We set up a podcast so we can talk about films we’ve seen on Mubi. It’s a nice little constraint. But we’re loudmouths and — frequently — we find ourselves wanting to share some thoughts about films that aren’t on Mubi. So we set up a Substack. Fringe essays. Idle thoughts. Catty gossip.
Here, Owen talks about the sonic worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky and his long-time collaborator, Eduard Artemiev.
They echo, these abandoned train sheds. Electronic cloisters, wet with dew. A synthetic twanging. Iridescent. Cleaved. There is the reverberation of rainfall. And finally, there are footsteps. Stalker (once preposterously described as “the last great Russian film”) was the beginning of my obsession with Tarkovsky, cinema’s last ascetic. Its holiest fool. Dying on a bed with sallow cheeks. Smiling as he clasps his son, drinking a mouthful of champagne. I’m referring to that documentary, of course; shot not long before he breathed his last.
Stalker, 1979. I was born in 1988. These years don’t converge. They shouldn’t. In 2006 or 2007 I watched Stalker for the first time, gasping without making a sound. Grasping without making a dent. Crossing into a restricted territory, three men search for the fulfilment of their deepest wishes. You could read it as a lazy metaphor of Soviet bloc dreaming. It’s not, of course. The shoot probably killed its director. So it goes.
Ill-fated. Electric. And we all seem to encounter it eventually, whether young and dumb or older and greased with the oil of existing. Either way, we remember how it feels to watch it (trembling, even a little bored?), and remember — more than anything else — how it looks. To its cholic and sombre dressage, to its tobacco-darkened scenography and pained, wretched faces. We forget how great a role is played by its sound — by Eduard Artemiev’s score (reissued by Superior Viaduct for a cosy $20). By all those tingling, echoing clangs and shafts of stabbing synth. It is a sound wrestled out of panpipes and ambiguously ‘Eastern’ strings. Folkloric and experimental. Modern yet timeless. In the tram shed, reality starts to abscond, to get away from us. We wave goodbye in a careless manner, fingers gently curled - like a dying flower.
Dripping water. Echoing footsteps. Crunching soil. Tinkling glass.
I say all of this because Mubi have themselves recognized the importance of ‘music’ to Tarkovsky’s worlds, curating an hour and twenty-three minutes of excerpts and effects, crescendoes and samples lifted directly out of the mouth of his movies. This, I should add, is part of Mubi’s Notebook Soundtrack Mix series, the rest of which I’ll come to — on some future date. Maybe. I’m not very good with plans atm.
The launching-off point for the mix are comments made by Tarkovsky himself. From the 1984 book, Sculpting in Time. To my knowledge, this book represents the only time when the beleaguered, half-exiled director would translate his poetic visual language into the written language of words (interviews, like his “message to young people”, abound). I treat it distantly, finding his writing too prophetic and shimmering to get my fingers at. What did I expect? I’ve never been able to finish it, but Mubi, apparently, has. “. . . with music, cinema is an art which operates with reality.” That might be so. We hear strains of voice. We hear J.S. Bach’s Matthaus-Passion - a fragment of the score of The Sacrifice. We get Artemiev, lots of him — from Stalker and Solaris both, two of Tarkovsky’s most openly ‘fantastical’ films and certainly the pair that were most ideally suited for Artemiev - a still-living Russian composer who, in the years since his collaborations with Tarkovsky, big Andrei, has scored the likes of Nikita Mikhailov and Rustam Ibragimbekov’s eye-wateringly good Burnt by the Sun, from 1994. He is an electronic pioneer, bowl-cut hair and scratchy jumper - sat, priest-like, at his sump of keys.
Eduard Artemiev at the keys
But alongside Tarkovsky, we even get something a little older, and a little newer; Henry Purcell’s ‘They tell us that your mighty powers’ from The Mirror, as well as the simple diagetic sound (overdubbed later, of course) of wind, tumbling branches, of water and the tread of footsteps. This, too, is music. Holy and twisted. Ordinary. Exalted. These layers of noise (that’s what they are, no? Even in their Sunday best) encompass danger. Awe. Fear and trembling. Delight doesn’t accompany Tarkovsky to these places, which is strange for a man who smiled so much, and so genuinely. I think, at least. Instead, these are sacral sounds and they are sounds which bead and coalesce at the edges of the real. We’re found confronting a beyond, a place of idiot yet holy incomprehension: the surface of the planet of Solaris (tumbling, a synthetic roar). The Gregorian chanting (deep, bassy) of Andrei Rublev. The silence of Nostalghia’s closing scene, which grows into a sombre agitation of hymnal and string. But then there are the spaces in which Tarkovsky refuses the mnemonic of music. In Mirror, Zerkalo, the burning of a hut. Only the sound of dripping, of water from the eaves. That is music enough.
And this is strange, and weird to me because I’d always assumed there was some sort of chthonic and emotional swell to accompany this poignant eruption of flame. My brain has short-circuited itself and created a false architecture of notes and of consolation. Not even the sound of flames. Just water, a man’s strained and distant voice. Shut your eyes for a moment. Close them. Good.
And in this way, it feels like Tarkovsky’s scores aren’t really scores at all. They become a part of the warp of his language, just as the paintings of Brueghel will accent scenes of Solaris, or the shallow stream bed — cluttered with faded photographs, coils of iron, bullet casings — accent the hump of Stalker, at the edge of its dream. Whispering, scratching, softly stepping. Fragile is the world, and delicate. Music, then, announces a kind of concentration — an attempt to ford the darkness. It is a passing between, where we are most closely brushing up against something important, something we should be paying attention to. Of course, Tarkovsky hoped — in a sombre echo of John Cage — that music might disappear entirely, should we learn to listen closely enough to the world. In shooting Andrei Rublev, his ponderously, swayingly long shots were intended to represent the “rhythm” of “life itself.” When he first met Artemiev, in the summer of 1970, the young Andrei Tarkovsky asked only that the composer “organize the sounds surrounding us.” The world is enough.