Landscape in the Mist

I really don’t like it when people try to draw up arbitrary comparisons between Tarkovsky and another director so as to imply that said director is fundamentally similar, or in some way a continuant of Tarkovsky’s legacy. I see it a lot with Tarr, Malick, Lynch, Weerasethakul, and Angelopoulos especially, and I think it’s an erroneous attempt at generalising these very much idiosyncratic directors under one, messily-constructed, incongruous veil (of course, Tarkovsky’s influence on their and many others’ work is unmistakable - the cinema of Tarkovsky fundamentally and irrevocably altered the way art cinema is approached, especially as regards to the treatment of time and it probably wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that there is a somewhat solid line between pre-Tarkovsky and post-Tarkovsky cinema, he just has not been imitated on any truly foundational level). It usually just suggests that they aren’t willing to scratch much further than merely the surface of them both being slow in pace and rich in imagery.  I’m going to make an exception to this however. I am going to make an exception for Theodoros Angelopoulos, and I’m going to make an exception for him in this sense: from all of the films I have seen from all of the countries from all of the filmmakers and all of their works, Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos are the only two who I would classify as genuine cinematic poets. I don’t mean poets in a loose sense as if to say they make poetical films. I mean they are literal cinematic poets. Their lines are images, their stanzas are scenes, and their syntax is editing. And yes, cinema and poetry have natural aesthetic similarities, but these two take it further. Their work is not a filmic version of poetry; it is simply just poetry on celluloid. It is substance deconstructed, and arranged not into an easily-intelligible narrative form, but a purely figurative and implicit combination of rhythmically-composed images and metaphors which reference and bounce off and juxtapose and combine with one another to create some completed, beautiful form. Perhaps this is just a pretentious attempt to rationalise what I have just seen into a more digestible form, but I have, without doubt, found in Angelopoulos the same incredible, impenetrable sensation I found when I first discovered Tarkovsky. They simply operate with different means. I don’t believe I am contradicting my initial statements: they are still very much distinct in methodology and in content. But the impression I get from them both remains starkly, hauntingly similar.