Tarkovsky

            On the Wednesday November 16^th I woke up at around 4:30 because I had to take a pee. I would normally go back to sleep for another half an hour, but when I got back to bed I felt wide-awake. I think that I felt un-sleepy because I knew I had to work early at OCADU and so I felt the compulsion in the back of my mind to make the front of my mind awake, and so I got up at 4:45 to start doing my yoga.

            Since I had to leave for work at the uncivilized hour of 7:45 that meant that I had to start getting ready to leave at 7:15. On mornings like this when I’m rushed I only sing and play one verse each of several of the songs I practice daily. I managed to get through them all and then I made coffee, but had to leave three-quarters of a cup to go cold when I rushed out the door.

            I worked for Terry Shoffner in the Design department. He’s a very nice guy and he’s always interested to know what I’m currently taking at U of T. and always tells me how impressed he is.

            Since Terry is from Arkansas, I was very interested to know what his thoughts were on what had gone down the week before in the U.S. election and whether or not he’d been surprised by the outcome. He told me that he was totally surprised at how it turned out.

            He said he’d gone back to his hometown for a visit during the campaign and had seen no Trump posters anywhere. He knew that a lot of people that he knew would be voting for Trump but they certainly weren’t making it obvious. He told me that his brother is a hardcore gun toting second amendment shouting redneck. Terry said he always sets aside an hour to visit with his brother when he goes there, but he makes sure that he has a backup plan as well. He related to me a story from the last time he saw his brother. They went to a food court and he had to use the washroom while they were there. His brother asked if it was a transgender washroom and then went on a rant about Obama having just introduced transgender washrooms to distract people from his horrible economic decisions. Terry told me that Obama had nothing to do with state legislature relating to transgender washrooms but that he hadn’t bothered to argue with his brother about it. Terry said that Donald Trump is a criminal and that his vice president-elect is an ultra right wing religious nut that believes that the world is only 6,000 years old.

            I posed for a portrait but I think I should have lain down for a few minutes before class started. I kept dozing off for a split second every few minutes. I hope it didn’t make things so difficult for the people trying to paint me that they complained about it.

Terry bought me a coffee at break time but I still felt droopy after drinking it.

            Before I left work I had to stop and make a bowel movement. That might have been why I’d been feeling sleepy. I don’t know why it is but I often feel sleepy when I have to take a crap.

            On y way out of the building I ran into Mikaela Ryder, who just happened to be passing by. I hadn’t seen her for at least half a year. She told me that she lives in the area around OCADU now and has a one-bedroom apartment sponsored by the same organization from which she rented a room for several years at the Eden Community House on Beverly.

            I told her that I’ve been living in the same place where I raised my daughter, for nineteen years. That reminded her of the Gladstone days when she used to come to read poetry at my open stage, the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy. She said she had great memories of that time.

            She mentioned that she was on her way home to do somatics. She declared that yoga is only good for 50% of people because yoga tears the muscles. I didn’t argue with her because she gets fixed on things, but I it’s very important, especially in middle age to do strength building exercises and the very nature of any strength building exercise is that they tear your muscles and then larger muscles form. That’s what muscle building means.

            When Nancy arrived in the classroom, said hi to me and asked me how the end of the term was going. We talked about essays. Her area of study is Bio Ethics and she likes the analytical approach and enjoys being creative within imposed limitations. I suggested she has a very different kind of mind from mine. She said she took a Hebrew studies course, though she doesn’t have a strong interest in Judaism, and had a hard time with the essay. She said History papers have similar style requirements to English essays and prefers Philosophy. She told me that she’s decided this year to start sending essays out to publications. So far no one has accepted the ones she’s sent.

            We started Aesthetics class with a review.

            Arnheim says that film can be high art because, like painting, it’s all about framing and uses light and colour to create a delightful picture.

            Adorno says film cannot be high art.

            Eisenstein says that painting cannot do what film montage can do.

            Bazin thought that film can be high art because it connects us to reality. When we watched part of “Don’t Look Back” we were literally connected to Bob Dylan.

            Bordwell builds on Arnheim with the idea of estrangement. Film makes the familiar unfamiliar. Familiar objects are recorded and edited to render something quotidian in a way that we don’t normally experience it.

            I asked, “Isn’t all art about estrangement?”

            Devlin admitted that poetry does make ordinary language unfamiliar but Bordwell thinks that film has a particular way of doing it. He’s justifying film along old dimensions.

            He showed us part of a video entitled, “Andrei Tarkovsky: Poetic Harmony”. Professor Russell commented that Bordwell would have liked it. What do Trakovsky’s movies mean? The thing about perception of Tarkovsky is that they try to figure out what they mean. Using a symbol implies a definite meaning. Tarkovsky wanted each member of the audience to create their own symbols from out of the atmosphere he provided. Sometimes a scene is just what it is. He asks us to embrace the emotions that the subject feels. What makes us understand helplessness more than a woman sitting on a well and watching her livelihood die? He opted for the poetic and rejected montage because it interferes with emotion. He wanted narrative nihilism. Devlin encouraged us to watch all of the Tarkovsky films, which show great examples on meditations on everyday images. He used prolonged shots; framed in an extraordinary way for enhancement, like for example, a bush blowing in the wind. This works against the idea that a film is record of reality.

            Devlin took an iclicker poll to see who we prefer now. 41% went with Tarkovsky and 33%, including me, were still with Eisenstein.

            Someone asked what the difference is between Arnheim’s idea of film and that of Eisenstein. The professor said that for Eisenstein, film was a sequence of frames, whereas for Arnheim, film is in the frame.

            I offered that Tarkovsky’s films are more like painting, while Eisenstein’s are more like literature.

            Devlin told us that there is no reason why we can’t accept all of the theories.

            Bazin said that film is high art in an entirely new way, which he called “imprint”. Why is that artistically important? Why is connecting us to reality artistically relevant?

            Geoff declared that imprint has more creative potential.

            The rest of the lecture was about the power of movies.

            Carole builds on Eisenstein, saying that film is not just about editing, but also juxtaposition, framing and sequencing that creates new meaning.

            Cinema was a language for Eisenstein and he thought that every audience had to learn that language before they could understand it.

            Carole thought that new, instinctual meaning was rooted in history and so we don’t need to understand the language of film. Meanings are cross-culturally widespread and so no training is required. Motion picture and video are the most captivating art forms ever. There is an element that gets us instinctively.

            We watched the scene from Hitchcock’s “Psycho” when Marian first decides to take the money and run. The money is stuffed in an open envelope on the middle of the bed while she gets dressed. The camera cuts to a close-up of the envelope. This pointing to and bracketing of the envelope is called Indexing. Scaling makes the object big. There is a low level instinctual meaning to the shot.