Tarkovsky or Bresson, that's the question, the poet says. Tark … no, Bresson, the poet says. It has to be Bresson! Everyone uses the same words when it comes to Bresson, the poet says. Austerity, for example. Impassivity. What a cliche!
Still, until recently, it was always Tarkovsky for him. Tarkovsky came first, although he was thinking of the Tarkovsky of Mirror, and to some extent Stalker, and not so much of the 80s Tarkovsky, of the later Tarkovsky, where he becomes altogether too Tarkovskian, if that's a word, the poet says.
Of course, it could be said that Bresson is always Bressonian. That there's a Bressonian way of doing things. Of looking at the world. At people. But Bresson isn't self-indulgent like the later Tarkovsky, the poet says. He's swifter. He's surer, an arrow loosed through the air.
A film shouldn't be much longer than 90 minutes, the poet says, although he makes a partial exception for Stalker. 90 minutes, and some of Bresson's films are shorter than that, he says. Joan of Arc is only 65 minutes, for example. 65 minutes! The arrow finds its target. There's no boredom. No longeurs when it comes to Joan of Arc, the poet says. And A Man Escaped is only 83 minutes long, he thinks it's 83. Nothing extraneous happens. Nothing indulgent.
Mirror is about 100 minutes long, and it only gets indulgent – a little indulgent – towards the end. Other than that, it's perfection, he says. The way its parts combine! The ordering of materials! The thought of Tarkovsky in the editing room makes him shudder with awe, the poet says. He only has to think about it, and he shudders.
He has his own summary of the scenes and shots of Mirror on his wall, and every time he passes it, he shudders, he says.
*
Mirror, says the poet. He never stops thinking about it. Mirror. Tarkovsky, in his film, wanted to show us an apartment in which time itself lived, the poet says, reading a quotation from a post-it note stuck to his wall. Time itself, the poet muses.
The secret of shooting time, for Tarkovsky, lay in the preparation for the shot – in particular, the conditions of light, of weather. He used a minimal number of takes for each shot. A single take was ideal – rehearsed, but one off, the poet says.
Tarkovsky wanted to allow time to flow, living and aleatory. He wanted to capture time in the shot, but also to release it – to realise what he calls the ceaseless flow of living life that surrounds us, the poet says, reading from the same post-it note. To capture and release time, both at once. The shot must breathe, live. Time has to live …
How to let time live?, the poet wonders. How to give life to the shot – the imaginary shot that pans around his flat? How to the framing of the wheelie bins in the yard, and the long scar in the wall where the pipe was pulled away? How the backs of the houses opposite, and the plant whose pot is broken, a cone of earth held together by roots?
Everything points towards a kind of wearing away of time, of linearity, of succession, the poet says. Of the way moment might be uncoupled from moment.
Sometimes, he imagines there is a kind of passion of daylight. That, seen from a certain angle, light falls into itself, and the day turns inwards, away, pressing into another dimension. That just as the third dimension unfolds from the second – a drawn square becomes a cube – there might be a fourth spatial dimension, and a fifth, and a sixth, in infinite succession.
The day unfolds itself in itself, he imagines. Somewhere else it is dreaming. Somewhere else, it is lost in its own corridors … Only he feels he's touched it, that other time, the other side of time. That it's come close to him, like a wild creature suddenly emboldened, trusting.
Lars Iyer's Blog 