Actually, despite the increasing conviction that I'm coming down with a cold, Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1975) made me feel better about pretty much everything.
Thank you! I woke up today very definitely sick, so I appreciate it especially!
I was just looking at shelves yesterday and noticed I still had this movie unwatched, so I suppose this counts as a recommendation?
Yes. It is a very beautiful film about being an artist and about the process of working through oneself in preparation to make art; there are ways in which I think it is categorized as a much more obscure film than it is because it's non-naturalistic (rain is very rarely an environmental feature in this movie; it seems instead to delineate a certain mood; I believe wind to function the same way) and contains the kind of double-casting that goes with certain approaches to memory and interiority (although I think it is more thoughtful and critical of the trope than many films in which the same woman plays the artist's wife and mother while the same boy plays the artist himself and his son), where in fact it tells the viewer how to read it right from the beginning, it's not plotless, and it's not pure autobiography, which would have played differently. It reminded me of several filmmakers and visual artists while being entirely its own language and I think it is a tribute to the film that it was possible to discern these levels of beauty and complexity through the worst subtitles I've ever seen on a theatrical release. (On a par with the first North American DVD release of Let the Right One In—simplified conversations, left whole sides of dialogue out, left entire conversations untranslated and then added a sort of summary tag at the end; amazingly bad. The poems were about the only passages of speech translated line-for-line and even there I'm suspicious. It was not such a hack job that the plot was impossible to follow, but that was the most you could say for it. I was almost impressed.) We're going back on Sunday for Stalker (1979), which I've been wanting to see for years. It had better not have been subtitled by the same studio, is all I'm saying.
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Thank you! I woke up today very definitely sick, so I appreciate it especially!
I was just looking at shelves yesterday and noticed I still had this movie unwatched, so I suppose this counts as a recommendation?
Yes. It is a very beautiful film about being an artist and about the process of working through oneself in preparation to make art; there are ways in which I think it is categorized as a much more obscure film than it is because it's non-naturalistic (rain is very rarely an environmental feature in this movie; it seems instead to delineate a certain mood; I believe wind to function the same way) and contains the kind of double-casting that goes with certain approaches to memory and interiority (although I think it is more thoughtful and critical of the trope than many films in which the same woman plays the artist's wife and mother while the same boy plays the artist himself and his son), where in fact it tells the viewer how to read it right from the beginning, it's not plotless, and it's not pure autobiography, which would have played differently. It reminded me of several filmmakers and visual artists while being entirely its own language and I think it is a tribute to the film that it was possible to discern these levels of beauty and complexity through the worst subtitles I've ever seen on a theatrical release. (On a par with the first North American DVD release of Let the Right One In—simplified conversations, left whole sides of dialogue out, left entire conversations untranslated and then added a sort of summary tag at the end; amazingly bad. The poems were about the only passages of speech translated line-for-line and even there I'm suspicious. It was not such a hack job that the plot was impossible to follow, but that was the most you could say for it. I was almost impressed.) We're going back on Sunday for Stalker (1979), which I've been wanting to see for years. It had better not have been subtitled by the same studio, is all I'm saying.