On the experience of watching all of Tarkovsky's films in sequence over one week.

I did this during a January when I had time and was in the right state of mind for it. I want to describe not what the films are but what the week was.

By the end of Ivan's Childhood on the first night I understood that I was watching something that asked more from me than my usual relationship to cinema. The second film, Andrei Rublev, took seven hours across two evenings and I had to stop in the middle. Not because it was bad. Because it was too much to absorb without sleep between.

Solaris reminded me that patient cinema does not mean static cinema. There is more happening in a single long take in Solaris than in ten minutes of cutting in a conventional thriller. You just have to slow down enough to see it.

By Stalker I had entered a state of watching that I can only describe as devotional. I wasn't analyzing. I wasn't even interpreting. I was sitting with the images the way you sit in a place you've returned to after a long absence.

I watched The Sacrifice on the last day. I cried twice. I didn't know why either time.