TARKOVSKY’S BEACON

At a Tarkovsky retrospective in Hong Kong’s Arts Centre some years ago I had a memorable experience after watching one night „Sacrifice“. I was simply entranced leaving the cinema and felt the need for deep reflection. Coming from the bleak twilight of a white night in Sweden, dazzling Hong Kong was something of a shock. Dopily, I headed for a road crossing and pondered on the black and white striping: the ongoing fight between darkness and light. Brakes shrieked nearby. ’Take your quality time, mate. There is more to life than hustle and bustle!’ That was a close shave. Soon, I was overwhelmed by the lights of many-splendored Wanchai, and I didn’t like it. I had to concentrate on the essentials and was even tempted to go back to the zebra crossing. I had a better idea; one of my favorite hangouts there was getting crowded only after midnight. It was actually half empty, and I went to a back room with a discarded dentist’s chair. I really wanted to focus on this film and ordered a concoction that could do the trick (no product placement here). Shortly afterwards, embarrassingly, I must have passed out.

I came back to consciousness hearing some voices behind my back: two men had entered the room, as far as I could tell no regulars there. They had been in the same movie. Apparently diehard Tarkovsky freaks (or at least one of them), who weren’t the least surprised at the sight of comatose customers nor did they even try to lower their voices. One seemed to be American; the other was much more talkative and had a booming, slightly slobbering voice. As far as accents go, dentures tend to make them universal. Judging by his unwavering impetus, he was at least German, if not altogether Russian. As it turned out, he even seemed to be a stranger to some foundations of the Enlightenment – and this in the middle of Wanchai. Anyhow, I was curious and didn’t want to disturb the free though almost one-directional flow of their conversation. ‘Freeze!’ I whispered to the ubiquitous fly on the wall. I was fully awake.

“You know, a German friend of mine believes that this film is a kind of prophecy of Nine-Eleven. Remember the nightmare sequence towards the end of the film when you see people from above in a panic rushing down the stairs in a public space littered with debris? Sweden’s premier, Olof Palme, was assassinated in the same place in Stockholm only a few months after this scene was filmed. That fact caused quite a stir in Sweden’s press at the time. Tarkovsky stated matter-of-factly certain places had the potential for catastrophes. In the film, some impending nuclear war is adumbrated, but running, milling crowds are an unlikely scenario after a nuclear strike. On the other hand, a simple assassination would not cause this panic. It looks more like a foreshadowing on a smaller scale of people running down the streets of Lower Manhattan after the heinous crime.- Tarkovsky himself mentioned in his later years on various occasions that he felt used as a mouthpiece by some divine power. He was rather unsettled by the fact.” “You really seem to believe this prophet stuff. That’s a bit odd.” “Well, some believe in prophets, others in Santa, still others in heroes.” “Mind your tongue.” “Come on, why so waspish?” “I suppose, you allude to the A Tribute to Heroes event ten days after the attacks.” “That’s right. A lot of people all over the world were watching. By and large, the event was very dignified and measured, but it was almost kind of pulverized when in the end Mr. Eastwood dawned: the big, fuming gun. It was the video material still missing to complete the crumbling towers: the sheriff of the global village reduced to helplessness. Whether he likes it or not, Clint the Flint was the best choice for that role one could think of.” “As far as I can remember, he tried to make up for it with the quick output of some intelligent films.” “That’s true, but the damage was done. I could imagine Osama bin Laden in his hideout watching this final section of the DVD again and again, chuckling with delight.” “We’ve wiped him out, clinically.” “Maybe he just reckoned this will happen to most of us.” “To all of us, scumbag.” “Before going down to his forefathers he had this little satisfaction of humiliating the world’s sole remaining superpower.” The men fell silent for a while; the gentle jingling sound of ice cubes in tumblers was heard instead. “Do you remember anything else of that event?” “There were of course lots of brilliant performances, but I recall Paul Simon in particular. To offer a ‘Bridge over Troubled Waters’ against this smoldering backdrop took some courage. At least this was my impression. Maybe I exaggerate, but he for one was a hero on that occasion, a metaphorical firefighter of sorts. By the way, I liked the less ornate rendition of the song much better than the original with its thunderous orchestration. That was kind of gilding the lily.” “Where are we now?” “OK, let’s get back to Tarkovsky. I think this film resembles in some ways the story by Charles Dickens about Scrooge. The main character, Alexander, is no capitalist, though, just an intellectual who can afford a beautiful little second home on an island. But the movie is mainly about his dreams during one night and this is similar to the Scrooge story. The premier announces in television that nuclear war is under way, and Alexander pleads with God, is talked by the outlandish postman into a sexual encounter with maid Mary, all in a dream. And when he gets up in the morning it becomes clear that it was just a nightmare. Nevertheless, he goes about setting the house on fire because he promised this sacrifice to God if the nuclear catastrophe did not take place. His dreams are much more muddled than the three ghost scenes in the piece by Dickens. Ingmar Bergman once pointed out that Tarkovsky like no other was able to render the stream of unconsciousness in dreams. To me, this film is the thinking man’s Christmas Carol.” “A crackpot’s thinking perhaps. What can you make of Alexander’s goofy suggestion to pour every morning a glass of water into the toilet? Is this a lame attempt at toilet humor or something?” ”Well, as I’ve told you before, it’s not the first time I’ve watched this movie. For very long, I could not make much sense of this. Maybe it’s a ritual like a morning prayer. Maybe in the long run it could tip the balance between purity and filth, especially if many pick up the habit.” “I’m moved to tears. And why does he feel compelled to become an arsonist?” “The director wanted to convey a sense of urgency. For generations, people keep talking and talking about the widening gap between rich and poor and, quite miraculously, the rich get always richer and the poor poorer, both on the national and the international level.” “In the first part of the film the guy is unbearably talkative.” “That’s part of the intention. We ought to lose patience together with him with this never-ending talking. Alexander wants to flush down the verbiage and finally do something. Year after year, the rich may watch A Christmas Carol with moist eyes and everything remains the same. More than hundred years ago, the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler made the nasty remark that sentimentality is the alibi of the hard-hearted; nasty but quite true. An American friend suggested to me that this conflagration points in the direction of Georges Bataille’s idea of expenditure. Bataille referred to the potlatch tradition among North-American Indians.” “A Frenchie or what?” “That’s right, in his writings he expressed a kind of reaction against the reigning rationalism and in this regard he shared some common ground with Tarkovsky. Rationalism is in France a home-grown plant which led to asphyxie, as the artist Jean Dubuffet put it, to asphyxiation. For Tarkovsky, rationalism is an import from the West which he sort of resented. To me the action of Tarkovsky’s hero is equally distant to alms giving as it is to potlatch. Tarkovsky re-introduced God, based simply on a dream. He wanted to erect a beacon, a warning sign, as an emphasis to his conviction that our civilization is based on luxury and therefore on sin.” “Was it not Deng Xiao-Ping who said: to be rich is glorious?” “The Chinese have no Christian traditions whatsoever. But in your country many believe to be Christians. You must have very special Bible editions, abridged for the rich. Why not let your kids in elementary school google for the phrase: ‘Woe to you rich’? But ‘woe’ is an awfully outdated word, so they would rather go for ‘Wow, you are rich!’ and everybody is happy.” “Do you really care for what this guy had to say? I mean he lived more than two thousand years ago.” “Yeah, I am still listening to him; still crazy after all these years. Tarkovsky himself was a rather unorthodox Russian Orthodox, much influenced by his unruly idol Tolstoy. In most of his films he could live up easily to what Churchill had famously to say about Russia, they are ‘a riddle, wrapped up in mystery, inside an enigma’. Tarkovsky even stated once in an interview he wanted in his films pass on riddles for generations to come. In that sense he was quite optimistic, since he believed that there would be still many future generations. But he was also socially less acceptable than Dickens for that reason, a basic respect for common sense was missing, it seems. There is of course much that can be said in favor of common sense, but it has a deplorable tendency to be banal. That’s why the most fervent among poets are not very fond of it. Tarkovsky was such a poet; though not a totally impractical person. Otherwise he would not have realized even one of his films. But poets are not like novelists, who are expected to be far more familiar with the practicalities of life, as Thomas Mann has pointed out. They should know a thing or two about the stock market. With poets that’s rather unlikely. Tarkovsky’s Soviet bureaucratic supervisors expected him to make films about kolkhozes. He could not, not so much because it was against his convictions; he was simply not capable of doing it.” “Talking about riddles, do you understand the meaning of the Renaissance painting? I think it’s a Leonardo da Vinci.” “It’s indeed a mysterious painting, huge by the way, left uncompleted as so many other works by Leonardo. Some time ago I followed up the story. The subject was popular with the upper classes in feudal Europe. Somehow, they had to come to terms with this strange underage king who later claimed his kingdom were not of this world. Florence had its golden age with the Medici when Leonardo started this painting. The Adoration of the Kings was also referred to as Adoration of the Magi. The Medici saw themselves somehow as descendants of the Magi. It’s a tumultuous depiction of ambition and conflict; in the background flights of stairs are seen leading to nowhere, to ruins with little trees on them. And in the centre the mother with her child sitting under trees, surrounded by a crowd, most conspicuous some old men crawling on the ground towards the child, horrified and not believing their eyes. This sense of horror invades also spectators in the film. Leonardo created this work fifteen years prior to the Dominican friar Savonarola’s famous bonfire of vanities, when the citizens of Florence on the apogee of their culture all of sudden were convinced to have lost their way. Tarkovsky saw in Leonardo a kindred spirit, an artist with the burdensome gift of prophetic anticipation. For Tarkovsky, in some way, the conundrums of western civilisation started in that age, when people drew a separating line between them and God.” “So, this guy wanted to reel history in the reverse direction? That’s quite ludicrous.” “At least he wanted to open a discussion. He reserved for himself the right to shout as loud as he could: change your way of life! In this film he united in an idiosyncratic way the enigmatic with a sense of utter urgency. What the Twin Towers were for big business is the burning cottage for middle class people. The upper echelons will be the last to change their minds.” “I beg your pardon – what have the Twin Towers to do with it?” “Well, at the time we were assured they were about freedom, for the architect they were about peace. I once met a guy who thought they looked like gigantic piles of banknotes: neat, sharp and almost unshakeable.” “With all due respect for flippancy, does it occur to you that on that day thousands of people were murdered?” “I would even claim that the scale of the crime has not been gauged so far – at least to my knowledge. It’s not just the number of victims. I mean to come up with the idea of ramming jet airliners into skyscrapers – that’s so outrageous, so out of the ordinary. It has something devilish. It has also this eerie, perilous flashiness about it. It was tailor-made for the age of mass media. In its magnitude, it was also a tailor-made joke on America.” “A joke??” “Yeah, since Goethe’s Faust we know that the devil can be a great joker. It took me some time to understand that the date of the attack, 9-11, is the number for the emergency call in America. It’s again this sheriff of the global village thing. Remember the end of this film? There is the phone ringing in the burning house. That’s exactly the situation. The brand of humor is very similar to that of the bystanders when Jesus was hanging on the cross. They almost quoted a saying Jesus had mentioned earlier on: Physician, heal yourself.- My impression is that there is reluctance in America to face up to the media fallout of the attacks. Fallout means that it will stay longer with you than you might like. Fortunately, few countries around the world have the same code for the emergency call. But as history teaches, things of this kind will seep through anyway.” “So, you believe in the devil?” “Well, don’t get me wrong. Should I get to the other side of the mystic river just to discover that there is no devil, that he was just a projection of my own dark side, I’ll be the happiest person alive, or how should I say. To me it’s much, much more important that God exists. But for the time being, I find the idea of the devil’s existence rather convincing. People who knew Osama bin Laden from earlier on agree that he was not particularly bright. Not someone to come up with such brilliant ideas. On the other hand, he wasn’t a crappy petite bourgeois like Hitler either. He was a kind of Arabian nobleman. Sometimes, even the best fall prey to the father of all liars.” “Father of all liars?” “Well, to believe that you will be honored in the afterlife for killing innocent people – a bigger lie than that…” “You say he fell prey to the devil. Should we pity him as a victim, then?” “No, for seduction it takes at least two. You cannot say the Germans were innocent because they were seduced by Hitler, quite the opposite.” “Do you believe that Islam is a devilish religion?” “It’s not that simple. This guy is far above – or far below if you wish – memberships and loyalties. Once upon a time, he colluded with the inquisition in the Catholic Church, later he had a cameo during the Terreur of the French Revolution. In Hitler’s Germany and in Stalin’s Russia he was in charge almost at the same time; to name just a few of his showings in history.” “You mean the devil can be on both sides?” “Why not? I see him as a juggler using at least two hands. When millions and millions are covered with sludge like seabirds after an oil spill, eaten up by hatred and selfishness – then he sees his golden harvest coming. To him nothing better can happen than war.” “But Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida have been marginalized.” “Osama, or rather his big brother, were more farsighted than you might like. Osama said once with mock compassion that the United States of America soon will be the divided states of America. I’ve read this in an American newspaper, the IHT, shortly after the attacks, but does anybody remember it? There is this overflow of information: so many news one after another and all more or less of the same importance. The web is really the great leveller. You read one headline: the Pope gave a sermon on peace in the Middle-East. Good for him. Good riddance. The next headline is from Tucson, Arizona, about the friendship between piglet Doggy and puppy Piggy. Now we’re talking! That’s something heart-warming and inspirational. Is bin Laden now any closer to his goal than he was ten years ago? And besides, he remains a fascinating figure for many underdogs, not only in Muslim countries. He appears as someone who came from the Jeunesse Dorée and converted to a simple life of dedication to his cause. Think of the many suicide bombers who still believe that big lie. It’s not just envy on the part of people in poor countries. We make it really difficult for them not to despise us. We are gorgeous in the department of technology, but spiritually? That’s what Tarkovsky’s pining was all about. There is this appalling dearth of dignity. In that regard, things in Europe are probably worse. It’s just, we don’t have these ruthlessly efficient mass media, we have no Hollywood.” “For someone who’s never set foot on American soil you have pretty much to say about our country.” “Small wonder, you are all over the place! I have still much more to say.” “Go ahead. Make my day.” “What do you mean by ‘make my day’?” “I’ll explain to you later. Now I need a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow morning 9 a.m. I want to be at the stock exchange. Say what you want, when it comes to money I prefer the stock market to Christmas stockings.” “You don’t believe in Santa, do you? Do you believe in anything?” After they’d paid and left I was determined to get hold of that film. There seemed to be some food for thought; especially the wake-up call in the end when the phone is ringing in the burning house.