[M]aking films is an extraordinarily expensive pastime. At present we therefore have a situation in which the cinema-goer is at liberty to choose the director who happens to be on his wavelength, while the director is not entitled to declare frankly that he has no interest in that section of the cinema-going public that uses films as entertainment and as an escape from the sorrows, cares and deprivations of everyday life.
— Andrey Tarkovsky
The title of today’s post, “Escape and Entertainment,” can be taken in two significantly different ways. The difference at issue hinges on how the first word, escape, is understood. In his lines above, the great 20th Century Russian master of cinema Andrey Tarkovsky uses that first word of my title in one common way, that way in which it points in the same direction as does the second word, entertainment. By that understanding and that common usage, what one seeks in “entertainment” is precisely escape.
Escape from what?
From all the sorrows, cares and deprivations of everyday life, just as Tarkovsky says.
Entertainment by what?
By amusements that divert one from the same sorrows, cares and deprivations of the same everyday life.
Is it any wonder that Tarkovsky has no interest in those who relate to works of art such as his own films as no more than means of such entertainment and escape? Even and especially, I will add, when what they seek to escape is care and concern for such a thing as the current Covid plague, to turn to art for such relief from everyday life itself is nothing but a degradation of all art and all artists.
May all artists always protest, as loudly as possible, such unconscionable degradation of themselves and their art! And may none of their works ever appeal to such escapist desires for mere entertainment!
Monument to Andrey Tarkovsky
Outside Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography
* * *
Creating art is a radical act of resistance, one that illuminates fragmentations and allows us as witnesses to attend to our collective wounds and transfigure them.
— Cellista
There is, however, a second way of hearing the title of this post, “Escape and Entertainment.” That is a way rooted in the roots of those two words themselves. In its roots, to escape means to free oneself from confinement — to elude one’s enemies by leaving them nothing but one’s empty cape in their hands when they reach out and try to grasp one. As for entertain, by its derivation that word means to hold (from Latin tenere) amidst or in the midst of (French entre- from Latin inter-). Heard to such roots, it is not entertainment that allows us to escape so much as it is the reverse: escape from the clutches of what would divert us from where we belong allows us to retain (once again, from Latin tenere, prefixed by re- used here in its intensifying sense) our proper human place.
The task of art is not to divert us from life, but to call us into it, to enmesh us ever more deeply in everyday life. Art performs that task most clearly not when it deals with unusual events--or at least events which we wish were less usual than they all too often are, such events as lynchings or mass murders with assault weapons. Rather, art performs its task most admirably, most remarkably, precisely when it gives us to see how extraordinary the most ordinary thing truly is — the incredible beauty of a glint of light off a pair of worn shoes, for instance, or the tinsels of ice dripping off all the trees in an ice-storm. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in the closing lines of one of her well-known poems, about which I have written before:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
The task of art is to give us such eyes to see.
As I said in my own opening line for this section of today’s post, it is not art’s task to divert us from everyday life, but rather to enmesh us ever more deeply within that life. To say the same thing differently: the task of art is precisely to allow us to escape from all diversions from everyday life, and to embed us through ever more entertainment in that very life.
That is what art is for!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning