In the mood for Reception: Back to the films themselves!

Here are the some comments of audiences for Mirror (1975) from Andrei Tarkovsky’s own book, Sculpting in Time:

A woman civil engineer wrote from Leningrad: ‘I saw your film, Mirror. I sat through to the end, despite the fact that after the first half hour I developed a severe headache as a result of my genuine efforts to analyze it, or just to have some idea of what was going on, of some connection between the characters and events and memories. . . .We poor cinema-goers see films that are good, bad, very bad, ordinary or highly original. But any of these one can understand, and be delighted or bored as the case may be; but this one?! . . .’ (p.8)

And another engineer, this time from Sverdlovsk, was unable to contain his deep antipathy: ‘How vulgar, what trash! Ugh, how revolting! Anyhow, I think your film’s a blank shot. It certainly didn’t reach the audience, which is all that matters. . (p.8)

A woman wrote from Gorky: ‘Thank you for Mirror. My childhood was like that. . . . Only how did you know about it? ‘There was that wind, and the thunderstorm . . . “Galka, put the cat out,” cried my Grandmother. . . . It was dark in the room . . . And the paraffin lamp went out, too, and the feeling of waiting for my mother to come back filled my entire soul . . . And how beautifully your film shows the awakening of a child’s consciousness, of this thought! . . . And Lord, how true . . . we really don’t know our mothers’ faces. And how simple . . . You know, in that dark cinema, looking at a piece of canvas lit up by your talent, I felt for the first time in my life that I was not alone . . .’ (p.10)

A worker in a Leningrad factory, an evening class student, wrote: ‘My reason for writing is Mirror, a film I can’t even talk about because I am living it. ‘It’s a great virtue to be able to listen and understand . . . That is, after all, a first principle of human relationships: the capacity to understand and forgive people their unintentional faults, their natural failures. If two people have been able to experience the something even once, they will be able to understand each other. Even if one lived in the era of the mammoth and the other in the age of electricity. And God grant that people may understand and experience only common, humane impulses—their own and those of others.’ (p.10)

A working woman from Novosibirsk wrote: ‘I’ve seen your film four times in the last week. And I didn’t go simply to sec it, but in order to spend just a few hours living a real life with real artists and real people. . . . Everything that torments me, everything I don’t have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light and warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me—it’s all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror. For the first time ever a film has become something real for me, and that’s why I go to see it, I want to get right inside it, so that I can really be alive.‘ (p.12)

After giving comments of different audiences or recipients and how they see or read the Mirror, it can be continued by introducing briefly cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky in order to understand from which perspective they should read his movies. As a Russian director, Tarkovsky’s cinema is, by his own words: “In all my pictures the theme of roots was great importance: links with family house, childhood, country, Earth…”

When Tarkovsky talks about his movies, he points out that the aesthetically pressure of visual is more important than to know meaning of the film. Thus, he uses different colors to show transition from fantasy to real or emphasizing dreams. The colors are the unit of the meanings and he uses Technicolor and sepia to tell different level of reality. For instance, in Stalker (1979), the real life is shot in chrome; dreams, desired places and events in real time are colored. Also, he refuses symbolism and metaphors in his movies but audiences try to give different meanings that what they see as you read above. Actually, he mentions that he just reflects his own outlook to the world: “I never create allegories. I create my own world. That world does not signify anything unusual. It just exists, it has no other meaning. I think symbol and allegory rob the artist”.

For him, when someone talks about a book or remembers his memories, a bottle of milk can throw down at the same time but it is just a bottle of milk since these things happens in real life, too. In other words, that a bottle of milk does not signify anything. Also, when it is asked what the coins (e.g. Sacrifice) or what the black dog symbolizes (e.g. Stalker), he says that he doesn’t know but they are same things as what they are in dreams or real life. It means that he does not add any special meaning to images that he created.

Although he does not assign special meaning to his movies, it can be inferred from his sayings, Tarkovsky wants audiences read same meaning from his movies but how is it possible?

In reality, it is not simple as Tarkovsky’s expressions since the audiences cannot be alienated from the film, itself. Thus, this issue, namely, the meaning of the film or how to read a film is the controversial topic for the ones who are interested in film analysis or film interpretation since it has different aspects and it is made by “audience”. As an audience, you can criticize or analyze a movie from different perspectives. Whether or not every audience can be a film analyzer or critic of every movie that s/he watches and whether only selective audiences having academic background analyze a movie from some perspectives are really controversial issues.

However, now, I’d like to speculate one of that perspectives focusing on phenomenological film criticism, namely, interest of Stanley Cavell. According to Cavell, the audiences must let the films themselves teach them how to look at them and how to think about them (1981). As you see, it is contrary to what Tarkovsky expects since there is no “how to look” issue in his films; they are already reality itself (i.e. not appearances). On the contrary, the other controversial issue arises that if there is an auteur cinema like Tarkovsky’s one, i.e. the eye of director and his pen and if the director makes all film as his outlook to the life itself, without knowing his “life philosophy” how can an audience interpret the film, can the meaning that the audience took from it be the same as he’d like to give? If we leave the film teach us how to think about it, don’t we miss out opinions or thoughts of creator of this art?

Thus, all issue is about how you regard as the movie, you can say that the audiences create the meaning by being in relation with the film. Since the audiences come to scene, there can be different meanings based on audiences’ socio-cultural background and also their “life philosophy”.

By taking Cavell’s saying further, I also think that once a work of art is created, the recipient of it becomes the owner of that work; at least, in the context of the film, integration of audiences to the film creates the meaning and it means that there is no meaning-in-itself in the film-in-itself even the director – especially auteur one, as Tarkovsky, expects that audiences take the same meaning like the case of his Mirror. In other words, what if the film does not want to say that what the audience takes or reads from it? Yes, the question is this: Is there really meaning-in-itself in the film? The questions can go further and bring us to bigger issue that mentioned above: There is a work of art but to whom does it belong? In the case of cinema art, if the audience interprets the film and takes whatever meaning s/he attributes to film, then doesn’t the film belongs to that audience?

Or contrary to that, if the critics of audiences contradict with opinions of director or scriptwriter, can the critics of audiences be “true” for the meaning of the film in the context of film itself?

In this respect, it is plausible to consider combining phenomenological critic with pragmatism: while considering meaning in the film, can I say that the meaning in the film is determined by what I’ll do with the meaning? As a matter of fact, yes I can say. As an audience, I do not loot the film, I engage with it and then I interpret it. According to William James, the pragmatist philosopher, “Ideas … become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience” (1907: 34) so thus I’m in a relation with a film, I take the meaning and my relation with film makes the meaning true for me. It is all about my conscious experience with the film itself. No director, no scriptwriter, there are only me and the moving images.

References:

Tarkovsky, Andrei, Sculpting in Time, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, 1987

King, Noel, “Hermeneutics, Reception Aesthetic, and Film Interpretation”, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, 212-23.

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