Lars Iyer's Blog

From its seamless, extended opening shot, it is clear, in this film, that we are in the presence of a great work of art. Nothing is mannered; there is an absolute decisiveness, a necessity, a plausibility; Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is magnificent.

The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky’s last film; he died, too young, in 1986, the same year as it was released, and of the same cancer that claimed the great actor whom he had wanted to play its protagonist. In the end, the role went to Erland Josephson, who also played Domenico in Nostalghia. If Domenico in that film prophesised the end of time, the apocalypse has arrived in The Sacrifice; nuclear war has broken out, there is no time left.

In his later work, Tarkovsky attempts to purify and simplify his films. To approach time? To approach cinema – or what he calls the cinematic image. What does this mean? The image is authentic when it allows time to live:

The image becomes authentically cinematic (when amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it, even within each separate frame. No ‘dead’ object – table, chair, glass – taken in a frame in isolation from everything else, can be presented as it were outside passing time, as if from the point of view of an absence of time. (68)

Life is a kind of welling up of time, which it is the special vocation of cinema to imprint. This is a lofty vocation. For as Tarkovsky notes, in our world, time itself threatens to disappear. This seems horribly abstract. How should we understand this? Tarkovsky quotes the journalist Ovchinnikov who, on visiting Japan, observed:

It is considered that time per se, helps to make known the essence of things. The Japanese therefore see a particular charm in the evidence off old age. They are attracted to the darkened tone of an old tree, the ruggedness of a stone, or even the scruffy look of a picture whose edges have been handled by a great many people. To all these signs of age, they give the name sabi, which literally means ‘rust’. Sabi, then, is a natural rustiness, the charm of olden days, the stamp of time. Sabi, as an element of beauty, embodies the link between art and nature.

One might remember the items the camera passes over in Stalker – the patina of age lies upon these apparently derealised objects. Derealised? Perhaps it is only when they are isolated thus, cast out of the networks with which we associate them that these items present themselves as what they are.

This may sound mysterious. But the materiality, the weight or the being of things is often hidden from us. I don’t think about the muddy ground until the wheel of my car is stuck in the mud. Likewise, the tables and chairs I bought cheaply at an out of town store sit unobtrusively in my lounge. The cup and the plate on my table are mass produced and cheaply available; they do not obtrude into my awareness except when they make my flat look untidy. And my flat is a flat like any other; nothing in particular binds me to it; anyone could be living there just as I could be living in any other flat. Things, then, mean little to me. Everything is replacable; and I know that for the Human Resources department where I work, I, too, am replacable. I am a resource like any other, and I am kept on a short-term contract to remind me of my disposability. From a certain perspective, I, too am a thing, with a shelf-life and a monetary value. And is it not true that other people in our modern world are things for me?

For Tarkovsky, the cinema, the cinematic image, by bringing things into view, confronts us with the fact of the heavy materiality of things, their presence and perhaps what one might call their saba, their wisdom, the way in which they evidence the claim of time.

I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience – and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema … (63)

In The Sacrifice, Alexander, a retired man of the theatre, lives with his wide, Adelaide, his young son, Gossen, or ‘Little Man’ (this is a poor translation – just use the word lad instead), and daughter Marta in rural Sweden. All is not well – we sense Adelaide is having an affair with Victor, a friend of the family. Alexander is jaded, weary, ironical and detached; he does not believe in God.

They are a wealthy family, with a servant and a large house. Then there is Otto, a mysterious character, collector of extraordinary events, who is also the postman who brings birthday greetings to Alexander at the outset of the film (I think Otto is my favourite character in cinema).

Nuclear war breaks out. Alexander kneels and prays for salvation. He offers everything he owns in exchange for the survival of the world. Otto visits him and tells him of the mysterious foreigner Maria, a witch, a saint, a holy fool whom, he says, Alexander must go to and sleep with. Alexander obeys. When he wakes the next morning, it is the day before the catastrophe. The day of his fiftieth birthday has begun again, it would appear that catastrophe has been averted. But now Alexander has to keep his part of the bargain: when his family (and Victor) go out for a stroll he sets fire to the house; he loses everything. He is taken away in ambulance.

Alexander sacrifices himself – but for what? For all of us. The world is given to us anew.

Is this what Tarkovsky is trying to in cinema when he appeals to the cinematic image, to life, to time? Is this not an attempt to give us the world anew, allowing an audience to receive time from which they have been estranged?

We go to the cinema to receive time, according to Tarkovsky:

I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience – and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema … (63)

Is this true? Does the cinematic image allow us to attend to the world in a new sense? In my favourite passage from Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes:

We’ve come to the end of the day: let us say that in the course of that day something important has happened, something significant, the sort of thing that could be the inspiration for a film, that has the makings of a conflict of ideas that could become a picture. But how did this day imprint itself on our memory? As something amorphous, vague, with no skeleton or schema. Like a cloud. And only the central event of that day has become concentrated, like a detailed report, lucid in meaning and clearly defined. Against the background of the rest of the day, that event stands out like a tree in the mist[….] Isolated impressions of the day have set off impulses within us, evoked associations; objects and circumstances have stayed in our memory, but with no sharply defined contours, incomplete, apparent fortuitous. Can these impressions of life be conveyed through film? They undoubtedly can; indeed it is the especial virtue of cinema, as the most realistic of the arts, to be the means of such communication. (23)

The film coalesceces from a kind of uncertainty, which, like the mist in a great Japanese painting, hovers on the edge of our awareness. Thus the wordless shepherd’s cry, the flat green landscape of Gotland, swallows’ song … These remind us, perhaps, of the diffuse, ambient background of our day, which is liable, because it is nothing in particular, to pass into forgetting.

Sven Nykvist, the great Swedish cinematographer, recalls of Tarkovsky, ‘he first and foremost wanted to communicate emotions, moods, atmosphere. By images, not by words. He wanted to impart a soul to objects and nature. Here he actually went further than Bergman ever did’.

The Sacrifice brings us, in its story, to the threshold of the end of the world. Somehow, he is able to make what is to be lost more present to us before. And our own lives? Do we not stand at the threshold in our own way? We go to the cinema for time, Tarkovsky writes – but this means, we go to feel the age of things, to discover the temporality which ensouls our world. It is to bring us sabi that The Sacrifice sacrifices itself.

Still, I wonder whether it is possible to feel the sabi of things. There is little now, it would seem, that hasn’t been sucked into the vortex of the market. How can I recognise the life of things in a film when there is no life in the things around me? Sometimes the world of Tarkovsky’s films seems entirely phantasmic and his book, Sculpting in Time, preposterous. But then, at times, it awakens a strange nostalgia for a life I have never led. It is at these times, perhaps, that time begins to open for me. Is it the power of his films to return to us a sense of permanence and endurance? Or does does it give us a kind of screen-memory for a lack or an absence that is eating our world away? I think I see something frightening in the cinematic image Tarkovsky does not want us to see – the nothingness and non-meaning that threatens to swallow our world.

The length of the shots and the glacial slowness of the film verge on affectation. It is a lugubrious film. But somehow Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (this is how he asks us to spell it) is a film about hope.

At the outset, Gorchakov and Eugenia drive through the dawn mist towards the ancient Chapel of St Catherine. Gorchakov is a Russia writer, in Italy to research the life of a Russian composer. Eugenia is a translator, beautiful and independent.

Her high heels prevent her from kneeling to pray in the Chapel of St Catherine to which she has driven Gorchakov. But the Russian does not enter the church. Eugenia berates him: it was his idea to drive halfway across Italy to see the painting of the Madonna by Piero della Francesca …

Perhaps we are supposed to see Eugenia as modern woman, too proud, too independent. We see her wandering the dark church in her opulent clothes. The Sacristan asks her: ‘have you come to pray for a child, or to be relieved from one?’ Eugenia tells his she is looking, just looking … Tarkovsky is sexist, we think to ourselves. But perhaps something else is happening here.

Eugenia says on first seeing the cathedral: ‘It is an amazing sight, when I saw it first, you know, I simply cried. Just look at the light!’ The film asks us to compare her to the woman at cathedral entrance, chanting ‘Virgin … Mother … Sister … Bride … Sea … Sky … Sun … Moon … Star’. It is incantation. They kneel to pray at the cathedral steps and, kneeling, mount the steps.

What do we see? It is as though the Chapel belongs to an older world, one we cannot re-enter. But it is this world to which the madman Domenico belongs.

We meet him first trying to cross the hot pool dedicated to Saint Catherine of Siena in the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni, where the protagonists are staying. Then we hear he locked himself in the house for seven years with his family, waiting for the end of the world.

He’s mad, Eugenia tells Gorchakov, who replies:

We don’t know what so-called insanity, or madness, is. First, they are inconvenient, they get in everyone’s way … Their behaviour, their wishes lie outside the generally accepted rules… And then, we simply don’t wish to understand them. They are terribly lonely, but I’m sure they are closer to the truth than we are …

Domenico is an Idiot, a Holy Fool. Gorchakov is fascinated by Domenico, this former teacher of mathematics; he demands to be taken to him. He talks to the Fool. Eugenia leaves. Domeinco tells him he intends to save the world. And he tells Gorchakov to cross the hot pool at the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni holding a lit candle in his hands.

Domenico immolates himself on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoleum, an ancient Roman square, after preaching to onlookers for three days. Aflame, crawling along the ground, he cries, ‘What is this world worth, what is the value of its truth if some unhappy mental patient, as you call us, tells you: “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” While there’s still time!’

And Eugenia? She travels to India with her new companion ‘He’s interested in spiritual matters’ she tells Gorchakov on the phone. Gorchakov carries the candle across the pool as Domenico asks. Twice he fails, but the third time, he succeeds. At the end he stumbles. Commentators tell us he dies, but I’m not sure.

It is a lugubrious film. The key, one might assume, is Tarkovsky’s own nostalgia for Russia. But Russia here means not only Gorchakov’s wife and daughter, but also the unity of a culture in terms of which everything will make sense.

Gorchakov: ‘Poetry can’t be translated… Art in general is untranslatable …’
Eugenina: ‘… but how would we ever have known Tolstoy, Pushkin? How could we even begin to understand Russia, if …’
Gorchakov: ‘But you don’t understand Russia at all’.
Eugenina: ‘And Dante, Petrarch, Macchiavelli? So Russians don’t know Italy!’
Gorchakov: ‘Of course not, how could we?’
Then Gorchakov gestures vaguely towards abolish national borders in order to overcome this difference.

I should add that Gorchakov is sexually drawn to Eugenia. She knows it. She berates him. Perhaps nostalgia also designates a desire for the security of family life.

Nostalgia, then, for what is lost – for Mother Russia, the unity of culture, the security of a wife and child. Nostalgia for the places of men and women, and for human beings who can kneel.

Why is Gorchakov fascinated by Domenico? The latter is indomitable, possessed of his beliefs, uncompromising. He will protest against what the world has become. It is his madness which allows Domenico to dream of transforming his society through his act of self-sacrifice. How futile! Yet he fascinates Gorchakov. Here, too, there is nostalgia, which one can understand from Tarkovsky’s remarks in an interview:

I am convinced that “time” in itself is no objective category, as “time” cannot exist apart from man’s perception of it. Certain scientific discoveries tend to draw the same conclusion. We do not live in the “now.” The “now” is so transient, as close to zero as you can get without it being zero, that we simply have no way of grasping it. The moment in time we call “now” immediately becomes the “past,” and what we call the “future” becomes the “now” and then it immediately becomes “past.” The only way to experience the now is if we let ourselves fall into the abyss which exists between the now and the future. And this is the reason “nostalghia” is not the same as mere sorrow over past time. Nostalghia is a feeling of intense sadness over the period that went missing at a time when we forsook counting on our internal gifts, to properly arrange and utilize them,… and thus neglected to do our duty.

Tarkovsky invokes nostalgia for the future, retrieving its sense, its promise from the deathly repetition of the past. Nostalghia would incite hope in us, a hope against hope, a hope to shore against what hope has become. But this is possible only when we put ourselves in the place of Gorchakov in his fascination with Domenico. Is this possible?

Tarkovsky has hopes for the artwork itself:

An artistic discovery occurs each time as a new and unique image of the world, a hieroglyphic of absolute truth. It appears as a revelation, as a momentary, passionate wish to grasp intuitively and at a stroke all the laws of this world – its beauty and ugliness, its compassion and cruelty, its infinity and its limitations. (Sculpting in Time, 27)

Truth? One might think Tarkovsky is nostalgic for the old place of art in a cosmos where human beings could look up to the stars and discover a source of the divine law mirrored in their souls. Musn’t one acknowledge that those stars have fallen, and there is no place for human beings in the cosmos? This is what Nostalghia reveals to me: the old laws have gone. It is no more possible to disappear into the world of the women at the church, of Domenico, than it is to become an animal, dwelling in nature as water does in water. The world, the whole world, can strike us as meaningless, as without sense or direction. But perhaps there is hope here – hope in the face of those who still believe in the great political projects through which freedom will arrive as a result of collective work, of shared labour. A hope implicit in what in a kind of resistance in things themselves, and in the relations between us, any of us, all of us. This is what Gorchakov’s wandering, his inability to complete his tasks or to resolve on any course of action, his sublime weakness suggests to me.

‘I’ve seen your film four times in the last week. And I didn’t simply go to see it, but in order to spend just a few hours living a real life with real artists and real people…. Everything that torments me, everything I don’t have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me – it’s all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror. For the first time ever a film has become something real for me, and that’s why I go to see it, I want to get right inside it, so that I can really be alive.’

Tarkovsky recalls the work that went into editing Mirror, in which the structure of the film was altered and the sequence of the episodes changed. It would seem the film would never find its form, that too much was missing. And yet, one day, he writes, ‘the material came to life; the parts started to function reciprocally, as if linked by a bloodstream; and as that last despairing attempt was projected onto the screen, the film was born before our very eyes’ (116).

Somehow, the two hundred shots of Mirror came together. Tarkovsky writes of a ‘time pressure’, in which the scenes have to come together to preserve a consistency of time, in the same manner one joins water pipes of a different diameter. The criterion that guides editing is life, according to Tarkovsky – life as it is ‘constantly moving and changing’, allowing each person to ‘interpret and feel each separate moment in his own way’ (118).

What is essential is that the audience experience a time that is uncoerced by the director; yet, as Tarkovsky writes: ‘There is still an apparent dichotomy: for the directors sense of time always amounts to a kind of coercion of the audience, as does his imposition of his inner world. The person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world), and becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your ‘own’ and others remain strangers; and I think this is not only perfectly natural, but, alas, inevitable.’ (120)

I am intrigued about the notion of taste at issue here: the idea that, somehow, the director’s experience of time would resonate with one’s own, to the extent that one is possessed, or, perhaps, dispossessed by the work. Better still – there is the notion that this play of possession and dispossession is at issue in every moment of our lives, and particular when we give ourselves to drifting or to idleness, or when our attention is captured for a moment by something that is mundane and surprising.

What is essential is to cross the bridge from the opening to the work to life. This is not an opposition. Perhaps the bridge leads into the work itself. It is never a question of the representation of the world in the film. The film, sculpted from time, resonates with the rebirth of the world. ‘In a word, the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as a drop of water. Only in a drop of water!’ (110) A drop of water: an event, banal but world shaking, ordinary but extraordinary insofar, in a moment, it captures us and holds us still. A drop of water – the image is sufficient unto itself, but so too is the event. We live our lives at one time in terms of our desire to complete tasks, to finish projects, but at another – and in the same moment – in the fascination when we are unable, any longer, to be able, to assemble ourselves such that we are capable of anything at all.

‘Everything that torments me, everything I don’t have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me it’s all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror.’ – Everything is in the film. But this is because the film answers to the movement within things as they give themselves to be experienced and as we give ourselves over to them. Everything is there because it attests to a kind of ‘push’ or pressure that inhabits things, that is their movement in time, their constancy, their flowering or their withering which escapes determination. This is what resonates in me as I watch the film; I am claimed not by director’s vision, or even his experience of time, as Tarkovsky suggests, but by time itself.

Mirror is not the film in which one recognises oneself, or recognises one’s childhood. I cannot contemplate Mirror – I am not the spectator; the work does not lay itself before me. Above all, it does not let me see myself. Alexei, the child of the film is fascinating because I am seized by the fascination that seizes him as he gazes into the mirror. It is then that he allows us, too, to gaze at the film as into the mirror in which we can no longer see ourselves. At that moment, we are no longer capable of seeing, of assuming a distance from what we see. We see the film with the blindspot which permits our sight – with the incapacity from which everything we are capable issues and to which it must return.