Cinephiles in the House!

Saturday night my brilliant cinephile husband arranged a movie night at our house. We made veggie pizza and homemade jalapeno ranch and salad and had wine and got real cozy and watched the 1972 Tarkovsky film Solaris.

Getting the living room ready for ten viewers = many blankets and pillows:

Friends settling in:

The interesting thing about this film was the sleepy and dreamy effect it had upon us in the audience. If you've seen it, or any Tarkovsky film for that matter, you know that he took great time with each scene (not at all catering to today's fast-pace-addicted audiences) with limited musical score, long takes, unconventional narrative structures, and reflective images of great natural beauty. Tarkovsky was trying to capture "time within time" and so the feeling of the film creates a sort of dreamworld that you are invited to enter.

Therefore it was not surprising and actually sort of magical that many of our friends fell asleep on and off throughout the film. Darin says that Tarkovsky films usually make him go to sleep upon first viewing, and because the films explore the themes of sleep and dreams, the experience becomes even more enchanted.

So we had a sleepy film watching evening and in the end it was around midnight and our lovely friends quietly yawned and talked a little bit and then departed out into the winter night thinking of which film we'll all watch next. No one was really bothered by the fact that people had fallen asleep because the whole room seemed like a cozy breathing cave of soft dreams.

The scene from the movie that best describes the feeling of our night happens to be one of Darin's favorite moments of cinema history:  thirty seconds of weightlessness. Floating within the space of love and memories, no gravity, earthless, boundless.

 I won't say more, because if you get a chance I hope you'll watch it.