WALL•E, Andrei Tarkovsky and the Power of Cinema

        What Is Cinema?  Andre Bazin asked that question more than 50 years ago. He wrote volumes on the subject.  So have many others more learned and insightful than I.  Perhaps we could all benefit from reading their works, I know I could. 

                What does cinema mean to me?  Well, knowing that my own personal understanding of what that word means to me has developed over the years, it's a definition that is not fixed.  Basically, it is moving pictures.  But certainly it is much more than that.  The advent of film cameras in the late 19th Century allowed people to capture more than an instant photographically.  It allowed people to capture and preserve time.  To catch the light and movement of the world and the beings alive in the world that lay in front of the focal plane of the lens captured on film and that moment of movement since passed into the wake of time could be viewed later, again and again and on and on forever.  First there were the nickelodeons and eventually the movie palaces.  The new technology went from being a curiosity to a fad to an art.  I believe cinema to be the greatest art form.  It encompasses all other art forms and yet is its own form of expression.   While a movie may not represent the highest achievement in sound or photography or design or the written word or performance or dance it does something wholly its own that no other art can do.  What sets film apart is the capture and control of time. What Andrei Tarkovsky called Sculpting In Time.  The compression and expansion of time.  The capture of objects moving before the camera and of the camera's eye moving in every possible direction and speed through space and time.  And perhaps most importantly the manipulation of these captured elements through editing.  The union and juxtaposition of a series of moving images and sound to create an overall experience greater than the sum of its parts.

                In a time when the summer crowds at the multiplex are inundated with fast moving, fast cutting, loud and dumb bombast the spectacle of CGI excess that move their plots (when they even bother with plots) forward through lazy exposition, it is a unique instance when a blockbuster succeeds in its telling its story through, at least the first half, with almost no dialogue through the moving pictures or "Pure cinema" (albeit one with an unparalleled sound design).  It remarkably effective not only in telling the tale of a robot alone in a literal waste land but it is also masterful in conveying the emotions of said robot.  Disney films have always excelled at clear concise storytelling with strongly defined characters, memorable heroes and villains. But the Pixar films, while not abandoning clarity, have always been a little more complex in their worldview.  WALL•E more than any other Pixar film and maybe more than any other family friendly summer blockbuster ever boils things down to the most basic elements, especially in terms of character. The robots don't really speak, and although they find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, they haven't contrived elaborate schemes, their aims are simple.  The film finds ways to explore themes as varied and deep as Love, loneliness, friendship, consumerism, media over-saturation, self-determination, pollution, and the beauty of Creation.

                In this bleak vision of a future Earth as garbage dump devoid of life, save for WALL•E and his pet cockroach, one thing that has survived among the detritus is cinema.  In one of the many brilliant little details in the movie WALL•E  watches a VHS cassette of the musical Hello Dolly (1969) that he keeps in a toaster (perhaps a reference to Video Toaster?) in a top loading VCR which is connected to an iPod and then magnified by magnifying glass.  These images of costumed performers singing and dancing on a Hollywood back lot but woven into a story of romance among other things is the only living record of humanity (other than the garbage).  It is through this movie that the human spirit lives on and is passed onto WALL•E.  Ironically, it is a robot who then teaches the now blob-like Homo Sapiens that have been lost in space limbo for 700 years what it means to be human again. 

                I know that, for better or worse, my life has been in some way shaped by the movies.  In spite of it all, I like to think the certainly the best of cinema has influenced me for the better.   For many, most of the time we're awake us is spent working, going to school, trying to be a "normal" member of society, playing by all the rules, keeping up on the popular culture and news of the day.  We communicate with people, mostly through pleasantries, formal ways of being informal, a measured casualness, a domesticated politeness.  I don't think most of us spend most of our time in a deep, holy, peaceful, or ecstatic state of truth and openness.  But it is in these rare and exalted sometimes surprising moments that we are most truly alive and ourselves. (Who are we the rest of the time?)  Movies are for me a place to enter into that space where the human condition is illuminated.  Yeah, there's entertainment too.  But I do lament when people see this greatest of art forms as nothing more than a frivolous diversion.

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” 

― Albert Camus

                So the way that seeing Hello Dolly sparked a consciousness of being and a desire for love in a Waste Allocation Load Lifter (Earth class)  so did the experience of viewing WALL•E  in the theater ignite and awaken in me a sometimes lost, often unseen sense of awe and wonder.  Like being possessed by the spirit of myself as a child; still discovering the world, not yet cynical and trained in the ways of the world.  How I sat; slack-jawed and wide-eyed with a song in my heart and a lump in my throat rooting for the hero, loving the adventure, recognizing what is truly meaningful in life.  That's just one of the ways that cinema has affected me.  How has it affected you?





an excerpt from Tarkovsky's introduction to "Sculpting In Time":

I would meet people on whom my film had made an impression, or I would receive letters from them which read like a kind of confession about their lives, and I would begin to understand what I was working for.   I would be conscious of my vocation: duty and responsibility towards people, if you like.

A woman wrote from Gorky:  ' Thank you for Mirror. My childhood was like that. . . . Only how did you know about it?  There was that wind, and the thunderstorm . . . "Galka, put the cat out," cried my Grandmother.  . . . It was dark in the room . . .  And the paraffin lamp went out, too, and  the feeling of waiting for my mother to  come back filled my entire soul . . . And how beautifully your film shows the awakening of a child's  consciousness, of this  thought! . . . And Lord, how true . . . we really don't know our mothers' faces. And how simple . . . You know, in that dark cinema, looking at a piece of canvas lit up by your talent, I felt for the first time in my life that I was not alone . . .'

I spent so many years being told that nobody wanted or understood my films,  that a response like that warmed my very soul; it gave meaning to what I was doing and strengthened my conviction that I was right and that there was nothing accidental about the path I had chosen.