[jamesakirk]

I discovered Tarkovsky only last year. I didn't "get" him until the death of my father. Roiling in ineffable grief, I struggled to find meaning, to sum up the arc of my father's life. The experience had (and still has) a timeless, absurd quality to it.

Tarkovsky's films seem to exist in a different type of time orthogonal to our own, and the experience of engaging with them is difficult to describe. They are both powerful and ineffable.

From his writings, he could be mistaken for a practitioner of Zen. I would like to share my favorite Tarkovsky quote:

"Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it."

[pm90]

That is quite a beautiful quote! I suspect we search for meanings and interpretations mostly to communicate what we feel to others we may try to share the experience with, although it seems that the best way to do this might just be to be honest about it and describe the feeing rather than the interpretation.

(Also, I’m sorry for your loss. Losing a parent seems un fathomable to me although I know it will happen to me too).

[forgottenpass]

>there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.

Almost all art analysis I see has to penetrates my zone of not seeking it out. So maybe it's being done impeccably somewhere, but in the stuff I see, the "analysis" is really a lossy description of the person doing the analyzing.

It tells me their frame of reference. The parts of the work they'll care about, and their analytical blindspots. It tells me about their views on hot contemporary issues, their pet peeves and hobby horses. It shows me the types of conclusions they were taught to draw. Very rarely does the analysis tell me anything about the work beyond the unambiguous facts visible to every layperson.