Finished Andrei Rublev and Death24x, the former's ending being a revelation and that of the latter's not so much, at least to one who's read 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' already.

Tarkovsky's use of camera movement is very choice, the constant change becoming the conductor of the scene in a way, always subtly reordering its contents and intensities. The timing of the bell's ringing, just at the point where the suspense is being forgotten, is outstanding, as is the final chromatic invasion.

Though no biopic the film does ultimately speak worlds not just about aesthetics but about being an artist. The hysterical tears of the bellmaker's son in a way marks the climax, and after that the artwork is emphatically freed from its creator. But the boy masterminded this huge effort to cast a bell with medieval technology, succeeded (avoiding execution in the process) and all he can think about is how the bell sounds wrong--as if his father never told him the secret of bellmaking. Your wish to create and your eventual creation are sky and sea at the horizon--at best an illusion of meeting. Or in other terms (Godard) once you know the kind of movie you like, the kind of movie you make can never be the same.

Not so much in Solaris but in this film I much prefer the way Tarkovsky's camera peruses minutiae of Nature to the way that a lot of Asian directors or say Malick seem to drool over Nature, though Kim Ki Duk has a knack for combining symbols of nature and civilization--like the extreme longs of the roads in Samaria or especially the caged bird thrown into the lake in The Isle. Real Nature appreciation I think should adopt a somewhat dispassionate stance and a casual momentum, a conversation rather than a prayer, in the same way as one should never excessively praise a person because the excess is all oblique self-talk.