The shot with Oleg and the dog in the Italian ruins/Russian country house;
it kills me every time I see it, it's like a painting that comes to life!
Possibly my alltime favourite scene in cinema history!
Anyone else agree?
It's also very reminiscent of the last scene (or close to last) of Solaris, where the memories of the cosmonaut become an island in the sea of Solaris. I read it as the embedding of displaced memories in the context one finds oneself in. The combination form a synergy, but there is a tragedy in the displacement.
shareDefinitely agree as well - and it holds there for several minutes as the snow falls (AT isn't one for lightning-fast cuts anyway). Made all the more poignant by the dedication to his mother just before the fade-out.
"POWER TO THE PEOPLE WHO PUNISH BAD CINEMA!!!"
Solaris, my #1 in film history, has this fascinating fact: you can read it in several ways, give it a lot of different significations.
As I see it, there's no travel, there's no ocean, it's all a metaphora about our mind and spirit. All the movie last the few steps between the lake and the house, it's all about the duel, the lost of the one he love. And that means, all the philosophical questions about life and death.
That's why the wonderful highway scene. The main character is no travelling, the others are going away. He needs solitude to make the duel.
And I don't want to talk here about the politic reading, that is also clear...or maybe not too much.
I'm atheist, thanks God (Bunuel)
The ending also signifies the Poet Gortchakov finally coexisting in the two worlds that have torn him asunder, it signifies his own spiritual unification.
One world he has nostalgia for because it represents his culture and nationality and beliefs and values and is the foundation for his creativity, yet traps him in an unmoderinized, unacademic, unsophisticated, rustic, pastoral, practical, ordinary, isolated existence.
The other world represents his liberation and freedom, his current materialistic and sophisticated and academic and philosophical life, and fuels his creativity.
Both worlds are fused together, both modes of thought (practical and philosophical) are fused together, his soul is reunified.
And this also represents the concordant, well-tuned synthesis of Logic (the farm = philosophical and practical beliefs) and Faith (the cathedral = philosophical and religious beliefs), in addition to the end of the Schism between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Western Roman Papacy.
I always thought that when he died he had become part of the place, like how a painting is?
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It's without a doubt one of the most beautiful images I've ever seen. I could watch an entire movie composed of just that one shot. Reduced me to tears.
shareI agree and cried and went to see the real ruin in Tuscany-IT.........and cried again...OF BEAUTY.
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