Frame by Frame

Andrei Tarkovsky is my favourite film-maker and it’s always a pleasure to re-visit his landmark first feature. It’s a true testament to the man’s extraordinary artistry that this sublime work of groundbreaking filmic poetry feels more like a prelude to the profound genius to follow than a defining peak of his oeuvre- but I love it all the same. At a little over 90 minutes, this has always been my vote for the perfect entry point into the director’s work. Part of what makes Ivan’s Childhood so fascinating as the debut film by one of cinema’s most iconic auteurs is that it was essentially a director-for-hire job: With the Soviet authorities seeking to replace a young film-maker whose had already spent half(!) the budget on work they considered sub-par. Tarkovsky agreed to take on the project with this majorly restricted budget and schedule provided he was allowed creative freedom, which the studio granted. The rest, as they say, is history.  

Few contemporary films have accumulated the same warped shape of cult snowball that Mulholland Drive has managed to amass. From its opening frames, David Lynch’s magnum opus announces itself as something wholly singular- and spends the next two hours fucking with the fabric of the medium with delirious vision, delicious wit- and the impossible magnetism of a witching-hour séance that simply cannot be resisted. While I loved the movie from the moment I first saw it as a teenager, it’s still grown on me massively over the years- and I want to stress that this is not because I ‘understand’ it better. If anything, this film’s fathomless depths have only further opened up into a mercurial sea of endless emotive readings- netting over all past ideas until each moment is rendered inexplicable by the sheer multitude of things it might express. This truly is an inexhaustible work, comparable to the modernist literature of the 20 th century at its most playfully wicked- and I expect that f...