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| Stalker / A Visitor To A Museum |
Instead of doing a semi-vague post on Tarkovsky’s influence on a director’s
entire body of work, I decided to focus specifically on
Starker and Konstantin Lopushansky’s post-apocalyptic quadrilogy.
Lopushansky was a production designer on
Stalker early in his career and I genuinely think it left a lasting impression on him and his work.
Many critics ask Lars von Trier, Alexander Sokurov, me about his influence. It is inevitable, as he is the greatest representative of auteur cinema, his quintessence of auteur cinema ideology has been absorbed by many, including me. But if we speak about style, some critics who do not like auteur cinema attempt to pick things apart; they say that in my films the water is flowing just like in his films. I respond that water flows in millions of other films. This argument is very weak.
And so on. In fact his influence is spiritual, it is the understanding of art. I was lucky to make a first draft of his lecture. He lectured film direction, later he took me as an apprentice for Stalker, we had an opportunity to socialize and one day he asked me to systemize his lectures - Konstantin Lopushansky, indie-cinema.com
There’s nothing I hate more than someone trying to tell an artist bout their own work but there’s something a little disingenuous about this quote. He’s not wrong in that there
are a million films with overhead shots of water. But in the case of Tarkovsky and Lopushansky, it’s not just two directors shooting overhead shots of water. It’s two overhead shots of water with the same color palette, panning over to the protagonist’s hand in said water with the a similar score/“soundscape” accompanying each scene. And, to reiterate, Lopushansky was a production designer for Tarkovsky. Is it out of line to assume an impactful film like
Stalker would leave a lasting impression on a young production designer that would go on to make their own films eventually?
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Stalker / Russian Symphony
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Konstantin Lopushansky’s semi-evasive response to Tarkovsky’s visual influence could also simply be a director sick of being compared to the same person for 4-1/2 decades.
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Stalker / A Visitor To A Museum
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I still think when you take all these factors in to consideration perhaps you’ll see that the comparisons in this post are more than just basic similarities or coincidences.
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Stalker / The Ugly Swans
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Stalker / A Visitor To A Museum
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Stalker / The Ugly Swans
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