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It took me several days after having watched Andrey Rublyov (1966) to even begin to start making sense of it all. This is a film that leaves the viewer speechless if they do endure in its watching. This is also not made for the contemporary viewer, since this requires amount of patience that is not required in contemporary blockbusters (as in every Tarkovsky film). Tarkovsky effectively transports us to wherever he might want his story to take place. It might be medieval Russia, or it might be in a distant planet, an abandoned place where miracles happen, or it might well just be his home. ...

Words, in their day to day use, are descriptive: they describe the state of affairs at a given time. When poetic language is used, however, language transcends this limitation: it precisely tries not to describe the world as is, but rather as it is experienced. A terminally-ill Greek poet attempts to finish a poem by their national poet, Dionysios Solomos, yet he says to his daughter that he just cannot find the words for it. Even when trying to use language in its poetic function, Alexandros is unable to put the vast experience into words, it is beyond both description and poetization. ...

A revision of our society at large. The stunning cinematography in this film guided me throughout it. From the opening scene, with the Osage dancing to the findings of oil, through the idyllic moments of the wedding where the light hits the characters and the water just right, to the doomy feeling of the final funeral, every scene creates an atmosphere that adequately depicts the overall tone of it. Thematically, at least at first, this is close to There Will Be Blood (2007), where we see DDL create an empire disregarding human lives that may be affected by it. The Hale family is doing the same: running after money without any concerns towards human life, especially because that life is not a life of people they can relate to. The people they affect are in no way close to them. Not historically, not genetically, not religiously. It is only in this juncture of time that they meet one another, and their goals in life are diametrically opposed: while they white folks want to gather as much money as possible, their Osage counterparts just want to live their lives in peace. ...

The Silence Of God The second entry in what has been dubbed as the “Silence of God” trilogy is hard to describe in itself. 80 minutes packed with the most profound type of crisis: that of faith in a modern world with a beautiful cinematography that is characteristic of Bergman. Bergman worked repeatedly with the cast of this film, namely, Björnstrad, Thulin, von Sydow. I believe they just shared some of the concerns Bergman himself had for they portray these characters so vividly that it is hard to think of other actors for the roles. ...

Psychoanalysis and Marxism In Freud’s psychoanalysis, the father is the quintessential cultural bastion, for he is the one who introduces his children into the cultural world, by allowing his son to have any woman he desires, except for his own mother. This is the simplest formulation, but more kin is introduced in more complex societies and one cannot have sisters or cousins. It is hard to dissolve Freud’s theories from its own cultural background: raised in a victorian era, the Judeo-Christian thought pervades him in ways he could not even see. His attempt is a proto-scientific, but it ultimately fails. ...