When Stan Brakhage met Andrei Tarkovsky… “So, the leader comes through, the room’s heated up, on comes Dog Star Man, Part IV. He starts exploding in Russian the minute the hand painted frames are flickering on the screen, along with the layers of superimposition. He’s obviously raging! No one’s heard him talk so much since he’s been here. He’s hammering away in incredibly rapid Russian. He ran, in the course of an hour and a half, through every argument against my work and any other individual’s work that I have ever heard, from the Emperor’s New Clothes argument through this-is-too-rapid-it-hurts-the-eyes, through ‘this is sheer self-indulgence,’ to ‘film is only a collaborative art.’ And in detail, ‘the color is shit’ and ‘what is this paint? Why do you do this?” “In the mean time, Jane and his wife are laughing and they’re holding hands, and smiling, like ‘isn’t this a wonderful cock fight!’ Because I must say I gave for everything I got. I ran through my whole repertoire of any kind of answer I’d ever given in the briefest and simplest way I’ve ever done. I’ve had twenty-five years of practice in being beat up in public. At one point he lashed out in a diatribe against innovation itself, which I haven’t heard before and maybe the only place you could hear it from would be Russia. The Avant-Garde crowds I’ve played to never thought of that one.” “Then, a further irony, we all had to sit there and watch a film by a Russian emigre that Tarkovsky had promised to watch. We had to endure a stupid, senseless movie in which the Russian girl who’s fat can’t get a boyfriend or adjust to America. It felt about ten hours long although it was only half an hour. I did hear afterwards that Tarkovsky told the Russian emigre that it was the stupidest film he ever saw.“
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 19:10:46 +0000
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