#eng 210

After reading "Three Sisters", I decided to look at Andrey's monologue at the end of the play where he explicitly expresses his dissatisfaction with the present, calling it "repulsive". The reason the present is so "repulsive" to them is because they live in this vision of the "future" they have created around their dreams of Moscow, and because of all that, their lives pass them by as they remain trapped in the present. The point of their folly, of course, is to illustrate that a happy future cannot be achieved without hard work.

Because they convince themselves the future is so bright, when in fact they are making "future" interchangeable with "dreams", they have created for themselves a dissatisfaction with the now. They are idle because they keep planning their lives around this "future" in Moscow that they'll never have, so Andrey gambles, and they all work jobs they're too smart for. Rather than working hard at fixing their life now, they sit in this "idleness" caused by their being trapped in dreams of the future in Moscow.

I also found it interesting that he starts listing routine daily things when he talks about wanting "freedom from idleness". Now, it seems to me that Andrey could easily get off his ass and change something about his life, but because he's so focused on how much he hates this routine, he can't shake it. Focusing on hating it is actually causing him to follow it day in and day out. It's notable, too, that he wishes for "freedom from idleness", but rather than actually freeing himself from it, he waits around for this amazing vision of the future to do it for him. But, because he's just waiting, he's perpetuating this idleness that he so loathes.

The "feeling of ease, of space" that Andrey gets from the "future" he and his sisters dream of is interesting as well. Even though they're feeling idle and trapped, Andrey feels a sense of "ease" from the future that he dreams of. When they dream of the future, they feel "ease" and "space", as if their whole life is ahead of them, when really it's passing. That's why the word "ease" strikes me so much here, it's like dreaming is easy, so they spend all their time at it, but because living and working in the present toward their future goal is hard and painful, they let themselves remain trapped in the "ease" of dreaming about it.

"The violent scene that upset him and whose meaning he was only to grasp years later...."

This quote sets the film movie up very much like a cycle. By starting with a scene and coming back to it in the end, creator Chris Marker totally traps his characters and his audience in a circular storyline. Falling in with our overall theme of "stuckness", the man lives to adulthood in a decimated post-WWIII planet focusing on a scene from his past. A scene that will also be a part of his future.

I chose to focus on the second instance of this scene in the film, the ending. As he returns to the observation deck at Orly, the man, while focusing on the woman he is trying to find, vaguely realizes that his childhood self must be there somewhere, watching the planes. It is only when he recognizes the man from the camp that everything falls into place: "that moment he'd been granted to see as a child, and that had obsessed him forever after was the moment of his own death."

Cinematographically, this scene illustrates this futility very clearly. In the few seconds he spends running to the woman, there are fifteen frames of him running to her, only interrupted by frames of her face. As he's running, the only sound in the background is the sound of planes taking off, like in the beginning of the film. Finally, just before reaching her, a frame of the man from the camp is shown as the man is shot to death before her. It's like the movie's creator is saying "fate is fate. Resistance is futile, and this is why." He wrapped the entire story of this character around one event that occurs simultaneously at the beginning and end of the character's life.

It's actually rather eerie. The man's life totally revolves around the moment of his own death. It's very easily an assertion on thh idea that most people are stuck in the past, chained by it in one way or another. So this man, who is so obsessed with an image from his past finally moves forward in his life and ultimately dies at the moment that obsessed him. He is so taken by his past that it becomes his future. An extreme case, but the point is, nevertheless, made. The man is so trapped in the past that it causes him to time travel there, and after meeting the woman whose face he'd remembered since his childhood, he chooses his past over the future, where the humans of tomorrow offer him a haven from the men at the camp. Then he comes full circle, creating the moment that would obsess him for years to come, furthering the cycle. It is only as he is dying that he realized that the image that plagued him so was his own death, his own future in the past.