A Tree In The Mist

There's a shot in Nostalghia – you have to spell it with the 'g', he says, it's the Russian spelling, or rather, our transliteration of a Russian spelling – that always returns to him, the poet says. It's eight minutes long, he's timed it, he says.

Gorchakov – the Russian poet – first sits and then lies down, that's the action, all of it. It's dark at the beginning of the shot, but by the end, dawn has come. In eight minutes, a whole night has passed, I think that's it, the poet says.

At one point, an Alsatian wanders into the shot. We viewers saw it last in the poet's memories of the country he's abandoned – Gorchakov is living in Italy. The Alsatian has wandered into the shot from his memories, from his dreams, the poet says.

Then it disappears. Dawn comes. The room lightens. The dog came and went in a secret fold of time. Was it a dream?, I ask him. No, the poet says, the dog was quite real. Everything in the room was real. He thinks a lot about that, the poet says. Am I real? Is he real?

*

Tarkovsky has a great feeling for the indefinite, the poet says. Tarkovsky above all. Bresson is less concerned about the indefinite, he's busy advancing his story, but Tarkovsky … He reads from a post-it note:

We've come to the end of the day. Let us say that in the course of that day something important has happened, something significant, the sort of thing that could be the inspiration for a film, that has the makings of a conflict of ideas that could become a picture.

But here's the crucial bit, the poet says.

But how did the day imprint itself on our memory? As something amorphous, vague, with no skeleton or schema. Like a cloud. And only the central event of that day has become concentrated, like a detailed report, lucid in meaning and clearly defined. Against the background of the rest of the day, that event stands out like a tree in the mist.

Like a tree in the mist, the poet says. That's a spatial image. Film can certainly capture space. It's made for that, for framing space. But it's time Tarkovsky is after. He thinks film can sculpt in time …

'How are you going to sculpt anything with your dictaphone?', the poet says. Look at you, waving your dictaphone about … it's grotesque!' If he stood for one thing with his poetry, his dreadful poetry, which he gave up a long time ago, the poet says, it was an attempt to sculpt in time.

'How pretentious!', he says. 'That's the thought in your Danish head, isn't it? How pretentious!' It's the thought in his head, too, the poet says.

But even now, he's after the same thing, the poet says. Not writing poetry is the same as writing poetry, in this regard. He knew what he was after, back then, when he wrote poetry, just as he knows what he's after now, now that he's given up writing poetry. It's the same, the same thing, the poet says. Only now he's on the side of the indefinite, part of it, the poet says.