David Vining's Blog, page 147

The Sacrifice

Made while Andrei Tarkovsky knew that he was on death’s door, The Sacrifice is the final work of one of cinema’s finest filmmakers. A plea in the face of a literal Armageddon on a small scale, it deals with the sense of the apocalypse in the most overt and immediate way, speaking directly to Tarkovsky’s obvious sense of mortality. That immediacy makes The Sacrifice a surprisingly visceral film when coming from Tarkovsky, the maestro of long, slow takes, made all the more interesting because ...

Nostalghia

This is probably Andrei Tarkovsky’s most autobiographical film, which is saying something because Mirror is about his own childhood. Mirror was really about the environment that led to the creation of Tarkovsky himself, in a way, but Nostalghia seems to be much more about Tarkovsky in the moment. His main character (also named Andrei) is a Russian national in Italy on a project, yearning for home, and the making of this film was when Tarkovsky decided to enter exile away from his motherland,...

Stalker

There’s something about science fiction that really tries to mess with the audience’s head that I really appreciate. These are stories that really try to create something different, something removed from our own experiences, that challenge some basic concept of perception. Part of doing that, I long ago figured, was tying these kinds of perception bending experiences with larger questions. You can imply the broken realities, but they also need to be tied to something else to give it gre...

The Sharp Kid – November 1

Pre-order is live for Kindle version!

Paperback and Hardback version to release on the same day.

The Blue Eagle

Well, this was disappointing. Coming off of his strongest silent entry, John Ford makes an overstuffed and barely coherent little issue film that just simply doesn’t work in The Blue Eagle. Moving in several directions at once but never really seems to understand what story it wants to tell.

It begins on a naval vessel during World War I. In the boiler room are two men, George Darcy (George O’Brien) and Tim Ryan (William Russell). They’re both from the same town and heads of local rival g...

Coming November 1

3 Bad Men

The first hour or so of John Ford’s 3 Bad Men is perfectly fine Western storytelling. The last half hour is probably the best he’d put together up to that point in his career, bringing every narrative element to full fruition in a finale that combines historical recreation, adventure, and pathos with a strong focus on character that elevates the entirety of the film to become the strongest film of Ford’s silent period. This is an absolute gem of a film that feels like classic Hollywood at so...

Mirror

Movies about the self can often become masturbatory exercises that actively work to exclude anyone not intimately familiar with the filmmaker’s life. Thinking back to a poetry class in college, I remember a girl complaining that you had to have read a biography of Sylvia Plath to understand literally anything about her poems because they were so intimately tied in with Plath’s own personal interpretations of particular images (like, you have to know that the man in black in her poems is her ...

Solaris

Fresh off the uncomfortable release of Andrei Rublev (actually, in the middle of it since it didn’t actually get an official Soviet release until 1973), Andrei Tarkovsky went safe. He chose to adapt the work of a popular Polish Soviet science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem, and hoped that it would help his career. Despite working closely with Lem, Tarkovsky ended up making a work that Lem hated, saying that the adaptation missed the point and that his novel wasn’t about the erotic problems of...

Andrei Rublev

In production for a whole month before Nikita Khrushchev was deposed as head of the Soviet State and the cultural thaw he had led was forcibly ended, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev was a thorn in the side of the Soviet authorities for years. Explicitly religious with a clear-eyed look at the oppressive nature of Russian history, it was far from the sort of nationalistic fanfare about a Russian hero of the arts the authorities wanted for propaganda purposes. Finished in 1966, but not releas...