What's up for six more days

My tragic case of missing Stalker in the theaters was partially compensated for yesterday evening as the new 4K restoration of The Sacrifice is at Walter Reade, thrice a day through Thursday the 26th.



As the trailer suggests this is one of the great soundtracks of film, and in addition to the music and water dripping you get the wind rustling through the vegetation of the Swedish meadow while the characters discuss philosophy, like that scene in Andrei Rublev I think of every time I see wind blowing ferns. Critics have always viewed it as a Bergman pastiche while Tarkovsky's protests on the matter (Bergman is not mentioned in reference to the film in Sculpting in Time) are earnestly stuck on his perceptions of the religious and philosophical differences between him and Ingmar.  He uses Bergman’s island (or a stand-in), Bergman’s actors, Bergman’s cinematographer and production designer (whose interiors Tarkovsky meticulously tinkered with), and Bergman’s shots and soundtrack, mostly as I recognized: Persona and Through a Glass Darkly.  The foghorns of Persona and Through a Glass Darkly are heard constantly, as in Red Desert by Antonioni, also an influence on Tarkovsky. More than Picasso reworking Manet and Velazquez this is analogous to Rouault using Gustave Moreau’s palette and studio. von Trier's Melancholia is a mercenary copy of the surface elements and plot. Tarkovsky: "The Sacrifice is a repudiation of commercial cinema.. I have no doubt that the poetry of the film is going to be a specific reality, that the truth that it touches will materialize - will affect my life. Once (one) has grasped truths of that order.. they overturn all his earlier ideas about how the world is.. Pushkin saw the capacity to look into time and predict the future as a terrible gift, and his allotted role caused him untold torment."