During the hot pursuit, trying to shake the security vehicle from the Cold War building, we managed to navigate Balloon Corner, no treacherous ice to send us skittering and the hubcap, although spinning, stayed on our rent-a-chariot. However, as we sped down Dellsome Lane, intending to enter the field below the pylons, we realised the gap was not big enough. It looked like a large concrete block had landed from outer space, a phrase employed in a local review canvassing the initial reception for William Mitchell’s mural at the water board. It may have been possible, had we clipped the rock at the right angle, that the car would have flipped up but we did not take the risk. The high speed cinematic re-enactment clause in the hire policy was somewhat ambiguous. We were sitting ducks by the bottomless pond. Our camera footage swallowed whole, confiscated under a local by law, under the auspices of which, Henry VIII removed the land from Thomas More, along with his head. Here is one of Tarkovsky’s test shots for the film opening. A series of slides still exist in the archive. Others are floating around cinematic memorabilia auctions. In his notes it says… bring the paper into shot with the disembodied hand taking down a sequence of coded dots as the radio mast flashes against sheets of lightning. Whilst filming the test shots Tarkovsky said the pylon near the lightning tree was hit twice. The reason the location was chosen.. there is nothing higher between here and the Ural mountains, a setting Tarkovsky knew well from Dr Zhivago.
The test images may remind some of our regular viewers of certain Sergei Eisenstein shots and we highly recommend this link to an Off Screen article about Eisenstein, Synaesthesia and Symbolism. There are references topics we have covered many times such as Eckartshausen’s Theory of Ocular Music, Rimbaud, Baudelaire and the symbolists. The section which interested Veronica Swan was the clavichord Eckartshausen built, made of glass tubes filled with varicoloured liquids, backlit by candles like Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete. Colours would glow and fade according to the pressure placed on the keys. This of course is an image which Swan and Tarkovsky use a number of times in their cinematic palette. The synergy of the synth with the synesthesia cross wired senses creates an uneasy alliance between sound and vision.
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