I'm not necessarily watching Stalker to "understand" it, I'm there to see, to experience cinema. And the very task of cinema/film in my understanding is to take/rip pieces from the world and arrange them so that something new /a new world is created. And that is happening quite literally on every editing desk. No other artform can do this, so it is at the very heart of what makes film film.
These pieces of the world are real and concrete and the result better had to be real too to have any life in it. Think of Stalker, the realness of it's wastelands and waterfilled caverns, then the realness of it's transformations in the film travel through this land.
Why the world? Because it's as rich as no invention, no thought will ever be.
Think of someone telling you her dream and how boring this bizarre! dreamstory is to you, how uninterested it leaves you.
Symbols are like that, in the way that they have nothing to do with you, only in the case of the dream it's because it's private and in the case of the symbol it's because it's supposed to be for everyone (and consequently for noone); Symbols act like blinders that block out the world and force upon you those unimaginative and trite imaginations of the author (Oh yes, how important he is and how important you will be when you "understand" him).
Symbolism is about avoiding the world.
So is Bresson.
The only thing you will see in Balthazar is a donkey and the donkey is the only reason to watch this failure of a film, because it couldn't be tamed by Bighead Bresson and was exploding all his petty constructs by merely being and screaming.
The irony of Bresson is that in his obsession to avoid "theatre" (a worthy cause btw, how one can succeed in that can be experienced in Vertov, in "Rentree des Classes" by Roziere or in "Menschen am Sonntag") he came up with a stylized, stilted contraption that is nothing but... theatre.
(Another irony: Someone who came from theatre - Jaqcues Rivette - was able to make rivetting films that took the world serious.)
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