to Hugo on Messenger in these words “Statements or comparisons of the greatness of others are not useful … other than as subjective symbols of the self … perhaps!”

Hugo: Perhaps! and I perfectly empathize with the love/inspiration which fuels them.

(slightly edited version of a post made on AUGUST 4, 2017)

Image: http://www.longpauses.com/

http://www.michaelchekhov.com.br/en/quem.html

https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/AhrDec_index.html

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/forty-years-on-tarkovskys-stalker-remains-a-great-example-of-movie-poetry-easier-to-experience-than-explain-6973641.html

https://genies.fandom.com/wiki/Angra_Mainyu

A monument to Andrei Tarkovsky was opened on the 29th July 2017 in Suzdal, where his epic, Andrei Rublev, was shot in 1965 … well over half a century ago. Andrei Tarkovsky was in my view the most important artist of the 20 century in any medium. Yes, that is a sweeping statement! … but I have just watched his films in the cinema – Solaris 3 times and Stalker twice in the course of the last week (july, 2017), and feel this claim is justified. I shall do my best to ‘contextualize’ (corrected from the original ‘justified’ – explained in Tarkovsky Monument 2) my hyperbole … and if I fail to persuade you … perhaps, you might at the very least, understand where I am coming from (my perspective or paradigm)!

The renowned Polish filmmaker, Krzysztof Zanussi attests (see minute 15.55 in the video below) that in that in deathbed conversation, Tarkovsky said to him, “If I happen to die, please whenever you talk about me, remind people I want to be remembered as a sinner, as somebody who committed many sins …. “ Andrei Tarkovsky was Christian in his conviction and I believe he was expressing, in this request, his subscription to the doctrine of original sin, which although different in nuance or even opposite in orientation is, in its essence, the same as Islamic fitrah (original purity), Buddhist dhukka (universal suffering) or Saiva pasam (attachment). In all his work Tarkovsky struggled to express, in historical and psychological terms, this metaphysical understanding of the human condition, this oscillation, or extension, between fall and grace.

In his art, film, the quintessential 20th Century representational medium, becomes both a balm and a sacrament – an interface for healing and a window to salvation. Tarkovsky set this ameliorative and soteriological vehicle into motion in what Ingmar Bergman, has described as “a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream”. Tarkovsky is the exemplary post-traditionalist, he is utterly contemporary in his engagement with social history and psychology … and he is timeless in his grasp of the sacred. In his 7 technically and aesthetically masterful works Tarkovsky articulated this timelessness through his art of ‘sculpting in time‘!

(slightly edited, from a post made in JULY 25, 2017)

Image : http://wellnews.us/articles/the-firstever