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Man is essentially alone. There may be many around, many may spare their time, but when a person wanders within the chambers of their own mind or consciousness, when they roam through the realms of past—even future—existence or non-existence, no one is found beside them during that journey. It is a cold, solitary voyage. Walking alongside oneself, knowing there will be no hand to hold, yet traveling such a path that, though intimately familiar, has never been walked before. It is like sifting through the grey particles of dust-reality to wander in the kingdom of imagination. If a person who spends a third of their life asleep suddenly declares that reality is greater than dreams, then such rhetoric becomes incongruous and contradictory to their very way of life. Eyes open, yet what a dreaming sleep it is—childhood and old age, both dance before us in various montages with such gentle grace, moment by moment, then the entire being rebels, crying out its doubts about the inner worlds of self and surroundings. This cannot be denied, yet accepting it brings anguish.
When someone, in seeking another’s mental landscape, questions their own infinite emptiness or apparent fullness or both, and memories or forgettings—which they themselves cannot clearly distinguish—begin appearing one after another, like curtains being drawn to reveal other curtains, they embark upon self-inquiry. That path is unknown, unfamiliar, yet its allure is irresistible. Life and world seem to arrange all the moments left behind side by side, and thinking that stepping into any one of them might clarify the present, they seek happiness, or at least peace, in this blending of past and future. Building bridges of unfulfillment and solitude, in the meditation of sighs they see: shadows shift and rain arrives, the new breaks and the ancient returns, light fades and darkness awakens. In life’s background, the clamor of the dead seems to play on, where mist trembles defying time, vision grows blurred, so many memories float up……….all of them solitary, empty. Is there never any escape from such cruel, melancholy existential crisis?
What condition must mind and brain pass through when beauty becomes unbearable, when keeping companions, family, country, even oneself at a distance brings apparent relief, when one wants to blow away all boundaries of sorrow or hatred in a single breath, wants to shout to shatter everyone’s illusions……..whoever has faith, think what you will of them, but don’t think them mad!…….To understand this, one must be afflicted with Tarkovsky’s nostalgia; such mind-to-mind pilgrimage or the satisfaction of walking oneself in a procession of living corpses by excavating life and biography……….renders us homeless. Bohemian as we are, we wish to cross the river of light with light in hand, yet that handful of light must never be allowed to die, for if it goes out, all the light in the river of light will extinguish too, and in that abyss of darkness one cannot move forward, nor can one return without regret. Journey from color toward the colorless, embracing absent-mindedness while setting aside mind, mistakenly forsaking the safe and familiar to search for the unknown……..such is the pale scenery of the quilted tapestry that is Tarkovsky’s ‘Nostalgia’.
There’s a saying of Tarkovsky’s that I cherish:
A book becomes a thousand books when read by a thousand people.
‘Nostalgia’ is such a film that becomes a thousand films in a thousand eyes. Watch the movie—through your cinematic vision you might not find much of what I’ve described in my felt testimony.
অসাধারণ রিভিউ। ছবিটার মর্মে যেয়ে উপলব্ধি থেকে বের হয়ে আসা কথামালা। ভীষণ ভালো লাগল।