Jim Emerson has a great post over at Scanners wherein he reconstructs an infamous exchange between the late Richard Widmark and Andrei Tarkovsky. It seems that at the 1983 Telluride film festival, just as the cold war was heating up — the Soviets had just shot down KAL flight 007 — Tarkovsky was in full, well, Tarkovsky flight, doing, as Jim put it, a “Mad Russian” routine for an American audience. Some Tarkovskian hogwash about how art was antithetical to entertainment, that his new film Nostalghia didn’t have a moment of entertainment in it (thus leaving himself wide open), and etc., etc.

To make a long story short, Widmark took exception and made an impassioned plea that entertainment and art are not mutually exclusive. Jim — who was there — writes:

Entertainment does not preclude art. For that matter, neither do pretentiousness and pomposity, and there’s no question Tarkovky unashamedly aspired to both. Meanwhile, strangely, it was Tarkovsky, not Widmark, who was promoting the idea that “masses of spectators” should drive or determine what could be explored in cinema — asserting his own false correlation between artistry and popular acceptance.

Well said, even though I love Tarkovsky’s films. And contrary to what Tarkovsky said — which was disingenuous at best, idiotic at worst — I find the astonishing imagery in Nostalghia very entertaining.

Read the rest of Jim’s post here.

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