Giel Louws about the Tarkovsky series
In 2019, the filmmaker Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was in the spotlight once again with a retrospective of his work at EYE Amsterdam. Restored versions of his films were shown in various cinemas throughout the Netherlands. I had watched his work several times on small screen, but the projections on the big screen made an even deeper impression on me. I feel that Tarkovsky’s sensitive and intuitive approach closely matches my own attitude towards my work. The films are made the way a poet balances words on lines, leaving the reader as an interpreter. I experience his films as visual poems, deeply influenced by the poems of his father Arseni Tarkovsky. Throughout the films, a deep melancholy shimmers with the passing of time. Tarkovsky combats this melancholy with his memories, faith, and art.
For the series I made, I use the forest from the film Offret as a background. The place where the father figure teaches his son a life lesson, with the blistering line that also appears in a poem by father Tarkovsky; ‘There is no such thing as death’. This forest became the bearer of new poetic and associative images throughout the series. Below these images are either texts taken from subtitles of Tarkovsky’s films, or they are fragments from his father’s poems. The images that seem to float in front of the forest are recurring symbols from my own existence/work. Sometimes they are things that the delusion of the day brought to me, often they are objects from my collection of early Chinese ceramics.
Sometimes the images and the text come together, sometimes they follow their own path. As in the films, they create a new space, a space for interpretation, contemplation, and aesthetic pleasure.