Words float through: Empty. Death. Grasping. 
The camera drifts underwater, everything a sweeping, swinging visual. 
Redeem my life. Justify it. That blinded you. 
I turned you upside down, my son. Longing for something other. 
There’s isn’t a story, just characters who stand about, some playing handsies. 
Nobody’s home.
You have to fly. Fly. 
High up. Everything’s just a…speck.
(Extracts from Knight of Cups in bold italics)
Russians may find profundity in the story and themes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 film The Mirror, but for the rest of us it’s the images, the visuals.
A woman runs. 
A barn burns. 
A bird lands on a boy’s cap. 
A dog leaves a cabin. 
A boy looks back at himself. 
The music plays. And we reflect. 
We know something about who we are, as if a light glowed behind us, as if this was not so much a movie as a dream that we had somehow conceived together.
Werner Herzog’s 1968 film Even Dwarves Started Small has a very specific and demanding vision dominated by extraordinarily long takes, the camera mercilessly watching as to what might unfold, be it a truck driving in an endless circle…
Dwarves looking at pictures of nude girls…
Or a chicken eating a dead mouse.
Much is demanded of the audience, too much, throughout this drifting narrative in which dwarves yell and laugh maniacally as they wreck everything they can find.
Says Herzog: “Film is out about our collective dreams and also our collective nightmares, something that cannot be extinguished from our minds.”
Nightmare indeed.
“You ever see Capricorn One? You ever see that, Nico?” She didn’t wait for him to reply. “James Brolin, O.J. Simpson. I fucking loved that movie.”
“The mission to the moon that went wrong. They faked it because they didn’t have the budget, and then the capsule dissolved in re-entry. And so they had to kill the pretend pilots. It turned stupid in the end, little evil black helicopters chasing them around.”
Nico hunched over his screen and turned a switch. “There will be something else tomorrow, Dee, another slaughter, another crime against humanity. And we all know exactly that. We wait for the next thing. And it’s always worse than we can imagine.”
“What about Twilight’s Last Gleaming? The gang that hijacks the nuclear silo, with Burt Lancaster.” 
He looked around at Dee. “Burt Lancaster claims that there is some kind of secret doctrine about the Vietnam War being fought to prove to the Soviets that they could sacrifice their men. Yes, I remember it.”
“You know, I used to believe all of that.” She spoke too fast, shorthand for what was in her head “It was a revelation. I believed it. I couldn’t understand why the government didn’t fall. It took me a long time to realize it’s not like that. I’m still not there. People are people. We are just who we are. There is no evil emperor, no star chamber, nothing. It’s just us and our demons, pretending that all of this is decided by someone different. And it’s just us.”
I can see in the dark, you know. I’ve been here for quite a while.*
*Mr. Robinson to Benjamin in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate
Peter Fischli & David Weiss’ 1983 film The Right Way features their mascot icons Rat and Bear journeying through the Swiss Alps. 
Rat and Bear drift through caves, glaciers and swamps, less a representation of the world as our fears, hubris and inability to focus.
Like Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Rat and Bear dally with a primal essence that comes out in moments of loss, confusion and incongruous observations.
Their aimless path drifts from the brink of death to congratulating each other on being at the top of the food chain to trying to kill each other, caricaturing the men inside the outfits.
Whatever sense can be made of Rat and Bear, I do wonder how much it might damage a child to see and hear any of this.
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