What fascinates me the most about cinema is that it can be both static and dynamic; stable and unstable; real and imaginary; it is the visual world of the director. Addition of sounds makes it both visual and auditary. To qualify as an art form, cinema needs to convey the story from director’s subjective world to viewer’s subjective world – and that’s a big, unsurmountable leap. Think of science, for example, which requires an objective, rational, quantifiable leap from one person to another through a “well-designed scientific method”. Cinema, on the other hand, attempts to do the same but on a subjective level. The question then is: how perfectly does it do it? What’s the notion of that “perfectness”? One way to address this complicated question is to replace it with another question, which is: can cinema, inherently, by the nature of itself, be the source of both “art” and “philosophy” simulatenously? Because if so, the notion of “subjective transfer” and “perfectness” can be gauged simulatenously. And, this is very hard! While most modern movies, with technological innovations, have enabled to create (artistically) visually stunning graphics; what’s inherently lacking is the “relatibility”, “familiarity” and the “philosophical depth” in the storyline. And that’s where Tarkovskian cinema comes in, which attempts to solve this conundrum by introducing poetic narrative to its plots, which are vague, metaphoric, contemplative, obscure, and yet demanding, self-conscious, and intellectually hard (on a personal level). In short, there is no question and there is no answer. You ask the questions as the plot develops, you answer them so as to move to next; and the movie never admonishes you for being right or wrong – it is all gray!
Tarkovky’s autobiography “Sculpting in Time” discusses his film-making perspective. His argument is that life is so complex and hard to decipher, as is the brain, that a logical (or linear, delineated, segmented, compartmentalised) narrative is always a facile way to tell a story. “The birth and development of thought are subject to laws of their own”. In other words, thought develops like a complex, emergent system – an initial condition and certain rule yields next step, but there is no way to predict next steps – “virtually any question about its long term behaviour is undecidable (Moore 1990)”. Only way to overcome this, in Tarkovskian cinema, is by “associative reasoning” aka “poetic reasoning”. By rejecting the law of excluded middle, a neural network kind of pattern finding is used to understand the story. In other words, pieces of stories are connected according to how your brain works; hence a “Tarkovskian movie” becomes “your movie”.
Tarkovsky’s sci-fi movie, Solaris, is a remarkable artpiece where the exploratory, scientific nature of mankind is displayed in an internal conflict with the “humane” nature of life. These conflicts are internal. Memories of loss, love, pain still haunts the exploratory human. The goal-oriented nature of humanity comes at crossroads with most common foibles, irrationalities, that humans have evolved to believe in. Tarkovsky regards such conflicts as an artistic yearning of human to attain a universal, ephemeral, spiritual truth through revelations in the form of flashes of images, which is in great distinction against a staircase-like truth ladder of science. However, what’s important to takeaway from such a view is that a universal Truth, if there is any, is the combination of scientific truth and ephemeral, artistic truth. To give an example, living in Solaris “safely” and advancing frontiers of collective human knowledge would be complemented with the “spiritual sacrifice” that humanity is undergoing in such pursuits. The loss of past relationship with “previous world” needs to be acknowledged and respected as truthfully as the new relationship with the “new world”. All joys, miseries, excitements, failures, successes of relationship with the “Truth” are anyways expressed through art (cinema here)- moving forward and acknowledging our mortal truth is important. Or for that matter, trying to make humans immortal and still acknowledging artistically, spiritually our failure to do so is important.
Water, by belief, can be regarded as a complex system (Turing complete) and this notion strengthens its unpredictability. Water, embedded in a Turing machine, when attempts, let say, to enter a particular low-velocity zone, by the nature of its unpredictability does not know whether it will reach that zone. I strongly feel this to be a spiritual crisis in respect of water – the yearning for “that zone“, and inability to comprehend when this will happen. The question is not the quantifiable/scientific truth of when/how/where this will happen, but that of artistic truth to yearn for this to happen. Just like decimal places of pi keep on yielding newer values after every computation, the yearning to reach “777” (for example) is the same yearning which water has to reach “that zone”. The questions that emerge are:
- Can a moving water have a certain faith in it?
- Can a moving water have spiritual yearning to reach certain velocity zone?
- Can Navier-Stokes equations, when embedded in Turing machine, inherently encapsulate this faith and yearning, somewhere?
It is certain that my faith in imposing the faith on water can not be ignored; however, I do not want to artificially program this faith within water, but perhaps, start this ontological cascading of faith.
(Apologies for the analogy and meta-mathematics in the last paragraph if it doesn’t make sense)
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