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Nostalghia
11.00am, Saturday, November 10
Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge
Free
Sparsely attended and overlooked by the media, the Brattle Theatre's monthly "Elements of Cinema" series must be the most unsung ongoing act of cultural good will in Cambridge. Since June, the Brattle has offered a free crash course in the history of cinema -- one classic film shown every second Saturday morning. Past screenings have included Citizen Kane, The 400 Blows, and Ingmar Bergman's The Silence. For this cinema-addled Bostonist, it's like going to church on a Saturday.
November's film is Andrei Tarkovsky's 1983 masterpiece Nostalghia. It follows a Russian poet through Italy, where he is researching an 18th century emigrant Russian composer. Touring the Italian countryside with a comely translator, he longs for the stark Soviet Union and his family there. He begins to withdraw emotionally and metaphysically and soon identifies with a local zealot who had imprisoned his own family to keep them from the evils of the world.
Watching Tarkovsky can be an ordeal because he uses long shots with few cuts in between. He called his technique "Sculpting in Time," and it's on vivid display in Nostalghia. Consider the excruciating ten minute long shot of a man trying to carry a lit candle across a pool. At 125 minutes, the film is tidy by Tarkovsky's standards -- compare it to the 165 minutes of Solaris -- and it's a good place to get a sense of why everybody loves this guy.
Stick around afterward for the discussion with Emerson professor John Gianvito, and you'll be able to fake a film studies BA.
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