Nostalgia

seraphimsigrist has got me watching Tarkovsky. It seems like a timely thing to be doing- what with that Ratzinger person being "elected " Pope.

Ratzinger belongs to the daytime of religion. Tarkovsky to the night. Ratzinger throws a sharp-edged shadow. Tarkovsky moves (in Bergman's words) "with confidence in the room of dreams". Ratzinger is a policeman, an  unthinking instrument of law. He has no passport to Tarkovsky's world.

I don't know exactly what is going on in Tarkovsky's Nostalgia. Ailz suggests that the protagonist is dead before the movie opens and what we're seeing are his post mortem adventures. Could be. Actually I don't think it matters.  We are in a realm beyond narrative logic- a world of images, of shewings. Birds fly in and out, feathers drift down- and I am reminded of two Biblical texts- the one about the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove and the one about the fall of the sparrow.

 "For I am persuaded that neither death ,nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, not things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, Our Lord."