Nostalgia

What a strange film, utterly lacking in narrative, self-indulgent, in a sense tedious, but I sat transfixed for two hours. Someone once described cinema as 'painting with light' and there isn't a single shot in this movie you wouldn't have been proud to photograph. It's utterly beautiful. You don't engage with it as you would with a regular movie, you just sit back and let the images wash over you, frankly I could have watched with the sound off and the subtitles off. I'm lying about the sound. Tarkovsky is a genius for dripping water. The switch between film stock is incredible, the sepia is some of the most breath-taking cinematography I have ever seen. This is pure art house cinema in all its gorgeous, pretentious grandeur.

It is beautifully photographed, and further established Tarkovsky as a genius with natural landscapes and settings. Aside from Orson Welles, Tarkovsky must be the king of atmosphere.

Atmosphere alone does not make a great movie. This movie is unbearably pretentious and slow beyond words. In comparison to Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman is an MTV director.

By this stage in his life, Tarkovsky was an acknowledged genius, and apparently nobody on this team ever dared to question his artistic decisions. He simply has no clue of when his point has been made and it's time to move on.

Is he a fine poet? Yes, as great as his father in many ways. I also think he has a marvelous photographer's eye for images. But he really had a complete disdain for communication with the audience, and that aloofness makes this film so hard to watch. Of course, the fact that much of the movie exists in dim remembrances and dreams makes it even less accessible. I don't even know if this film had a script. Some of the actor's dialogue, especially Giordano's, seems unrelated to the scenes they are performing. The actors performed admirably.

I watched it a second time with my fast-forward, and it was much better. He has a way of holding the camera on a still or barely-panning image for many, many seconds - with no sound either, except for his overused running or dripping water cliche. If you fast-forward all of those to the next scene, the movie flows much better.

I consider this movie a disappointment. I always thought Tarkovsky would make a great movie when given Western budgets and technology, but he pretty much just remade his earlier movies on better film stock.

He has a beautiful vision. I wish he had become a photographer instead of a filmmaker.

There are very few people worthy of the accolade of "Genius" but the late Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky was definitely one of them. In his film-making career he is responsible for some of the most beautiful images ever to be put on a cinema screen.

"Nostalghia" deals with a Russian poet who is in Italy to research the life of a Russian composer, who died there. Accompanied only by his female, Italian, interpretor, who is attracted to him, the poet feels strong feelings of home-sickness for Russia and he strongly misses his wife and child who stayed behind.

This was Tarkovsky's first film made outside the Soviet Union (and his first in a language other than Russian), but it is still very obviously a Tarkovsky film, complete with many haunting images of water and fire. in fact, instead of the beautiful, sun-drenched Italy we are used to seeing on film, here the country is grey, wet and shrouded in mist. As usual in Tarkovsky's films there are many changes between colour footage and black-and-white (or sepia). Here, the poet's memories of Russia are presented in monochrome.

As with all Tarkovsky films, "Nostalghia" demands a great deal from the viewer. It is very slow moving and requires a great deal of patience and concentration. Also, be warned that Tarkovsky did not see cinema as "entertainment" but as an art form. I would advise anyone to make the effort and stick with it, though. It is a great work of art.

Like a gallery of someone else's strong memories/obsessions, the luxurious images and painstaking movements attracted me with their clarity and disturbed me with their foreignness through the entire film. The undeniable beauty of his visual compositions pulled me in like any flawless performance. I felt no desire to visit his landmarks because they called to mind my own strong memories of similar grandeur. It did not matter that these were his choices. All that mattered was the complete realization of each spiritual personal epiphany. The dialogues, monologues, and mini-plays, on the other hand, disturbed me by adding layers of interpretation that either had to be accepted and incorporated into a less pleasant solipsistic whole, or separately analyzed and digested for their complexities in search of a grander vision. It was as if a famous artist began talking to you about the single meaning of each work of his as you observed them. Does he intend to deny you the pleasure of finding your own answers, or is he simply adding a new layer to enliven your own search for meaning? Accepting the latter explanation, has kept my mind busily turning for several days now.

Regardless of whether you accept Tarkovsky as philosophically profound or wise, his work is complex and open to multiple interpretations like a well-written haiku. Was Domenico deluded and tragicomic and the poet's torturous journey with the candle a sad joke? Are our memories of the past so intimately woven into our perceptions of ourselves that we cannot avoid irrational acts that imperil our future? Does strangeness or madness have a singular spiritual value all its own like an architectural ruin or a ravaged landscape? Do we take ourselves too seriously or have we over-developed our social, political, and scientific infrastructure to the extent that we are blind to the real world and threaten its existence? Are our poets and mystics spiritual resources or oversensitive fools, and does it matter? Perhaps Tarkovsky would disagree with every one of my questions. I am certain that others will have different questions and answers. However, for those that don't dismiss this film as self-indulgent and ponderous, Tarkovsky offers a rich composition that can support and survive several generations of critics and interpreters.

A more traditional episodic film with a clearly defined story line and a swift movement between scenes would have less to hide behind that a film like "Nostalghia," but there is no law that says a piece of art cannot be obscure. It comes down to a question of faith in the artist and whether it really matters how creative or insightful he was so long as you personally can find meaning in his work.

Previous critical comments about Nostalgia include 'the nearest to poetry that cinema can ever aspire'. There is nothing more one can add, this comment sums it up totally. I would say that this film is different every time I watch it, it's more than poetry, it's hypnotic to the state of Tarkovsky casting a spell on the viewer.