Tuesday, September 11, 2018

The Sacrifice (1986) A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky


"In Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, the distance from hope to despair is a short jump—a chasm crossed with the help of something so immediate as a television transmission. As his birthday celebration winds down on a gloomy summer evening in remote Sweden, retired intellectual Alexander (Erland Josephson) tiptoes half-drunk into his living room to find a small company of friends and family bewitched by the soft blue glow of a TV set’s screen, out of which emanates an announcement of nuclear conflict. The warning winds down, the TV is turned off, and the mood descends—first into stunned silence, then into outright hysteria, and then into a kind of sedated anxiousness from which the film never quite resurfaces. In certain contexts, this dramaturgical pivot might register a bit maudlin, but in 2018, when Twitter and cable news provide an endless gushing stream of outrages, the film’s evocation of being rapidly thrown into disarray by a piece of topical turmoil hits home."

Kino released a new Blu-ray for The Sacrifice, so I reviewed it for Slant.

2 comments:

Unkonwn said...

ابداء الاستثمار في قطاع التعبئة والتغليف مع ماكينات تعبئة سوائل نصف اوتوماتيك حيث تتميز الماكينة بهيكل فولاذي متين مقاوم للصداء مع سهولة استخدام ب لوحة تحكم باللمس ، كما تقدم شركة ماسترتك ضمان صيانة دورية علي الماكينة لتحافظ علي ادائها وعمرها الافتراضي.

Kling4 AI said...

Your excerpt makes the shift from the television’s blue glow to stunned silence unusually concrete; the tension comes from how the room changes around the broadcast. For an original suspense scene, I would keep the camera position steady when the screen goes dark, then let a small change in someone’s posture lead into the next reaction. In a Seedance 2.5 storyboard, I would mark the sound cutoff separately from the first cut, so the silence has time to register. That pause could make the later escalation feel earned without immediately showing what caused the alarm.