Thank you, moon

Thank you to everyone who was glad to hear I wasn't dead. There have been no more fainting episodes. I hope to be able to say that for years. It was not an experience I need to repeat.

Tonight was a lovely evening with rushthatspeaks. We were meeting in Harvard Square for a pair of movies we'd been looking forward to since October. Dinner was located at Crema Café, home of the cardamom-currant snickerdoodle (sadly no longer home of the lamb sandwich with walnut aioli I've ordered every other time I've eaten there, but their spinach-artichoke grilled chicken was quite a satisfactory substitute), after which we took up a spare hour with the Harvard Book Store; I departed with a neat little reprint edition of Tom Stacey's The Man Who Knew Everything (1988), which I bought on the strength of the first three pages and John Hurt having once played the protagonist. We weren't even late for the movies. They were worth waiting two months and a protractedly late train for.

As part of their Chris Marker retrospective, which I have otherwise completely missed, the HFA screened a double feature of One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch (2000) and A.K. (1985). They're short films, running 55 and 75 minutes respectively; I don't know if they were created as complements, but they make a natural pair. One Day . . . looks as though it was originally conceived as a study of Tarkovsky on the set of The Sacrifice (1986), much as A.K. concentrates on Kurosawa on the set of Ran (1985), except that Tarkovsky was diagnosed with terminal cancer either during or shortly after the shoot, at which point the documentary seems to have shifted to become a meditation on his life and career. It is not dispassionate; it doesn't pretend the camera isn't there. Tarkovsky in his hospital bed in Paris, editing The Sacrifice with the help of tapes and portable televisions, wrapped in a camel-colored bathrobe and later a headscarf that he says makes him look like a pirate, talks as much to Marker's camera as to anybody, at one point calls out to Chris to make sure he hasn't missed a good line. He is sharp and lively and ironic for a man who will die within the year; he was just reunited with his fifteen-year-old son after five years of Soviet refusal. He is conscious of playing a part for the press. He doesn't talk much about his own movies; Marker does that, through the voice of Alexandra Stewart, and he is absolutely in love. I can't tell what either The Mirror (1975) or The Sacrifice are about, but I am very curious about both of them, and Stalker (1979) sounds like something I will adore. Thanks to hylomorphist, I own a DVD of Andrei Rublev (1966), which I think I have no excuse not to watch now. There are beautiful long floating shots, things with the calm, commonsensical, unexplainable juxtaposition of dreams. I don't want to sound unimpressed with A.K., but I already knew I liked Kurosawa; the second feature told me mostly that I like Marker's ability to film a documentary without assuming either an artificial distance or an equally showy intimacy, that being an extra in a jidaigeki is pretty much like being on campaign in an actual sixteenth-century army, and that I need to see Ran, because I want to know the relationship between the action I just watched from behind the scenes and the shots produced by the camera. Marker records the filming of a luminous, oneiric scene of mad Hidetora riding through a field of glittering golden grass by night, with a huge golden moon "worthy of Meliès" following him in the arms of an unseen stagehand—the crew spent all day spray-painting the field—after which we are almost unsurprisingly informed the scene was cut from the final film. The fog that billows around Mount Fuji delays filming; only up to a certain density can it be intercut with footage of battle-smoke. A nameless extra, hanging out around the fire with his blanket and his hot soup because those black volcanic slopes are cold, jokes that he should get a subtitle—and Marker gives him one, complete with sweeping title music: "The Unknown Man of Fuijiyama." (I really hope he saw the film.) There's less attempt to make a coherent symbol-set of Kurosawa's oeuvre, more attention to the members of his team. An elegaic moment is given to the sound engineer Fumio Yanoguchi, whom Marker compares to "an elegant old cat"; he died during production. I still think I'll have a harder time not tracking down all the Tarkovsky I can get my hands on tonight.

And then because it was Sunday, the MBTA was fucked and we spent half an hour waiting for Rush's bus in the freezing cold of Davis Square. Still and totally worth it.

We may be watching some Tarkovsky this week.