Andrei Tarkovsky a Prophet? Sacrifice and 9/11
Second and Third Thoughts
“You don’t read Tarkovsky’s films; they read you.” (Harlan Kennedyi)
By Peter Seifert
Abstract:
Kennedy’s remark is not just witticism. In Sacrifice, Tarkovsky created a film we can use like a submarine to explore our interiors, both individual and collective. In his previous films, namely Mirror, this had antecedents, but none is, like Sacrifice, up to two thirds a dreamscape to be explored. The reference to 9/11, which one can find more or less convincing, is taken as a starting point to investigate the Christian roots of our civilization and the challenges to which they are exposed by nihilism. Unlike other films, Sacrifice is not so much entertainment, but asks us to make decisions.
[1] Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film Offret (Sacrifice, Жертвоприношение 1986) was completely realised in Sweden. He died of cancer in December 1986, not long after finishing his last film. Can the film of a director, who died so long ago, be related to 9/11? Tarkovsky experienced himself as a prophet of sorts. Circumstances surrounding his last two films Nostalghia (1983) and Sacrifice convinced him that he became increasingly an instrument of some divine force acting and speaking through him. Mostly, this was by no means a pleasant experience. In Nostalghia (1983), for instance, he described the sufferings of a Russian bereft of his country. Very soon, it became Tarkovsky’s own fate. Towards the end of his book Sculpting in Time, he quoted Alexander Pushkin, one of his heroes in Russian literature, with the poem The Prophetii. The poet is commanded by God: “See and hear, be filled with My Will and go forth over lands and seas setting fire to people’s hearts with The Word.”
[2] In Sweden’s press there was much ado about the fact that at the very site in Stockholm, where Tarkovsky had filmed a disaster scenario, only a few months later Sweden’s premier Olof Palme was shot deadiii. It is this precise scenario which I take as a starting point because Tarkovsky showed from above a site in the centre of Stockholm littered with debris, an overturned car and a demolished wooden chair. Much later in the film, the horror vision returns: a panicking crowd, visibly shaken and partly undressed, spilling down on a place in the inner city. What are they escaping from? It can hardly be the murder attack on a politician. People running away, after a nuclear attack, much feared at the time, aren’t a likely scenario either. Instead it looks very much like the dust-covered people rushing down the streets in Manhattan on September 11iv.
A Beacon and its Message
[3] To say that the film starts almost on a bright note would be a gross exaggeration, but at least there is the birthday party of Alexander, the main character. Alexander has been a famous stage actor and is still an accomplished writer. The same applies also to Erland Josephson who impersonates Alexanderv. Odd congratulations come in, more enigmatic than funny. But our concern is more the relationship to his son, who is strangely, and consistently, referred to as “Little Man”.
[4] The boy is in the first quarter of the film the object of Alexander’s prolonged doom sayings which were, in their “maudlin” verbosity simply annoying for some reviewersvi and are referred to by Victor, a friend and very practical medical doctor, as “his monologues”. Even if we want to be indulgent because it’s Alexander’s birthday, they are hard to endure.
These monologues, which could more precisely be described as extremely asymmetrical communication situations, have a long tradition in Tarkovsky’s films. In Andrei Rublëv the protagonist is quoting the Apostle Paul’s famous praise of love (1 Corinthians 13) when he speaks in a playful manner to the little princess. Certainly she does not understand much of it. In Nostalghia, the drunken Gorčakov tells the little girl Angela a joke in Russian, apparently not even hoping she could understand him. In Sacrifice, the asymmetry between Alexander and his son is emphasized by the fact that the boy can’t speak because of recent throat surgery. As an allegory for the relationship between the auteur and his audience it would denote a rather preposterous presumption. And yet, revisiting Tarkovsky’s films from time to time, after thirty, forty years, I start to understand something more. Tarkovsky was a man full of contradictions: claiming some superior insights, he saw himself at the same time lost in Dante’s wood until the endvii.
[5] Alexander is bashing our Western, formerly Christian civilization we take so much pride in. As he puts it bluntly, “We use the microscope like a cudgel”. Tarkovsky gestures here rather offhand in the direction of an awe-inspiring film: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In the end of the opening segment Dawn of Mankind an ape man throws a bone cudgel triumphantly into the air after discovering it as an apt instrument for killing. (He was inspired by a mysterious and sinister black monolith.) In one of the most famous cuts in the history of film a satellite of similar shape and – because of the distance- similar size appears in the darkness of space. The cut implies that the driving force behind this enormous flash-forward was and always has been – rather primitive. Kubrick has great thinkers in favour of his vision, not only Friedrich Nietzsche, who is introduced by the famous use of Richard Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the beginning of the film, but also the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 – c. 475 BC) made the well-known statement: “War is the father of all things”.
[6] Tarkovsky took issue with that understanding of progress. For progress in the material sense it might be true. But this is precisely the point – in his later statements Tarkovsky deplored the growing chasm between material and spiritual progress of mankind, in wordiness equal to Alexander’s. Making reference to the microscope, the visionary somehow anticipated the “biological turn” we witnessed only some years ago in the war against terrorismviii.
[7] “Some intelligent person must have said that all possessions not strictly necessary are sin. Then our whole civilization from beginning to end is based on sin.” Alexander here attacks the sacrosanct, religiously revered tenet of private property. Tarkovsky, maybe, followed here Leo Tolstoyix. The Russian director was always torn between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the two towering Russian writers from the second half of the nineteenth century. In his last years, however, he was increasingly fascinated by Tolstoy, the tougher of the two, who had no qualms to take on the entire establishment of his country, church and statex.
Already on April 20, 1976, Tarkovsky noted in his diaryxi Tolstoy’s intention to live and even write like a “holy fool”, a yurodviryi. Tarkovsky followed this program in his last three films Stalker, Nostalghia and Sacrifice with ever-growing determination. In old Russia, the “holy fools” were provoking the devotees of common sense by their behaviour; they could even attack the tsar or the authorities.
[8] Under the threat of a nuclear war, Alexander promises to God to sacrifice his summer house and all that is dear to him if everything turns to normal. In the morning, the threat of war has vanished like a nightmare. Alexander is setting doggedly his much beloved house on fire. He is being chased across a primordial landscape of huge water puddles and mud by the employees of a mental institution and finally driven away in an ambulance, calling to mind the hilarious oldie: They are coming to take me away ha-ha!xii
[9] When a blaze engulfs the house and a menacingly growing black cloud is rising into an otherwise cloudless sky, it uncannily resembles the sky over New York on 9/11/2001.
After those devilish attacks some commentators felt sickened by the fact that similar explosions were such familiar sights in your average action movie. Tarkovsky was not known for being very much into special effects or pyrotechnics (even though he developed, in his own way, a liking for real fire). In fact, when they filmed the burning house everything seemed to turn out nicely, but then, halfway through, the camera jammed. A strange irony of fate: while filming the deflagration real disaster struck. Everybody on the set was devastated. It took the joint effort of the whole crew to rebuild the house within two weeks only to put it to flames once again, but this time to everlasting effect.
[10] Alexander is growing increasingly impatient with his own endless talking and finally wants to do something. His annoying verbosity mirrors the certainly not less annoying fact that in the Western world people keep talking for at least half a century that it is our duty to help those nations which are in need. But what is the point in destroying your house? Could he not have convinced his family to sell it, making a donation to some charity? Viewers and reviewers given to empathy wondered: what is so charitable about depriving your family of their belongings?xiii And yet, already Rublëv (1966) in the segment referred to as the Russian Calvary, accused Christ of cruelty because he abandoned his friends and family. As he showed in Sacrifice, Tarkovsky not really disapproved of Christ’s “cruelty”xiv. Perhaps Tarkovsky made his point as a yurodviryi in the Tolstoian mould. Perhaps he wanted to question the still present order of things, our lifestyles, in a more radical manner. All almsgiving in the present situation, he might have argued, is mere social cosmetics.
In a way, he was not just preaching but talking from personal experience. In order to maintain his artistic integrity he left behind his Russian motherland and, like Alexander, gave up a house in the countryside, which he and his wife could buy as early as 1970, and his beloved son. (Only on his deathbed he saw him again.)
The Boy’s Pantomime
[11] Tarkovsky once quoted in his diaries (July 26, 1981) Henry David Thoreau (1817 -1862) from the end of Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)xv: “ ‘They pretend,’ as I hear, ‘that the verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas’; but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation.”
[12] Alexander, or rather the actor Josephson, was at the time of the shoot 62-years-old. So the age difference with “Little Man” of at most eight years was relatively big. This could by itself already be an allusion to Abraham, the father of nations, who got his son Isaac in his old age. The archaic notion of sacrifice displayed in the film hints in the same directionxvi.
[13] In the first part of the film, “Little Man” is wearing a too big, white textile beach hat, which covers most of his face. It makes him a mystery man. Tarkovsky used the boy for all kinds of allusions. Precisely because he cannot speak we should pay close attention to his pantomime. First the boy is strolling behind Alexander, who reminds him to bring along his “lasso”. We see therefore an underage cowboy, a familiar sight in many parts of the world, and at the same time it’s a casual hint to an American myth. (The Marlboro men were still around in those days.)
[14] But there is heavier stuff to come: some reference to Nietzsche. As a German, and all the more for having roots in the small town of Naumburg, where Nietzsche lived in his early youth, I should perhaps feel flattered by the attention my compatriot, the philosopher, has garnered over the last decades. I don’t.
[15] Already some time ago the allusion to Nietzsche’s dwarf in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to whom Alexander and the outlandish postman Otto refer in their conversation, was followed up by Gino Moliternoxvii. Otto mentions that “hunchback who sent Zarathustra into a fainting fit”. When Otto, driving in circles on his bicycle, is explaining Nietzsche’s thought about the eternal return of the same, “Little Man” binds the bicycle secretly with his lasso to one of the few shrubs around, causing a sudden jolt to the philosophizing postman on his bike. Tarkovsky, who was attracted to Zen Buddhism (Diaries, April 2, 1972), uses this gentle practical joke as a surprise, as a point on an experiential level against the thought of the eternal return of the same. Zen masters can use sometimes not so gentle surprises, like sudden blows with a stick, to bring their pupils closer to enlightenmentxviii.
[16] Alexander carries then the boy on his shoulders in a clear allusion to Zarathustra’s heavy dwarf. After some small talk with Victor and his wife Adelaide, who went out of her way to welcome the doctor, Alexander continues to talk to the boy. He sits down in the grass against a tree in the mentioned sparse grove and holds “Little Man” in his lap which again is an allusion to the patriarch Abraham, but in a cameo in the New Testament. Jesus indicated the pure bliss of the poor Lazarus after death “in the bosom” of Abraham (Luke 16: 19-31). The rich man, who would not have cared in eternity for the poor Lazarus lying in front of his palace, finds himself after death in a not so comfortable place. In vain he tries to negotiate with Abraham for something better. Apparently, however, “Little Man” doesn’t feel that cozy either. He sneaks away and out of the frame while the old man keeps talking.
[17] On a deeper level, in very Tarkovskian fashion, we have here the abridged narrative about the history of Mankind. Paradise, the original harmony, lost, man finds himself in utter, animal-like primitivism. In the beginning of his ruminations, Alexander cautions his son that for an expedition to Africa one needs to be well prepared. It’s totally out of context. Again, Tarkovsky was taking on Kubricks Dawn of Mankind, which, as we know, took place in Africa. “Little Man” is stalking on all fours through the high grass. Then, all of a sudden, he attacks Alexander from behind, jumps on him. So to say, he sides with the more irritated members of the audience and causes the elderly gentleman to stop his ramblings. It follows the announced fainting fit.
[18] Before, we see for the first time the boy’s blond hair because he has lost his hat in the attack. The prowling and the blond hair call “the splendid blond beast” to mind, one of Nietzsche’s more reckless fantasies, which had, to put it mildly, an embarrassing aftermath in Nazi Germanyxix. Therefore, the toying of French and American philosophers (and the British director Kubrick) with Nietzschean concepts strikes us Germans as somewhat frivolousxx.
[19] Tarkovsky’s viewpoint is belittling in the twofold meaning of the word: it seems to belittle evil, and this is very supportive of Nietzsche’s position. The prowling boy can be related to the second and third metamorphoses of the spirit in Zarathustra (also mentioned by Moliterno): the lion and the child. Nietzsche saw already in the lion, which fights for its rights, the aspect of innocence: you cannot blame the beast of prey to be a predator. In the child, according to Nietzsche, this aspect becomes all the more obvious. Nietzsche wanted to convey a sense of narcissistic complacency.
[20] Belittling is Tarkovsky however also in assuming an ironic and almost motherly perspective. He tries to curb the infamous demonic glow of Nietzsche’s style. Think of Béla Tarr’s latest (and probably last) motion picture The Turin Horse (2011) starting with the account of an episode which is in its peculiar way embarrassing too: “In Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Albert. Not far from him, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home; he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. We do not know what happened to the horse.“ As it turns out, the film is not about Turin, but routine. Nietzsche, too, is never mentioned again. We see the daily exercise of caring for the old, stubborn horse again and again. Thus, the film makes an indirect statement about Nietzsche’s last decade of an apparently meaningless life.
[21] Nietzsche, who thought of himself as a half Slav and loved to fable in one of his few harmless daydreams about his “aristocratic Polish ancestry”xxi, is for the Eastern-European Tarr to some degree an understandable character. Tarr sees through his histrionics, his posturing as merciless predator. And so did Tarkovsky. The Eastern-European nations, especially the Russians, have suffered more than most other nations under the German madness of the 20th Century, the master race nonsense. (Don’t forget that our German parents and grandparents were beguiled by the heroic antics of a man who practiced his speeches in front of a mirrorxxii.)
[22] Back to “Little Man”: his nose is bleeding. As Mark Le Fanu remarked rightly, he looks like a “wounded demonic goblin”xxiii. We should note that his wound is self-inflicted. It’s a metaphor for the utmost mankind can get in its rebellion against God. A bloody nose, however, is an understatement in the best Anglo-Saxon tradition.
Thinkers as diverse as Marx and Nietzsche shared a fascination with the rebellion of the Titan Prometheus against “Zeus”, who is, thinly veiled, the Christian God. Goethe created the ode Prometheus, crackling with “demonic glow”, in 1773, as a young gun of 24xxiv. In 1841, Marx, 23-years-old, wrote as conclusion of the preface of his doctoral thesis: “Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.” xxv Nietzsche, at the age of 28, put a vignette of the unbound Prometheus on the cover of his debut Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik –The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872).To him Goethe’s poem was “essentially a hymn celebrating impiety”.xxvi
[23] If we consider that Tarkovsky readily provided the biblical antidote to Nietzsche’s dangerous image of the “blond beast”, by simply putting some meadow flowers between the teeth of the prowling boy then it is about time to ask why this continuous oscillation of meaningsxxvii.
“Ambiguity as a System”?
[24] In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky referred to a portrait by some scholars ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci Ginevra Benci (1474-1478, National Gallery, Washington D.C.) and commented: “There is something inexpressibly beautiful about her and at the same time repulsive, fiendish …. A true artistic image gives the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings… We cannot comprehend the totality of the universe, but the poetic image is able to express that totality.”xxviii He then explained that he had introduced this painting in the film Mirror to represent “eternity”. In fact, in the film the face of the woman appears together with a flashing light and we hear a recitative from Johann-Sebastian Bach’s Passion according to Matthew: “Und siehe, der Vorhang des Tempels riss entzwei – And behold, the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom.” (Mt 27, 51) Nigel Savio D’Sa quoted the above statement without elaborating on its deeper meaningxxix, but I must confess to me these are the most disturbing words by Tarkovsky I have come across.
[25] One possible cue could be Tarkovsky’s documented fondness of Thomas Mann’s epic tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers in the early seventies; he even planned to make a film about the novel (Diaries, September 18 and October 8, 1970; January 1, 1971). Thomas Mann, who cetainly was no theologian but did very extensive reading in preparation of his novels, wrote repeatedly about God’s ambiguity (“Zweideutigkeit”) in different parts of that work. Moreover, “Zweideutigkeit” is a key concept in Thomas Mann’s artistic credoxxx. He developed it in antagonism to his elder brother, Heinrich, who was a writer of leftist tendency. This is a parallel to Tarkovsky, who developed his concept of the poetic image, which expresses totality, as antithesis to the partiality, the partisan tendency required by the doctrine of Socialist Realism. Already early on in his book (which developed over several years) he quoted from the diaries of Tolstoy: “The political excludes the artistic, because the political must be one-sided to accomplish something. (March 21, 1885)”
[26] “Ambiguity as a system”, to use Thomas Mann’s expression, can be found not only in the boy’s pantomime but also in other aspects of the film: the postman Otto is a thoroughly ambiguous figure – buffoon and mystagogue at the same time. Remember the eerie siren voice. Only in the end it dawns on us that these are shepherd calls, bordering on the psychic anyway. Or as evening falls, Victor and the women (Adelaide, Martha and the servant Julia) gather for a solemn supper. Nobody seems too bothered that the celebrated doesn’t show up. Their faces are lit by the mild light of a simple standing lamp with a spherical lamp shade. The scene is somehow conflating the last supper and the pericope about the bridegroom and the prudent virgins (Mt 25: 1 – 13). For Tarkovsky, who was a lifelong admirer of Bach, it calls to mind the famous cantata Wake up, the voice calls us. (BWV140, Chorale Cantata for the 27th Sunday after Trinity) Alexander, however, steals away into the darkness just like Judas Iscariot. The film, on the other hand, hints obliquely at the fact that Victor is having an affair with both, Adelaide and her daughter Martha. I must admit that this kind of obfuscation is not what fascinates me most in Tarkovsky’s art. Moreover, the twilight of Thomas Mann’s prose can not eliminate my doubts regarding Tarkovsky’s theology. Not being a theologian either (I am art historian by trade) I simply pose a question.
[27] The gospel of John is the only one mentioned in the film (with the first sentence of the prologue). Could it be that the above mentioned scene in Mirror, the extremely ambivalent face of the woman in combination with the Bach recitative of the veil torn in two in the temple, is an allusion to the last judgement, but interpreted in light of John 12: 47 – 49? (“And if anyone hears my words and does not observe them, I do not condemn him, for I did not come to condemn the world but to save the world. Whoever rejects me and does not accept my words has something to judge him: the word that I spoke, it will condemn him on the last day, because I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and speak.“) That is, we will not be judged by Christ, but we judge ourselves according to our innermost spiritual leanings. In Sacrifice the director explicitly offered different, mutually exclusive readings of the film. That’s not the preachiness he was accused of. If we wish we can keep riding with Nietzsche and his (hopefully tiny) bunch into a never-ending sunset.
[28] Alexander was famous as a stage actor for his interpretations of Prince Myshkin, the saintly Idiot created by Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare’s Richard III, the former an example of incredible goodness, the latter the epitome of abject ruthlessness. Small wonder he found his acting profession highly questionable. So far, most commentators could not make much sense of these detailsxxxi. It’s an aspect of Nietzsche’s analysis of Western society that mutually exclusive value systems more or less peacefully coexist. In one cinema you relish the devilish, next door you can admire the “profound humanity” of a film, deeply moved by your better self. (Or you can have it all much more easily as channel-hopping couch potato.) Nietzsche wanted to urge his contemporaries to make up their minds and so did Tarkovsky. However they did so, it seems to me, from opposite sides of the divide.
[29] I think starting with Solaris (1972) we can see Tarkovsky engrossed in a kind of spiritual kung-fu. Making the watchdogs of Soviet censorship drowsy was only his first move. (That also ordinary members of the audience got sleepy in the process he took as collateral damage in his stride.) His opponent took in his earlier films the guise of “Marx”, in his Western Sacrifice it became “Nietzsche”.
In the Darkness of the Night
[30] In the protection of the night, Tarkovsky moves into our dream zone, turning things upside down. (He once stated that the artist enters the soul of the spectator like in a Trojan horse.) Thomas Redwood pointed out that the director placed a signal in different scenes of the film which in any realistic reading simply could not be there. Something that Redwood calls a “red herring”xxxii. Adelaide has a fringed shawl of ivory colour which she uses to playfully distract her husband when he tries to inspect Otto’s birthday gift, the old map of Europe. Alexander is wearing this shawl around his shoulders when Otto is visiting him in his upper room. The same shawl becomes conspicuous during the following scene of the TV-broadcast with the stuttering announcement of nuclear war by the prime minister. When Alexander ventures on Otto’s bicycle in the middle of the night to the maid Maria, he passes by Victor’s BMW. A large piece of the shawl sticks out from the closed side-door, betraying an amorous hideaway. I would content that all these incidents are dreamt. Then there seem to be dreams within a dream like the disaster-scenario in Stockholm. After all, “Tarkovsky’s nightmare”, the nickname the film was given by the crew, was not far off the markxxxiii.
[31] After the news of the outbreak of nuclear war Alexander sits on the floor of the upper room, the never-abandoned glass of cognac at hand. When in the beginning asked by Otto what kind of relationship he had with God he wearily quipped: “None at all, I am afraid”. Now he tries to remember the words of the Our Father and continues with a desperate prayer. Here we have a magnificent synergy of Tarkovsky’s and Bergman’s genius’, in the sense that the co-operation with Bergman’s famous cameraman Sven Nykvist, which initially proved to be difficult, reaped riveting, searing imagesxxxiv. The expressive, but not exaggerated, lighting in the close-up of Alexander’s face, his tremendous terror, when he stammers about his animal-like fear, brings about a facial expression of exactly this kindxxxv. Much can be said for the lightness of art, but this ultimate seriousness is one of its possibilities I don’t want to miss.
[32] It’s also a major feat for Erland Josephson, the actor and old friend of Bergman and Nykvist. Tarkovsky, who had encounters with other admired luminaries of world cinema like Kurosawa, Fellini and Bresson, never met personally with Bergman. They went out of their way to avoid this encounterxxxvi. The site of this encounter would have been Christianity: they saw each other, so to say, in the revolving door – Tarkovsky on the way in, Bergman on the way outxxxvii.
[33] What’s at the centre of Alexander’s prayer? What’s the condition of his sacrifice? That “tomorrow will be like today”. That’s, in other words, almost what Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return is about. But instead of locking the door to transcendence (as presumably was Nietzsche’s intention with this thought) it is pushed open for a man who has lived in almost peaceful indifference towards God.
[34] Commentators were generally puzzled by the fact that Alexander in addition, lured by the whispering Otto, goes to visit the “witch” Maria. Few, however, have noticed that Otto’s promise is the exact contrary of Alexander’s prayer intention – he promises: “that all this ends.” Tarkovsky offered here, as he had already to some extent in the Pagan Holiday segment of Andrei Rublev, a meditation on sex, a very rare sight indeed. He reflected on what Nietzsche called the “Dionysian”, the ecstasy which makes you forget everything and which makes sex the most powerful natural escape. But Tarkovsky’s film remains meditative in its approach all the way through. It never gets provocative or suggestive, on the contrary, while sex is on the man’s part always also an affirmation of what Nietzsche called “will to power”, on the climax, when the gently rotating couple is elevated in rapturexxxviii, we hear Alexander whimper: “I, I can’t.“ The scene is followed by the image of the panicking crowd in Stockholm which creates a correspondencexxxix with the flock of panicking sheep running around Maria’s house, providing a hint to the etymological root of the word panic: it refers to the Greek god Pan who terrified herds by his sudden, noisy appearance. Another dream image is also referencing the image of animal-like fear: the naked Martha chases a bunch of white chicken out of a wood floored corridor. Sex appears here not as glorious self-affirmation, as “will to power”, but as escapism, expression of panicking, of animal-like fear.
In the prayer scene and in the bed scene Tarkovsky’s film is turning things upside down.
Transitions
[35] Tarkovsky once wrote: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”xl The scenes here described might have a cathartic impact. Another scene seems to be harrowing especially for women: Adelaide’s hysterical fit after the news broadcast of disaster. Victor gives her an injection, a strong sedative. He does the same with Martha. Accommodated by the doctor on a couch, after calming down, Adelaide is in a reflective mood. She thinks to herself: “It is like awakening from a dream. There is always a voice telling me: Don’t give yourself up! Otherwise you will die. How badly mistaken we are.”
[36] This is in a way just the flipside of the coin which is presented in the fact that when Alexander stops talking, Little Man finds his voice again. Alexander has promised to stop talking and being secluded in a madhouse nobody will ever again listen to him anyway.
In the final scene Little Man, lying under the planted dead tree says: “In the beginning was the word. Why, father?” In an allegorical wayxli, it is an allusion to the Pauline antinomy of the “old man” and the “new man”, or, in modern translation, the old self and the renewed self, in the letter to the Colossians, chapter 3, especially 3:9-10: “Stop lying to one another, since you have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed, for knowledge, in the image of its creator.” Of course, only in allegory it is possible to silence our mega-egos once and for all so neatly. Adelaide’s situation reflects much more realistically the nitty-gritty everyday battle of overcoming the old self.
[37] There is another transition taking place in this film, this one for the director. Even more than in other films of Tarkovsky, dream sequences became important in Sacrifice. It has been elucidated that it is sometimes unclear who is actually dreaming the dream? For instance in this case: Is it Alexander or Little Man?xlii During most of the film the boy keeps sleeping in an upper room of the house. During the second nightmare of the mentioned disaster scene (towards the end of Alexander’s dream) the boy inexplicably appears sleeping or dreaming above the street where people are precipitating. After the second or third viewing it dawned on me: Is the boy possibly an allusion to America (young compared to “Old Europe”) and so we witness a foreshadowing of the American dream turning into a nightmare?
[38] Be it as it may. In Sacrifice, Tarkovsky had finally arrived in our contemporary world.
Nostalghia is basically still Eurocentric in its outlook: the final image of the Russian izba within the ruins of the Italian San Galgano Abbey stands for a desired union of Russian spiritual vitality and the time-honoured traditions of Italian, European forms. But the times they are changing in Offret. For a while, I could not make much sense of Otto’s birthday gift for Alexander, the French map of Europe from the late 17th century. Then I understood: It had to be sacrificed in the “Bonfire of Vanities”! Already on February 21, 1972, Tarkovsky wrote in his diary that he had to gather information about Savonarola. The example of the Dominican and his “Bonfire of Vanities” in Florence, in the late 15th century the centre of the Renaissancexliii, was always in the back of his mind. Alexander comments on the precious old map:”This Europe here is like the planet Mars. That means it has nothing to do with truth.” It’s a clear invitation to leave the Eurocentric mentality behind. It becomes practical for Victor, who has decided to immigrate to Australiaxliv. What’s the big deal in this transition at the end of the 20th century? Tarkovsky was “gefühlskonservativ”, to use a coinage by Thomas Mann, “emotionally conservative”, and there are many of us in Europe. Seen from that angle, the incineration of the map denoted an important step.
[39] After resurfacing from the trip of soul-searching, what can be said looking back to the point of departure: 9/11? The divide between good and evil is not so much between “us and them”, but goes right through our own self. It’s an old and simple truth (Romans 7:19), but in the heat of the battle it is easily forgotten.
[40] Setting your summer house on fire is most probably a once in a lifetime activity, therefore is the watering of the dead tree complementary: it’s a day after day effort of unrelenting perseverance and an image of indomitable “hope against hope”. The apostle Paul speaks about it with regard to Abraham’s faith (Romans 4:18). Chances that anybody will change life in answer to this film are as great as the likelihood that the dead tree will flourish.
[41] In most of the film twilight is reigning, sometimes an even very dark twilight, but in the end the light wins unequivocally: the camera dollies up the barren tree and shows the silhouette of the branches against the sea, shimmering in the sunlight. Out of focus, the reflections resemble for all people “of good will” blossomsxlv. Tarkovsky dedicated the film to his son, who is now a 41-years-old, “with hope and confidence”. By extension, one could say it is dedicated to the young generations and the nations of the New World.
i Harlan Kennedy, Andrei Tarkovsky – A Thought in Nine Parts, http://www.americancinemapapers.com/files/tarkovsky.htm ; a refreshing and inspiring read.
Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time. The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art, London Faber and Faber 1989, pp.221-222; see also the comments of Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: a Visual Fugue, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1994, p. 33. Johnson and Petrie point out the rather violent imagery in Pushkin’s poem where a six-winged seraph opens eyes and ears of the poet with a sword.- Earlier in his book Tarkovsky quoted Paul Valéry with a sarcastic comment about the bad habit of poets to think of oneself as a prophet.
iii Valuable information can be found on the Tarkovsky Website Nostalghia: http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Offret/Offret_Sketches.html; on the same site: Layla Alexander Garrett, Andrey Tarkovsky — Enigma and Mystery: “But how is the following fact to be explained? When filming the apocalyptic scene of The Sacrifice, the camera was standing but a few meters from the place where the Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, was later murdered, six months afterwards.”
iv In the documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1988), on the shooting of Sacrifice, by Tarkovsky’s editor Michal Leszczylowski we can see how the extras for this scene were painted with soot or something similar.
(Second disc of the Artificial Eye edition of Sacrifice)
v Josephson became well known as a film actor in eight films of Ingmar Bergman, realized between 1958 and 1982.
vi Gino Moliterno, Zarathustra’s gift in Tarkovsky’s The sacrifice, in: Screening the Past, an international refereed electronic journal of screen history, La Trobe University, Australia, Issue 12, March 2001
vii In Mirror (1975) Lisaweta, the friend of Alexei’s mother, is filmed in a long shot as she starts skipping on one of the corridors in the printing-house, exclaiming the beginning stanza of Dante’s Commedia Divina. In the end of the film, the camera is zooming out from a dark wood. In Sacrifice, Alexander is lost in the sparse grove on Gotland. Again it is an allusion to Dante’s wood. According to his wife Tarkovsky’s last words before dying were: ”It is time for a new direction…” http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Last_words
viii Melinda Cooper, Pre-empting Emergence. The Biological Turn in the War on Terror, in Theory, Culture &Society 23(4), July 2006, Nottingham Trent University, UK , pp.113-135, http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift/readings/pre-empting-emergence.pdf
ix Leo Tolstoy, The Slavery of Our Times, published in New York by Edwin C. Walker, chapter X, Laws Concerning Taxes, Land and Property www.cooperativeindividualism.org/tolstoy-leo_
x Jerzy Illg and Leonard Neuger, “I’m interested in the problem of inner freedom…”
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/interview.html
Towards the end of this interview, Tarkovsky makes a remarkable statement in favour of Tolstoy and against Dostoevsky.
xi Regarding the diaries, I follow Robert Bird’s pragmatic approach who decided to “provide only the date of the relevant notation” (Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky, Elements of Cinema, Reaktion Books London 2008, p. 23). I have at my disposition the Italian edition of the diaries which has the reputation of being the most complete (1999). The English edition is: Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time, The Diaries 1970 – 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1994
xii One could find this scene literally “mired” in cliché. Bringing into play a comic commonplace, Tarkovsky can let it develop its own dynamics. Despite the repeatedly denounced preachiness of this film, the director offers his audience a way out, the possibility of an alternative viewing. Humour was never a major concern for this director. But some bits and pieces, falling off his table, have comic potential. Alexander Gordon, brother-in-law and a colleague, reminisced from an early collaboration: “Tarkovsky was serious about his work, but jolly at the same time.” Nostalghia.com http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Gordon_On.html See also: Johnson, Vida T. Laughter beyond the mirror: humor and satire in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, in: Horton Andrew (ed.) Inside Soviet film satire: laughter with a lash, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press 1993, pp. 98 -104, p.102
xiii Philip Strick, „Offret (The sacrifice)“, Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 54, no. 636 (January 1987), 7-8: “Why, in any case, deprive his family, when he is the one offering atonement? Setting aside the extraordinary arrogance of his supposition that one man’s silence and self-deprivation would persuade God to change history – and moreover to fulfil His side of the bargain first – why should the pagan rite of setting a torch to his belongings be any kind of suitable (other than, perhaps, Zoroastrian) exchange?”
xiv Robert Bird sees the segment of the Russian Calvary as an imagination of Rublëv’s pupil Foma. I cannot follow this interpretation (Elements of Cinema, p. 82)
xv online PDF-file of Pennsylvania State University, p.254
xvi This understanding of sacrifice was criticized for not being really Christian. Maybe the atavistic aspect of it contributes to the fact that the appeal of Tarkovsky’s films is wider than Christian. The Iranian, non-Christian director Abbas Kiarostami said once in an interview: “Tarkovsky’s works separate me completely from physical life, and are the most spiritual films I have seen–…” in Taste of Kiarostami, Interview by David Sterritt, in Senses of Cinema, Australian Online Quarterly, 12 September 2000
xvii Gino Moliterno, Zarathustra’s gift in Tarkovsky’s The sacrifice, in: Screening the Past, an international refereed electronic journal of screen history, La Trobe University, Australia, Issue 12, March 2001
xviii See the German director Doris Dörrie’s tongue-in-cheek Erleuchtung garantiert (2000), English version: Enlightenment Guaranteed
xix Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. A Polemical Tract, 1. Essay, chapter 11 http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/genealogy1.htm
xx The most prominent German intellectual who addressed this issue is Jürgen Habermas in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen, Frankfurt am Main 1985, English translation, Cambridge,Mass. 1987 Konrad Ott is a lone German defender of Habermas on American (and Nietzschean) ground in his almost rude review of: Babette E. Babich (ed.), Habermas, Nietzsche, and Critical Theory, New York (Humanity Books) 2004, (published online by Fordham University, New York) http://www.fordham.edu/gsas/phil/babich/Review%20of%20Habermas%20Nietzsche%20and%20Critical%20Theory.pdf
The upcoming book by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen American Nietzsche, History of an Icon and His Ideas, University of Chicago Press 2011 seems to confirm that my apprehensions are topical.
xxi David Farrell Krell, Cosultations with the Paternal Shasow. Gasché, Derrida and Klossowski on Ecce Homo, pp. 80 – 96, p. 85 in Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation edited by David Farrell Krell and David Wood, 1988 Routledge London & New York
xxii Bert Brecht saw Hitler as early as 1922 by chance in Munich’s Hofgarten Café, a Beer garden, at the next table. He was told that the strange politician took lessons from an elderly stage actor, specialized in heroic roles. Bert Brecht Ein fähiger Schauspieler. Begegnung mit Adolf Hitler in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, 50 1996, 9.12. 1996
xxiii Mark Le Fanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, London: British Film Institute 1987, p.127
xxiv Goethe distanced himself very soon from the boundlessly rebellious spirit of the poem already in 1780, seven years later. See Hartmut Reinhardt’s even-handed and scholarly thorough treatment of Prometheus und die Folgen. Hartmut Reinhardt: Prometheus und die Folgen (21.02.2004).
In: Goethezeitportal. URL: http://www.goethezeitportal.de/db/wiss/goethe/prometheus_reinhardt.pdf
p. 26
xxv Reinhardt, p. 7
xxvi Reinhardt, p. 12; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (e-text) http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm
xxvii See Isaiah 11, 6-9; 65, 25
xxviii Sculpting in Time, p. 89
xxix Nigel Savio D’Sa , Andrei Rublev: Religious Epiphany in Art, Online Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 3, No. 2 October 1999, Department of Philosophy and Religion University of Nebraska at Omaha, paragraph 6
xxx Hans-Peter Haack, Zweideutigkeit als System, Archiv Dr. Haack , Leipzig 2010
http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Zweideutigkeit_als_System_-_Thomas_Manns_Forderung_an_die_Kunst
xxxi Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: a Visual Fugue, op.cit., 14 A Dialogue With Art, note 5, 311: “Though we are not told which part he played in Richard III, the obvious assumption is that if was the – surely inappropriate – title role (unless Alexander’s renunciation of the stage is meant to derive from his having to adopt an alien identity of this kind). Perhaps Richard II might have been a better, more Myshkin-like choice.” David C. Gillespie wrote: “Alexander is a former actor who played Dostoevskii’s Prince Myshkin (…) as well as Shakespeare’s Richard III. Both of these characters are tragic heroes, doomed and unable to escape their historical destiny.” David C. Gillespie, Russian Cinema, Pearson Education, Essex 2003, p.181
xxxii Thomas Redwood, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Poetics of Cinema, London: Cambridge Scholars 2010, p. 108
xxxiii Nostalghia com. In the news section, July 7, 2011 a reviewby Vera Liber is posted of Layla Alexander-Garret, Andrei Tarkovski: Sobiratel snov Published by: Izdatelstvo AST, Astrel, Moscow 2009 , in East-West Book Review, 2010 p. 29-30, p. 30
xxxiv Sven Nykvist, On the Shooting of Sacrifice in Nostalghia. Com, originally: „Vördnad för ljuset“ (In Reverence of Light), by Sven Nykvist and Bengt Forslund. Albert Bonniers Publishing Company, pp. 181 -188
xxxv At my first viewing, I felt reminded of Titian’s second Martyrdom of St. Lawrence in the Escorial, painted in the last decade of the master’s long life: quite irrationally, a white horse rolls its eyes, “trembling” with primordial fear; or take Picasso’s last self-portrait, famous and terrifying, in the Fuji-Gallery, Tokyo. I see T. in that league.
xxxvi They quite literally did. Michal Leszczylowski, Tarkovsky’s editor at the time, tells the story of this incident in September 1985 in the article A Year with Andrei for Sight and Sound, Autumn 1987, pp. 282–284, p. 284; http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheBibliography/Articles/michal1.JPG
xxxvii See The Religious Affiliation of the Director Ingmar Bergman, http://www.adherents.com/people/pb/Ingmar_Bergman.html
xxxviii As a confirmation of a long-time suspicion that many creative people from all lines of business helped themselves generously with inspiration from Tarkovsky’s films, I noticed that quite soon after this film was shown, a German pop song came out, describing love in terms of rotating elevation.
xxxix The Book of Concordances was the title Tarkovsky had first in mind for his book (see Olga Surkova, Tarkovsky vs. Tarkovsky http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Surkova1.html)
Concordances correspond with Correspondances, the title of a famous poem by Charles Baudelaire. To a degree, such poetic correspondences are more important than plot in Tarkovsky’s films.
xl Ouoted from Harlan Kennedy, Andrei Tarkovsky – A Thought in Nine Parts, see note 1
xli The director was not fond of allegory, but, exceptionally, he was ready to use it. In his diaries he wrote on February 22, 1976 that he wanted to make a film about Jesus Christ “allegorically”.
xlii Peter Green, Apocalypse&Sacrifice, in: Sight and Sound, vol. 56, no. 2, Spring 1987, pp. 111-118, p.118
xliii Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi (1482) is overshadowed by the crisis which culminated ten years later with Savonarola’s rule in Florence. That is one reason why Otto finds Leonardo so much less reassuring than Piero.
xliv Robert Bird thinks approximately along these lines: “Just as the consumption of the house by flames frees the son [Little Man] to fashion his own future… so the consumption of the film detaches the spectator from its own specific configuration and returns him to the world renewed and empowered.” Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky. Elements of Cinema, Reaktion Books, London 2008, p.212
xlv In the documentary (see note 4) it becomes clear that Tarkovsky was earnestly looking all over Sweden for a tree in blossom. Fortunately, the season had passed…
tarkovsky peer review 
