nostalgia (w&d tarkovsky, w tonino guerra)

Cinemateca still has a limited foro, something like 50%, at a guess. So it’s not a surprise that this screening of Tarkovsky’s penultimate film was effectively sold out. What was a surprise, was the demographic of the audience. Impossible to say if I was the oldest person there, but what was evident was that the majority were younger than me. One normally associates venerable art movies with a more elderly public, but that wasn’t the case last night. Which was refreshing. Even more so, given the reaction at the film’s conclusion. The final shot is a lengthy, artistic, as close to the transcendent as cinema perhaps gets. The film concluded and there was a tangible silence, an immobility. No-one rushed to get up. As though we were all gradually returning to the other world, after our deep immersion in Tarkovsky world. 

Nostalgia is a film which at times feels almost playful, bordering on the melodramatic. The relationship between Gorchakov and Eugenia is charged with soap opera tension. There’s a glorious scene where Eugenia psychs herself to run up some stairs but instead goes flying on her high heels. She gets up laughing. She’s a belligerently anti-Tarkovskian character who undercuts the film’s solemnity, refusing to kneel in the opening sequence when they visit a church. Perhaps because of this lightness, the moments of alt-poetry feel all the more bewildering and astonishing. The film plays with Gorchakov’s memories, which infiltrate the narrative like a ghost dog, the same dog that crops up in both the Italian world of the action and the Russian world of memory. This more playful Tarkovsky refuses to let the viewer settle into anything close to reverence. The sound of drilling, of Chinese music, invades and distracts. The viewer isn’t sure where to place themselves, anymore than the Russian visitors seem to know how to place themselves within the complex faded glory of Italy. 

This disorientation, perhaps most cruelly expounded in a scene where a clown mocks Domenico, the holy fool who has set himself on fire, eventually builds towards the harrowing, over processed finale, whose very intensity acts as a release. Finally we understand where we are. Finally we realise that this has been as close to an act of prayer as we’re likely to get in this sacrilegious world. The seriousness comes as a relief. This is what we need. We need the snow to fall on the ruined abbey of our modern world.

mirror (w&d tarkovsky, w aleksandr misharin)

There are moments in Mirror when it feels as though Tarkovsky is exploring the outer boundaries of the possibility of fiction, and he has no option but to concede that fiction will not do what he needs. In these moments we see images of war, as soldiers trek through mud-wracked fields, or alternatively, more curiously, a mass of Chinese wave Mao’s little red book. These Chinese images fall out of apparent context into the film. The images of the Soviet war have a logic in this memory piece, reflecting the ubiquity of the second world war in post-45 Soviet filmmaking. The images of Russian soldiers lock us into the world of Tarkovsky’s children and describe the terror that helped form that world. But the images of the Chinese seem to push the narrative further, seeking to locate it in a more universal twentieth century experience, something which is amplified by the curious Spanish section, when unexpected characters appear, talking in Spanish about bullfighting, again contrasted with documentary footage of the Spanish Civil War.

Who are these Spaniards, or these Chinese, and what are they doing in Tarkovky’s delicate memory piece? But then our memories are not confined to the details of family or place. Our imaginations even as children engage with the morbid fears of the age. At another point, there’s footage of the nuclear bomb exploding, and any child who grew up in the shadow of the cold war had the bogeyman of nuclear annihilation lurking somewhere in their consciousness. Fiction can only go so far, at some point the filmmaker has to declare that his imagination has been formed by the actuality of the world. 

Having said that, in Mirror we see again the breathtaking scope of the auteur’s imagination. The way he painted poetry with a camera that glided, like a ghost, through the scenes of a child’s past. There are so many moments for the high priests of cinematic criticism to dwell on that we could be here all year. Ideas and images thrown together in a style that sometimes borders on the Dada-esque, Tzara racing around fitting pieces together that don’t appear to match, but somehow do anyway. There is something almost childlike about this investigation of being a child. The construction of the film foregoes the adult demands of coherence, delighting in a language that is being created anew, for the very first time, all over again. In this film, more perhaps than any of his others, there is a connection with Godard, both employing a seemingly haphazard process of assemblage to stretch the boundaries of cinematic possibility. 

ivan’s chidhood (w&d tarkovsky, w vladimir bogomolov, mikhail papava, andrey konchalovskiy)

 The face of a goat. A tracking shot across a field. A ruined church. An icon. Trees in water. Birch trees. Albrecht Dürer.

There are a thousand and one images to be harvested from Tarkovsky’s first film. He was a painter. He was also a philosopher. He married the two disciplines and came up with cinema. An art form he did indeed invent, even if some say it had been around for nearly a century when he got going. 

The war. The sudden drastic switch to documentary footage. Dead children, Goebel’s cowardly offering. A death cult. The documentary footage jarring, all wrong compared to the aesthetic splendour of all that has preceded it, but all right too, for this is a film about a boy who died, who was captured and executed. A boy whose life was enshrined in childhood. 

Sound, like water, a relentless rebarbative rhythm, the rhythm of being alive. 

Image on the front line, language left behind in the rearguard. Words are for the moments when joy or tears are called for. Words are for joking or flirting. Not for when you reach the frontier between life and death. A frontier Ivan crosses, never coming back. Neither to his companions, nor to us, nor to language. 

andrei rublev (w&d. w. tarkovsky, andrey konchalovskiy)

The newly refurbished Renoir screen, within the Renoir cinema (as I shall continue to call it), is a fitting place to watch Tarkovsky’s epic. Obviously words like masterpiece can and should be applied to this spectacular piece of filmmaking. It might be that there is little to add. It feels as though Tarkovsky’s reputation, justifiably, continues to grow. Each new generation of auteur filmmakers acknowledges their debt to the Russian, none more so than Inarritu in The Revenant. Someone put together a striking comparative video of that film with images from Tarkovsky’s, claiming the Mexican was stealing from Tarkovsky, but, as Brecht pointed out, all writers are thieves. 

SCALE

Watching this film on the big screen, for the first time, allowed many of the set piece scenes, including in particular the battle scenes, to be appreciated in all their glory. Whilst on one level a poet of the natural world, Tarkovsky was also a master composer of the grand set piece, showing a flair which Hollywood can only envy. The screen is filled with detail, like a Breughel painting, the camera lingering on the scene for long enough for its glorious complexity to be assimilated on a large screen; a TV or a computer cannot do justice to these moments. 

MUD

There’s so much mud in the film. The last scene is Rublev in the mud with the child bell-maker. Having visited the area around Vladimir, including Suzdal, there’s nothing exaggerated about any of this. Even in the middle of Summer, when I visited, the mud was wonderfully pervasive. The film takes place in the 15th c, but it’s no better now. Which also suggests the reason for all this mud. There’s something elemental about it, something overwhelmingly Russian. The mud is actual and metaphorical. Nothing is easy in Russia, everything is muddied, which might have something to do with a climate which veers from one extreme to the other. Andrei Rublev is a film about Russia, this elemental, unchanging Russia, the same now as it was under Stalin or the Peter the Great. The mud is a constant which glues this all together, both within history and within the film.

3-D

The film famously opens with a balloon trip, offering a sky-to-earth perspective. Thereafter the film continues to play with perspective and angle. The camera is employed to encourage a sense of viewer disorientation. Tarkovsky was not the only Soviet director to do this, and it’s a methodology which has since been pushed further. (Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba immediately springs to mind.) The question is why this technique is adopted. The man in the balloon is not central to the narrative of the film. Who is he? (The film never clarifies this, nor does a cursory internet enquiry, beyond telling us his name is Yefim). What we can say about him is that he appears to be an ordinary, anonymous individual. As such, he’s the reflective image of the spectator. It’s a bold move to open the film highlighting a character who has, as they now like to say, no agency within the story. Perhaps this is Tarkovsky’s nod to us, his audience. We are about to embark on a balloon ride; to soar, to lose ourselves in the clouds, to get caught up in the exhilaration of the experience. At the end, we will come crashing back down to earth (like Yefim) with a hard landing, as discordant, colourful images fill what has been a black and white frame. For a brief while, the camera’s perspective offers the common man another vista. You could make an argument to say that in so doing, Tarkovsky is towing the blockbuster line (what is Andrei Rublev if it’s not a blockbuster?). You could also make an argument that in Soviet Russia, as in the hegemonised world of global capital, the need to dream, to look at the world from an altered perspective, is paramount. Art is one of the few mechanisms available to us to do this, to step back and see the world afresh. It was ever thus, the film’s protoganism appears to imply, from 15th c Russia to the present day and beforehand too. Tarkovsky’s film is a remarkable proto 3-D portrayal of a 2-D artist. 

solaris (w&d tarkovsky, w. frederick gorenshtein)

Dyer in Zona talks about Tarkovsky's roving camera. He talks about the camera 'breathing'. It's true. Tarkovsky's camera is more like a living creature than an inanimate object. The machine that feels. We can never settle, just as the narrative never settles, caught up in the restless quest of its characters. It's a device that has been used in horror or suspense movies extensively, but rarely in drama. In horror it's clear that the intention of the roving camera is to put the viewer ill-at-ease, to subvert the feeling of security that the standard viewing position offers. But Tarkovsky does not appear to be out to unsettle us. Rather, he wants us to be aware of how 'real' the scene is. To fracture the assumed complicity of viewer and screen, in order to rebuild. Just as with 'reality' we can never be entirely sure what's going to come next, so within the world of Tarkovsky's camera. Don't blink. Because when you look up everything might have altered irredeemably, and you'll have missed the reason why.

Not that logic is necessarily the key factor in the sequence of events within a narrative adapted from a Stansislaw Lem novel. Some of the most entertaining dialogue occurs when the script starts to explain the apparitions in the spaceship. The 'real' characters, we are informed, are made of 'atoms', whereas the apparitions are made of 'neutrons'. So that's cleared that one up. Tarkovsky would appear to be escorting us into a zone where the rules of physics have become susceptible to unexplainable distortions. The search for a logical solution is spurious. The question is whether one chooses to go with the flow or resist it. A choice to be made by both spectators and characters.

I went with it. As Dyer’s book corroborates, reaction to Tarkovsky’s art is a highly personal affair. One can quite understand someone walking out at any point. It’s a reasonable response to a film that drifts and ebbs like a river, bringing to mind cinema seen through the lens of Heraclites rather than Ridley Scott. At some point the film wrapped me up in its dreams and I floated downriver with it, gravity-free, headed for the great ocean which contains another earth with its alternative philosophies. Like any journey downriver on a foreign planet (Apocalypse Now?), there are moments which drift, punctuated by moments that take your breath away. You would need to write a book, in the vein of Dyer, in order to begin to do justice to the power of this cinema, a few words here are but a frippery.

the sacrifice (d. tarkovsky)

I first saw The Sacrifice when I was at university in York, presumably upon its release in 1986 or 87. I used to go to the film club in the large comfortable auditorium, frequently in N's company. The auditorium was built on what was claimed to be the largest artificial lake in Europe, though that now seems doubtful, and word had it that it was sinking, as the direct result of a Boomtown Rats concert the year before I arrived. I vaguely realised that the film I was watching was supposed to be the work of a seminal director, but my memories of that viewing remain vague, and dominated by the spectacular closing scene.

One's reaction to a work of art is always conditioned by the conditions under which one sees it. These conditions might include one's state of mind, the person in whose company one sees or experiences the work, one's age, or countless other factors. It seems pertinent to allude to this earlier watching as the film itself is so self-consciously addressing the issue of ageing. It is the last film Tarkovsky made; it is dedicated to his son; the final scene is of Alexander's young son addressing a question to his father who is being removed in the manner of a modern day Lear. One cannot help but feel that, perhaps like Lear, which it so consciously echoes, this is a film best seen from a reflective perspective, located not so far from the threshold of death; even if that death were merely the starting point for the next round of eternal recurrence (or 'return' in the script's translation) as the mysterious postman, Otto, suggests.

Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche are all name-checked in the opening twenty minutes. The parameters are laid down. But the influence of two other northern artists seems stronger. It's impossible not to feel the shadow of Bergman looming over Alexander's struggles. Alexander is played by Erland Josephon, a long term collaborator of Bergman's. His depiction of an isolated soul, seeking not merely to create but actually to become a work of art, references the filmmaker, as does his character's name, an echo of Bergman's childish incarnation in Fanny and Alexander. The other key influence seems to be Chekhov. In some ways The Sacrifice feels like a dystopian reading of Chekhov (through Beckett). Although two of the characters arrive in a nifty BMW, the women wear dresses that look more like something out of turn of the century Russia than an Abba influenced Sweden.

All these influences are brought to bear and, as one of the key moments of the film shows, they all count. The reason the characters are gathered is to celebrate Alexander's birthday. Otto, the postman who seems more like the boatman at the Styx, brings Alexander a large 16th century map of Europe as a present - a present which is a sacrifice, as all presents, he says, should be. They talk about how Europe has altered, and what those early inhabitants might have made of it. All this precedes the film's central tenet: the occurrence of the fabled nuclear strike. Unless Alexander is prepared to sacrifice himself to redeem time and the world, nuclear winter is upon us. In the lead-up to the moment when the world ends, the film explores what it is that will be lost, and what it might be that has brought us to that point.

At the time the film was made, Europe was still the front line of a potential nuclear war. Now, twenty years later, the terms of the chess match have changed. The fear of a third world war, which clearly haunted Tarkovsky, has receded, to be replaced by other millennial fears. The slow, sepia shots of crowds rushing through a devastated street, which punctuate the movie, seem just as pertinent in this era of ever-more-dramatic Hollywood apocalypse movies; or McCarthy's The Road. Alexander's sacrifice may have staved off one damnation, but it hasn't kept the others at bay.

In a film so steeped in Western culture, (this review hasn't mentioned the influence of Leonardo, Pierro della Francesca or Russian icon painters), the latter stages suggest that Tarkovsky perceived another direction for the world to turn. Alexander listens to Japanese music, and wears an oriental cloak, decorated with the Yin and Yang, as he summons up the courage to take the step of destroying his home in order to save the world. His son tends to the tree he has 'created' in a Japanese manner. He carries water to nurture it. This echoes an idea Alexander expresses at the film's opening, as he 'plants' the tree, that if we were to find one ritual to perform every day, at a set time, even were that just to pour a glass from the tap and then throw that water away, it might create a foundation of meaning in our lives.

This notion, redolent of Zen Buddhism, allied to the restoration of faith (those who fail to believe in God are those who have never been desperate enough to need to, Alexander claims as he prays) offer, so the filmmaker seems to suggest, an escape route from the terminal end that centuries of Western culture have created. In burning his home, Alexander destroys his possessions, books, maps and all. There is a way out, but it requires sacrifice.

Tarkovsky's film is no easier to watch twenty years on. It is still a long haul of a movie, demanding the viewer's exhaustive attention. The underlying themes the film explores seem no less pertinent today than they did twenty years ago. The notion of sacrifice, personal, societal and cultural, in the quest for nothing more than survival, seems even more relevant. The conditions under which the film is watched have altered less than time might have lead one to expect.

The lake still may or may not be the largest artificial lake in Europe, (this remains debatable), but the auditorium would still appear to be sinking.