Nostalghia

Rating:
Summary: a life-changing film
Review: Tarkovsky was unknown to me until about 10 years ago. I came home late from work and 'Mirror' was being shown on TV. Captivated, I sat up and watched it right through. The film made a huge impact and stayed with me for days. I had to see and know more. And so I obtained copies of all of Tarkovsky's films, somemetimes not so easily, and in prints of varying quality and content. I now know and love them all. 'Mirror' alongside 'Rublev' would seem to me to be his best works, but my personal favourite is 'Nostalghia'.
There is so much that is extraordinary about this film that it is hard to know where to start. The long, beautiful and lyrical shots that linger over everything, always giving a textural, tangible feel to the 'surface' of the film. The lighting, the spare but evocative soundtrack that often highlights mundane sounds, such as the buzz-saw in the central meeting of the two protagonists, and the Russian folk-song that comes at the start and at the end- these things really stay in your memory. The interiors, the mist, the rain, the wind, the dreams that seem to pull the film into a logic of their own. The meeting of the two protagonists in which they barely say a word to each other. I could go on and on.
The ending is extraordinary and emotional; tears will always come for me as I watch Andrei struggle to get the candle across the pool, and the final shot, enigmatic and ambiguous, is one of the most amazing images in contemporary cinema.
Do try to get hold of this film and indeed the others and let it work its magic on you.

Rating:
Summary: Dreaming with your Eyes Open
Review: Tarkovsky's "Nostalghia" is, simply put, my favorite film of all time. I know that may sound trite, but it really is true. No other film I've encountered has been so completely lyrical, magical, poetic and deeply human all at the same time. Tarkovsky has created not just a movie, but a work of art that borders on a spiritual experience.

To me "Nostalghia" is about dreams and memory and how they reflect our private longing for "home." The way we carry that sense of place, of where we've been and the people we've loved, with us in our feelings. How in that sense, home and people still live on in our feelings no matter what "strange land" we may find ourselves in. And how that apparent distance, not only in space but in time, gives rise to the most intense and personal feelings of nostalgia.

Technically it's the story of a Russian poet's journey through Italy on a mission to trace the path of a famous Russian composer (Sosnovsky) and to perhaps come to understand why the composer had chosen to return to Russia to die, even though he'd been exiled from there years before. The poet's journey to find Sosnovsky though is more about his own journey to find himself, or a sense of something, a return to the "home" he too carries in his feelings and inhabits his dreams. Along the way he meets a madman and through their mutual understanding is given a small-yet-monumental task of redemption to complete.

There are many layers to the film, some ambiguous at best, some clearly laced with metaphor and meaning. There are also many strikingly poetic moments, often without anything being said, and beautiful transitions between waking (color) and dreaming (b&w) which magically blur the boundaries between the two.

It is a stunning film when one considers that all this was done without any of the digital special-effects found in most movies today. Many cinematic shots that could well be paintings by old masters like Vermeer or Rembrandt (the still of the dresser in his hotel room before he falls asleep, the mantel in the madman's room before he's given the candle) and some that are optical illusions so convincingly composed one can't help but stare in awe. Andrei Tarkovsky was truly a master of his craft.

Tarkovsky's lessons about "redemption through small yet meaningful gestures" is something worth considering in our self-aggrandized culture and it's ever-increasing pace. As is his "madman's" edict that in order to go forward we must first return to the place in the road where we went the wrong way and make it right, demonstrates that so-called madmen are perhaps not really so crazy after all. And the end of the world, after all, comes to each of us in turn.

Admittedly, the pace is glacial. So if you are unfortunate enough to have a short attention span, you'll probably not understand or appreciate this film. To you I wish all the best in your search for those elusive moments of meaning and subtle beauty happening all around you, all the time.

As for the rest of you, what are you waiting for?! See this movie and witness poetry in slow-motion. It's like dreaming with your eyes open.

Rating:
Summary: swollen angels point and laugh
Review: The first time I saw Nostalghia was in a movie theatre.

I was completely captivated.

If you like faster paced movies, like most of the gnats who inhabit this planet, I recommend you watch this anyway. Maybe you'll learn something.

At the end of the film I was totally blown away, I just sat therre with my mouth hanging open, dumbfounded. There were two couples on either side of me. At the end of the film, the couple to the right got up and didn't say anything. They didn't even lok at each other. They just looked at that final image on the screen, turned away, and left in silence, looking at the floor.

The couple to the left of me was weeping. Both of 'em. Everyone in the audience was deeply moved. I had only experienced that once before, when I saw Chris Marker's Sans Soleil at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC in 1985. But there, people were more overwhelmed with the steamroller intellect of that film. Nostalghia speaks directly to your heart, and breaks it.

If you really understand what's in this film, you'll never be the same. I know I was, and on my first viewing I only caught a percentage of what was in it.

This DVD has a special place in my DVD/VHS collection- along with Koyaanisqatsi, The Stalker, Sans Soleil, the directors cut of Bladerunner, and Wings of Desire, it is of special merit. And like those films, it is one I cannot watch very often. Every time it finds a new way to challenge me.

Rating:
Summary: Tarkovsky's best film - meditative metaphysical film poetry
Review: The late Russian filmmaker's best film, Nostalghia moves like a fever dream. The images are slow and studied - the film makes you concentrate on them the way you might stare at an abstract painting. It is to film what t.s. eliot's poems are to words. You may not understand or make sense of what you see, you only know that there is a subliminal beauty to it.

Rating:
Summary: Unrequited Longing
Review: The mercurial nature of this film - its liquidity (incompressible but formless state) - is mesmerizing. The central narrative - a Russian poet researching a Russian musician's time spent in Italy in the 1700s - is the frame which the amorphous stuff of Tarkovsky's film flows up against, into and around without every reaching saturation. All of this is to say, Nostalghia is a portrait of the state of vague desire felt by all sentient beings without ever achieving what is longed for. The exquisite structure of the film - its mise en scene - is somewhere in-between a parable by Bergman or Antonioni, a parabolical milieu that represents the intersection of variable states of consciousness (of vaporous, fixed and fluid states belonging to one or another of the inhabitants of this film, inclusive of the landscape and architecture) best illustrated by the long tracking shots Tarkovsky used in the black-and-white dream sequences where figures appear first in one part of the evolving frame and then in another, looking as it were at themselves looking at themselves looking at the dreamer looking at himself. There is a recurring theme of architecture as analog for consciousness, and several scenes where architecture in ruins is invaded by nature. And then there is rain, permeating this symbolical structural system like the fog that opens the film and suggesting a rotting, decomposing and regenerative essence within the film mirroring the ennui and the morbidity of the Russian poet as he slides toward his own end, making a pilgrimage across an outdoor pool with a lighted candle to fulfill the promise he has made to a reclusive and visionary madman. This eccentric man of faith has passed his own obsession with this ritual act on to Andrei, the poet, unable to complete the transaction himself. The longing for Russia, the poet's affliction (shared with the 18th-century composer), becomes a universal condition as it is deferred and transcribed into a quest for something that transcends time and space and nationality, bringing home the poet's words that to understand one another we must dissolve national boundaries (and one might add 'natural' boundaries), the provisional borders and walls suggestive of inexorable psychic states - rationality, individuality, sanity, madness and, of course, nostalgia.

Rating:
Summary: Hollywood Skelaton with Unforgettable Sensations
Review: The night I received my copy, I had some heavy homework to be finished, so I thought: "Hmm, I will just take a slight glimspe at it... a glimpse." Time must have slipped away from me like milk in water. When I came to myself, I was looking at the menu with my mind full of Beethoven, candles, and images of water. Later I realized that I had been taken to another plane of existence, experiencing an epic journey through meditation, spirituality, and total beauty.

I bought a box of emergency candles and a lighter the next day.

This is exactly what would happen if you can fully appreciate Tarkovsky's masterful films. "Nostalghia," however, has a touch of Hollywood-style. You might be able to notice several key scenes can often be found in, say, Spielberg's movies. However, they do not look contrived or pretentious, and the purpose of their existence is not merely begging for audience's tears. These scenes are among the best in history that create striking emotional impacts. The familiar plot is totally unrecognizable due to the unique sensations, unforgettable scenes, and perfect acting.

The DVD itself, though, is quite disappointing. I can't even click on the time bar on my PowerDVD player. The picture quality is acceptable yet can be much better. The menu looks cheap and pretends to have a lot of extras. The trailer is simply BAD because it reveals everything. You may want to wait for a better version but I think only Criterion would dare to release a new one. RUSSICO will not do it because "Nostalghia" is in Italian. Nonetheless, the masterpiece alone worth the price, and you won't regret of buying it.

I try to do the same as Andrei, but I can't even light the candle.

Please watch this movie, thus you can feel the power of pure filmmaking. Thank you.

Rating:
Summary: Angelic
Review: There is much to be said for a film about light, air, time, fire, stone, and ghosts. In this case, the ghost is the past, the longing for what we once had. It is beautifully portrayed in the black and white portions of the film.

Tarkovsky's works are all subtle. He has denied any intent to include or use symbolism in his films. Despite these claims, as viewers, we expect and perhaps require representation in order to find a relation between his films and our own lives.

Each film is crafted into layers: Landscape and visual atmosphere, Texture and light, Subject and object, Framing and alignment, and Aural atmosphere (including non-diegetic poetry). While large papers can be written on any of these aspects, it is important to be conscious of what Tarkovsky has done. While his films do not necessarily require cerebral stimulation, I recommend watching his films several times with varying degrees of attentiveness.

Nostalghia is an important film to me. I was introduced to it in college, and it is one of only a very few motion pictures that I consider a personal treasure. I do not take offense to the ones I love who could care less about this film. If everyone understood and appreciated Tarkovsky, it wouldn't be the art it is today.

Nostalghia is a celestial film, drifting far above any claims of comprehension. This film is deeper and far more complex than many viewers realize. (This could probably be said of any film in general, unfortunately.) I was not kidding when I called this film "angelic." There are angels throughout this film, both in the form of light, divine intervention, sculpture, and if you look closely, there is even a real one walking, solitary, a stark white contrast to the misty landscape in which she has been immersed.

Rating:
Summary: Pure poetic cinema
Review: This film to me is the purest example of film poetry I have ever seen. It does not exist on the level of plot, and yet every image is so suggestive of things beyond or beneath the surface that the only thing comparable to it is a profoundly meaningful and haunting dream.

Tarkovsky was tormented by his Soviet-enforced exile from his homeland Russia at the time he made this masterpiece, and the nostalgia he felt was more than for his own home - it was a nostalgia for the spiritual world that is absent in so much of modern life. It is supremely ironic he and his main character - a bitter Russian writer - felt nostalgia for the spirit in one of the most "spiritual" places on earth - Italy. And yet it is frighteningly appropriate today.

There is none of the borrowing from other mediums - whether literature, theater or painting - that is common with other so-called art films. This film is the purest cinema that can exist, because everything is done as an image from reality - a reality that exists in the character's own world, and is transfered to the viewer's by means of the most intense visual imagination.

The actors are so perfect in their roles that they do not seem to be acting at all. That is always a hallmark of Tarkovsky's films - utter realism of human behavior, without the slightest trace of fakery.

Ingmar Bergman called this master of cinema the greatest of all filmmakers, and this is probably his greatest film. It is essential to anyone interested in the medium.

Rating:
Summary: What is vital for you ?
Review: This movie teaches (even though not directly) that everybody has sometthing vital and essential in his life. But nobody struggles to preserve it if it seems natural, like your country, the meadows, or your family. They are all part of your life and you couldn't live without them but your life doesn't turn to preserve what you think is the Essence of it. Trying absolutely to preserve it would seem insane in the face of the world, and would bear some deadly smells as if you would put your favorite landscape in aquarium. So men have to deal with its loss, keeping more things in their heads and hearts than in their pockets. But life shows us that everything fades even though memories can't. That's the bitter power of the Nostaghia...

Rating:
Summary: Transcendent
Review: Watching Tarkovsky's films is analogous to reading James Joyce,It takes a lot of time, a lot of thought, and a puzzle enthusiast whobelieves in puzzles for their own sake, regardless of whether the completed whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Nostalghia is full of oblique and blatant metaphor and piecing together the meditations on faith vs.(statuesque)imprisonment, self vs. other, and God's relationship with the lost is worth however many viewings it takes. Tarkovsky's masterful visuals, as always, are a given, so the mental challenge of the film is tempered with gorgeous compositions. The final shot surpasses even the shocking final frame of "Solaris", not only in metaphorical significance, but in beauty as well. Yet these images are neither "for their own sake", nor self indulgent; each and every slowly unfolding sequence and lingering shot has layers of significance. I have learned, there is no "filler" in Tarkovsky's films, each image is a line in the greater poem, and like Joyce's writing, as terse and sometimes as difficult as this master director deems fit to carry the wieght of his brilliance. Nostalghia, like the seemingly incoherent proverbs of Zen Buddhism, can simply befuddle, or, as is their true intent for the prepared, bring Enlightenment. Nostalghia, is capable of both. END