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Tarkovsky's heartbeat

The language of Tarkovsky is poetic and he expresses himself cinematographically through images of melting ice and trees moving in breezes that swell up unexpectedly. Tarkovsky work is incohate, while barns and candles burn and vast oceans move with sentience. Tarkovsky's landscapes are always sentient. The rhythms of car and train journeys play against the unspoken thoughts of Tarkovsky's characters, which, in turn, still unrevealed, play against the watching cinema audience like Rimbaud's sunlight reflecting off water.

Long slow camera shots allow us to dwell in Tarkovsky's iconography and share his sentiment. We feel we may even sense the characters heartbeats and, doing so, our own heartbeat breaks through in synchrony. We watch the candle flicker as the writer shields it from the eddies of air blowing up dry leaves in the empty swimming pool, and we can't help but hear the softly snickering whispers.

Who's that? Who's there? Can you hear them too?

And then there is the feeling of "Tosca", it is a uniquely Russian feeling. The films Whorf back with great loads, great burdens. The main burden is the weight of a world war lived through. Tarkovsky reaches back, reaches back, through time, through to his mother and his father and he wraps them in a loving cinematic embrace as he goes off to war; as she bears up to the gut wriggling evil of office politics during the terror.

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