Production Pit :: Essays Papers

Production Pit Zizek wants to know of Tarkovsky, â€Å"Does his cinematic materialism effectively provide the adequate â€Å"objective correlative† for his narrative of spiritual quest and sacrifice, or does it secretly subvert his narrative?† (254). He looks to Tarkovsky’s writings, which he takes as Russian obscurantist religious mysticism, but ignores the answers already present in Tarkovsky’s film. The basic dynamic he considers is a questioning of the relationship between two given elements of the film, its narrative theme (which Zizek takes as an overall gnosticism, along the theological lines that spirituality demands moving up and away from the body) and its textured visual/aural materiality (which is Zizek’s consideration of the dirt, blending of nature and civilization, and overgrown made world). To critically reassess this acrobatic relation between a filmic quality and a narrative one, I will consider the sole scene and setting of produ ction in action – that late scene in â€Å"The Bell† of plain heavy production. If this scene shows anything, it is production becoming more than a process of manufacture, but always a partially concealed smoky setting with ambiguities of depth and direction. The white smoke that seems present in so many scenes in the film passes through and obscures the thoroughly planned and understood processes that are absolutely crucial to the formation of the Prince’s bell. Water drops down just behind the mastermind of the project, and as Boriska walks right and up he passes the Russian workhorse of a man that seems the muscle of such industrial efforts. A mighty-chested man whose face is obscured by the bowl of water he pours into himself serves not only the Prince of the plot, but as a metonymy for the brute civic engineering that surrounds the decorative/religious world of monastic painters. Just as Tarkovsky’s landscapes are populated with humans, as if just another plant or animal on the horizon, the background, coming in and out of focu s as the image ponders losing its inertia into the workings of the furnace, the sparks, the bellows, and the molten metal that has been riches and will be the bell. Even synthesizer music becomes appropriate, with Andrei’s shoulders and head standing above it all. What we make of these gentle waves of the monastically introverted experience the film tries to get by as isn’t interesting.