[in]Transition

The video essay is a compilation of evocative shots from Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. It opens crisply on a hopeful note with creatures who are young, fresh, beautiful or winged – though very soon teary-eyed. Couples and other kinds of dyads then either caress or comfort one another with the same sense of urgency and loneliness, turning by degrees older, paler, bruised, muddy, sick, or deathly. Not least at this point, Tarkovsky’s particular kindship with Bergman powerfully springs into visual significance, with pietàs, sick beds, lines of sight through old interiors, and more. The montage is effective and beautiful.

The clips proceed to examine how eye contact, or the lack of it, is thematised in Tarkovsky’s films. Either characters look at each other, or lone characters avoid, meet, or negotiate the audience’s gaze. Twinkles of carefully lit eyes speak to the visual importance of the averted or probing eye in Tarkovsky. The ability to show exactly this trait so clearly across a number of films is one of the strongest point of the video essay.

In compilations, formal interest in what is going on within the frame naturally tends to obscure meanings and signification; but in this case, no viewer can miss the central importance in Tarkovsky’s films of human beings, their relationships, and their ordeals. Only faint echoes remain of the themes of individual films, but the techniques behind these themes become all the more visible and arguably still exist through them and not detached from them. The video essay makes clear, for instance, how strong visuals of rain, fire, wind and water can help thematise the sodden, derelict or ruined.

When making visible how the different films are related, the compilation’s unifying action is at the same time a potential stumbling block, since Tarkovsky’s conviction was that the temporality and rhythm of the individual shot is truly central to the film. In Sculpting in Time, he calls this the ”sense of time passing through the shot.” Such guidelines about how to perceive of his formal work need to go meaningfully unheeded, and the rhythms altered, for the compilation to work. Probably the longest sequence used is the last one, with the burning house from The Sacrifice; but this is still of course just a snippet of that tracking shot (roughly as long as the entire video essay).

The process of taking such immediately dominant traits away from the film and instead offering cross-assembled bits and pieces allows other systems and syntaxes into view. My best proof-reading tip is to read backwards, sentence by sentence, so as not to slide back again into instead engaging with the meanings of the sequences; something similar although far less prosaic is going on here. The music (including Ovchinnikov and Artemyev) has been taken from soundtracks to Tarkovsky films and re-set to the succession of clips. It was amusing to see that since several of the films are in both colour and black and white to begin with, the mix of colour and black and white footage in the compilation film is paradoxically another feature that makes the viewer feel at once at home in this new, broken up and reassembled Tarkovskyan world.

In the essay accompanying this video, Vandersteen and Kravanja express some trepidation at cutting into the works of a director that has been so revered as Tarkovsky. In the writing of many critics and theorists, the director’s works and personage are frequently imbued with an almost sacred aura and significance, in keeping with Tarkovsky’s own pronouncements, in Sculpting in Time, on the role of the artist in society and the inviolable status of the artwork. At the same time, as the video itself proves, Tarkovsky’s films are perfect for the type of work that the authors conduct here: lifting out the visual patterns and motifs, the compositions and textures, that resonate throughout and across his eight feature films. In this illumination of the ‘internal architecture’ of the films, the authors have chosen to highlight portals, faces, hands, embraces, and nature. Placing the images of these elements side-by-side, Vandersteen and Kravanja create a kind of mosaic from films that themselves are frequently thought of as tessellations of striking audio-visual moments.

Divorced from their context, we can see more clearly the ways in which these images resonate beyond their immediate ties to the particular film from which they emerge. These resonances take several forms. For example, the visual motifs have a thematic significance: portals might suggest transformation or thresholds between states of being, while hands grasping and touching suggest the desire for human connection that drives many of Tarkovsky’s characters. Excising these images from the flow of the film emphasises, however, the ways in which such moments come to have an uncertain status, rather than operating as fixed symbols.

The repeated patterns that human figures and compositions form seem to direct us towards meaning, but it is not always clear what those meanings are. In Tarkovsky’s films meaning, like time, is fluid. While the video-essay demonstrates the presence of ambiguous thematic resonances, it also shows us how the images pulsate with a powerful materiality, whether this be the material textures of the natural world, or the hapticity of human embraces. Finally, in removing the visual motifs from their contexts, what comes to the fore is their potential to function as moments of indeterminate affect or emotion, where the viewer may be as tossed between states of feeling as Mirror’s Maria seems to be, when her expression modulates between laughter and tears. In his writing on the editing process, Tarkovsky emphasised the importance of allowing images to find their own temporal rhythms. In rearranging Tarkovksy’s images, Vandersteen and Kravanja’s video has engendered new rhythms of time, and offered new patterns of experience to viewers.