COMMENTS:

Is there any more hypnotic moment in narrative cinema than the driving scene in Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS? Is there any moment in postwar narrative cinema that is better for showing how things do indeed fall apart, the centre that is narrative cannot hold, even when filmmakers can't bring themselves to cut loose from it? This is part of the film that really launches into outer space, when the viewer starts to get hints of transcendence and of a more vivid perception that is both beyond image and yet also wedded to the image. To describe the moment is in one way a case study in how style evades explanation: well, you see, they drive through a city, for a really long time, and there are only a few shots. And yet, you need to know all of that; they are driving (and the irrepressible sense of forward motion is overwhelming), and they are driving through a city (and the oppressive urban landscape that they surge through feels just as overwhelming), and it is a few shots but not too few (a continuity system seems inadequate, and yet, in good tortured-modernist fashion, Tarkovksy can't quite shake his desire to believe in what it can do, and so ends up driving his viewer a little crazy too), and it lasts a really long time. Tarkovksy's oeuvre is full of sequences like these; understanding them via style is to unlock the door to a cinematic universe that includes Stan Brakhage, Chantal Akerman, Claude Lanzmann, and Haile Gerima.

[ By Jerry White • December 11, 2004 ]