The film is slyly but, for most critics, unmistakably critical of the Putin regime: in one scene, characters use portraits of Russian leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev for target practice, before the hero asks, "Haven't you got anyone more recent?" The film impresses with its political bravery, but also with its austere visuals and Dostoevskian seriousness of tone.
Or was he mainly a painter and sculptor whose frenetic genre-bending and wildly eccentric visual style obscured his seriousness?
But as the song proceeds, the melody picks up speed and the lyrics becomes more and more ludicrous, comic bits of visual humor undercutting the seriousness of the tone of the music and images, until it ends in the church.
Calder took everything seriously except seriousness.
Reviewing the picture in The New York Times, A. O. Scott called Mr. Shindo "a distinctive and protean visual storyteller" whose films "balance ethical seriousness with an almost voluptuous appetite for natural beauty and pictorial elegance".
Their self-satisfied seriousness marred another programme of Visual Music - another hour and a half of music, from Conlon Nancarrow to John Zorn, set to newly commissioned visuals.
There are relatively few full production numbers, almost as if the show wants to withhold visual and aural pleasure, the better to underscore the seriousness of its project.
Circles also figure prominently in Mr. Aronofsky's visual scheme, and he seems to be trying, with a seriousness of purpose that few American filmmakers attempt, to subvert the essentially sequential nature of film.
With the visual arts, it seems that artist, critic and audience have the same expectations of seriousness, however playful that seriousness may be.
Each painting feels like a new adventure in shape, space, color and suggested meaning, and a continual joke on Modernist seriousness that is also serious, most of all in its visual richness and telling surface variations.
