Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

A Russian poet travels through Italy, trying to understand life, but finding his own death. The film is quite winding and although it kept me interested I often wandered about certain scenes and details. I am not quite a scholar on Tarkovsky's movies so I dare not try to walk those treaded paths. The most memorable shot is undoubtedly the one with the main character walking through the emptied pool, trying to bring a candle from one end to the other. In this 8 minute (very) long tracking shot the wind blows out the candle twice, before he can finally bring it to the other side - and then dies. The framing starts as full shot and is narrowed to a close up in the final moment. Questions: What does the broom mean?   Another interesting tracking shot is when Andrei visits the old man in this ruined house. When the old man tries to accompany to the front door, they pass through a long hall, that is visually divided by pillars into four rooms. There are a l...

Young Ivan goes on dangerous missions for the Russians behind the lines of the German Nazi army still having traces of childhood in him. As all the other Tarkovsky films this one has been discussed to death in a plethora of books, articles and possibly anywhere else. There are plenty of good analysis websites out there: Jean Paul Sartre's comments are here . As I went through the movie I found a lot of three-layer deep-space compositions inside the 4:3 frame. Tarkovsky and Yusov's imagery consists of a lot of these setups. I collected a couple of them here - although there are way more during the course of the movie. As Ivan is 'accepted' by his fellow comrades, he drinks from a glass. All their gazes focus on the center of the picture. It seems a classical deep setup in three layers. Here there is the commander trying to prevent Ivan from going back behind the lines. The composition is more extreme, with the foreground cut off and the space between th...