....

We'll see each other tomorrow

She declared: “Fate has brought you ruin and degradation after us”

“Everything is an eternal circle, and it repeats and repeats itself.”

Mirror (1975) Andrei Tarkovsky

Nostalghia is the story of a Russian poet adrift in Italy, searching for a lost composer and discovering pieces of himself. More than a film, it evokes emotions rare and unnameable a masterpiece beyond measure.

The Sacrifice ends with one of the greatest shots in history? For me, that would be this one, which carries words...

“His favourite colour—the waves of the sea.”

Unspoken feelings are unforgettable.

In Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie (tr. Daniel Russell) a passage eerily akin to Tarkovsky’s Mirror:

“I am not writing some textbook as required reading, but offering my own thoughts and reflections, and inviting the reader to share in them.”

“I am tired (…) and there is never any silence.”

“Perhaps cinema is the most personal art, the most intimate. In cinema only the author’s intimate truth will be convincing enough for the audience to accept.”

If time and memory merge into each other and without time there would be no memory, what then is immortality? Questions I ask Tarkovsky in my dreams.

Tarkovsky, Monday, 22 April, 1974:

A work of true art

Mai Ziadeh (1886-1941), Lebanese-Palestinian poet, in Song to the Moon, tr. by Rose Demaris