The Andrei Tarkovsky fan club

I haven't been familiar with Tarkovsky's films for a long time, but I sure am enjoying them immensely. In fact, I think he's my new favorite filmmaker. I've seen Andrei Rublev, Solaris and Nostalgia.

I think Nostalgia is the best of the three. I've watched it twice, and I'm still in a kind of catatonic state -- it was very moving, very deep, very affecting. Almost like shock therapy in a way, lol.

It's not just his length, though. His long-takes have a totally different quality than, say, an Orson Welles long-take. It's like how he describes in his treatise, Sculpturing In Time. You can feel the time pass through each take in a hypnotic way, and you are vaguely aware that they don't necessarily correspond to real-life time. This is especially prominent in certain shots of his where a character or object disappears off one side of the screen and reappears from another side some time later. It's like a lullaby -- it might be just a few lines, but you feel as if a lifetime has gone by.

I just finished watching Stalker, and I find it to be his best yet. Almost perfect in all regards. What he seems to have done is to involve the audience into the film by not doing many establishing shots so that the geometry and space of the settings are discovered little by little. Also, certain shots are done in a way as if we temporarily inhabit a character: for example, when the wife talks she faces the camera the whole time, only looking away briefly when she's, say, embarrassed. It's not really a POV shot, but we inhabit the Stalker.