tarkovsy's mirror

Here is a new theory. For me at least. I come up with these all the time of course and usually forget them. Right from childhood I have had blinding revelations about something or other on a regular basis. Often I wonder whether I should write it down but every time I think, no, this one is so special that I will always remember this date and this place. I am always wrong and I have no way of knowing whether my epiphanies are worth anything. So my new theory. There is art that is disorienting and there is art that is frightening and both of these are good. I am thinking particularly of film at the moment. I just finished watching Godard's Alphaville which is in the disorienting camp. But after that I watched Tarkovsy's Mirror which something else again. It is a third art that is both disorienting and frightening. I am not sure I can think of any other films immediately that accomplish this even from my other favourite directors. I can think of other pieces of art that have this effect on me - the border ballad Long Lankin is one. I was working towards a theory that this art which is both disorienting and frightening is perhaps better than other art but that is not the case. I would say though that there is a special resonance to such art with very basic very overgrown parts of us that other art cannot achieve.

I want no comments from anyone claiming that they have seen Mirror and were not frightened. I believe you but I do not believe it to be a good thing. I suggest that anyone who wants to write that comment should go back and watch the film as many times as it takes for them to become afraid. This is not sensitivity to art this is sensitivity to yourself. Perhaps this is what the surrealists attempted in a crude sort of way. But set any surrealist film against any Tarkovsky and see how macho and juvenile and literal the surrealists appear in comparison.

What is the value of this sensitivity to self? I wonder whether it might be moral? That to be sensitive to one's self and frightened by that is perhaps to be more truly sensitive to others. But I do not believe that. I am not any more moral or sensitive than anyone else I know and I have not done much to improve the lives of other people. In a lot of ways I am quite selfish. Is there then any value to this sensitivity to self or is it just a common part of the aesthetic experience and of no special value? The idea that it has no value is upsetting. Disgusting even. But that might only be because it feels like an attack on the individual's need to be special and different and for experience to have meaning. But this is a diversion. The sensitivity to self is the thing that makes a piece of art disorienting and frightening and fascinating and beautiful.

Another brief digression. This is one reason why I am poor critic and cannot write extended prose whether fictional or factual. My ideas are often only half ideas and run away before I have caught more than a shadow of them. But still I chase after them as they change and hide and double back. My arguments get more tangled and nonsensical and my prose becomes progressively more confused. Again this is why I dropped the philosophy component of my English and Philosophy BA. In poetry even if it is sound or visual I can be more allusive and can go further back behind language closer to thought closer to the place where I am disoriented and frightened.

Rather than something unique in the viewer it is in the skill of the artist. They communicate their disorientation and fear with a directness that we rarely experience because we learn quickly how to avoid disorientation and fear. Without intending to I have come back to something I only alluded to at the beginning. I wrote that there is a special resonance to such art with very basic very overgrown parts of us. I nearly wrote very old and even considered primordial but in each case would have had to qualify it. What I meant by both and what I meant by basic and overgrown are those parts of us that are associated with childhood fears. They may simply be a product of childhood. But this still does not explain why this experience feels so valuable.

And again before any comments come in I am not willing to accept any supernatural agency in this. I will not accept any suggestion that it represents a sense of awe in front of some power or an awareness of separation from the same. These are only attempts to give a name and a concrete form to something unknown and difficult that may simply come down to biology, neurology or the brain attempting to observe itself. For me all appeals to god are an attempt to provide a full stop at an arbitrary point. I will accept that religion might come from a similar impulse to that driving the creation of art and that each has its tendency to provide consolation as well as the much rarer impulse to uncover our discomfort.

Possibly this is getting close to the value of an art that disorients and frightens, and explains why it makes us sensitive to ourselves. It takes us away from the illusions that we cushion ourselves in most of the rest of the time and closer to the world we actually inhabit. Perhaps this particular art has the value of making us more aware and more alive. That in older and much harder times it was an art that could have helped you stay alive. That as thinking creatures fear was something we needed to practice. We may still need to practice. This is not an answer this is just a thought.

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