“In 1977, on my wedding ceremony in Moscow, Tarkovsky appeared with a
Polaroid camera. He had just shortly discovered this instrument and
used it with great pleasure among us. He and Antonioni were my wedding
witnesses. According to the custom of the period they had to choose the
music played during the signing of the wedding documents. They chose the
‘Blue Danube.’
“At that time Antonioni also often used a Polaroid camera. I remember
that in the course of a field survey in Usbekistan where we wanted to
shoot a film—but finally did not do it—he gave to three elderly Muslims
the pictures he had taken of them. The eldest one as soon as he took a
glance at the photos, immediately returned them with these words: ‘What
is it good for, to stop the time?’ This unusual refusal was so
unexpected that it took us by surprise and we could not reply anything.
“Tarkovsky thought a lot about the ‘flight’ of time and wanted to do
only one thing: to stop it—even if only for a moment, on the pictures of
the Polaroid camera.”
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment