Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

[Flex Mentallo]

…and so with the harbinger of Martin's painting we come to apocalypse, or my experience of it. If at the end of this somewhat lengthy post you come to the conclusion that I was merely a tourist in Bosnia Herzegovina I will not argue. I was not called up to service. I was not paid to go there. But I went anyway - and if I was quietly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of human suffering I encountered, well, you can say I got what I deserved.

 

At the same time, this is not really my story. It is actually many stories. U2, Paul McCartney and Luciano Pavarotti are part of this story - though before you ask, no, I didnt go to school with any of them! There is at least one hero in this story - and no, that isnt me either, but a man I met called Nigel Osborne. If anything, I discovered that on some instinctual level I am a coward. But that doesn’t matter either. As with nearly all my stories, the real subjects here are the children, wherever they live, and what we oblige them to suffer.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Over Christmas I began a long delayed project to collate a room full of pictures - sketches, drawings, canvases, photographs, and began to upload the scanned images to photobucket. (Still a long way to go.) I'm not now sure to be honest, whether posting these illustrated narratives on the boards was the stimulus I needed. Perhaps it was, as the job has badly needed doing for years and perhaps would never have gotten done otherwise!

 

Like Heinrich Schliemann excavating the walls of Troy I am ploughing through layers of material as if it were an archaeological dig - metaphorically speaking I think I've just reached the floors of Troy 7. Or in real terms, 1994 and the Siege of Sarajevo.

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

I consider it a great privilege to have access to the boards and a sympathetic audience. I am quietly amazed that so many of you still appear to be reading - though the various pm's I've had assure me that this is the case.

 

As before I will interweave art with life, music and film. The connections I make between the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky and my experiences in the former Yugoslavia may appear tenuous, but to this I would say, sometimes we make sense of things later, and in that process, a greater meaning emerges. Serendipity looks backwards as well as forwards.

 

I will see if I can explain this as I go along.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Andrei Tarkovsky 1932 – 1986

 

 

My first encounter with the work of Tarkovsky was his film from 1972, Solaris, based on the book of the same title by Stanislaw Lem.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

I can’t remember when I first saw it, but I found the experience quite hypnotic.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

His way of making a film had nothing to do with the laws of narrative exposition I was accustomed to from conventional Western movies. He did not edit to speed up the action, or use multiple camera viewpoints.

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

As I pursued his oeuvre I began to realise that he sought to capture moments in time. But also, that he did not separate inner from outer realities.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Sometimes what you think is a dream sequence shatters your assumptions.

 

 

 

For example, at one point in his film Mirror (yes, mirrors had to come back into this weaving at some point!) a sparrow dead in the hand miraculously revives and flies away.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The last movie he made in Russia was Stalker, based on the book Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. (A very powerful sci fi novel).

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Aliens we never see have dropped by for a brief stopover, leaving behind the equivalent of litter scattered around after a roadside picnic. This is no ordinary litter however. Time and causality have been altered, and in this zone, those who enter may also be transformed.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

In 1983 he made Nostalghia, ostensibly a movie about a Russian historian pursuing the story of another Russian - a musician - in Italy.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

But in reality it is about the fact that Russians miss the homeland so much when exiled that they can die of it. In the movie, the historian meets a man who has tried to preserve the past by building a model of it in his living room.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

His home is a ruin, with water running down the walls and pooling on the floor. And ruins are an important theme in this narrative, as you will see.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Memories are depicted in grainy sepia, like still lives, like recurring dreams. To give you an example of Tarkovsky's attempts to capture time, in one such sequence, we see figures - and a dog - in a mist-shrouded pre-dawn landscape. Behind them is a farm. They do not move. The camera slowly pans through 360 degrees, and just as it returns to its starting point, the sun rises.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

At another point in the movie, the historian comes across the shell of a ruined church.