Seasonal Ruminations: Melbourne Cinematheque And Tarkovsky's Prose

The Mirror

Certainly his most personal film, The Mirror follows an unseen artist who reflects on three generations of his family and his relationships with them. Punctuated by haunting dreamlike images interwoven with newsreel footage, the film evokes memories and fantasies of the artist’s public and private life. The film features Tarkovsky’s father reading from his own prose, and includes performances by Margarita Terekhova, Larisa Tarkovskaya (the director’s wife) and Tarkovsky’s mother.

Session screens with Nostalghia on March 26.

Stalker

A bona fide masterpiece, Stalker takes the layers of a metaphysical science fiction film and wraps them around a spiritual quest, The film concerns the Zone, a forbidden place where wishes may come true, and a place based on the infamous Pripyat and Chernobyl nuclear zone.

The film is characterized by the director’s mesmerizing, elaborately choreographed long takes filmed (in color and sepia) and each scene is given life through the film’s electronic score by composer Eduard Artemyev.

Session screens with The Steamroller and the Violin on April 2.

Solaris

You may recall the remake effort from Steven Soderbergh, a fairly somber affair starring George Clooney's melancholy in space.

The original however is a different beast. A planet circling a distant star appears to read the human imagination, driving the crew of an orbiting space station mad by projecting back their own memories and fantasies. This is a sublime, haunting and hypnotic adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s works concerning the nature of consciousness and human emotion.

A combination of the earthly and the spiritual, this is the pivotal work in the director’s career and is often compared to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and a major influence on many 'groundbreaking' sci-fi that has come along since.

Session screens with Ubiytsy and There Will Be No Leave Today on April 9.