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Petr
Král Luminous
blows and unforeseen encounters: an introduction to Petr
Král
by Adrian
Martin [1]
Translated fromthe Czech by Kevin Windle. Originally published
inSvedectvi
XXIII, No. 91, 1990, pp. 258-68. An earlier and
substantially different version, "La maison en feu: sur
Andrei Tarkovski", appeared in Positif 304, June
1986, pps 16-23. This translation is reprinted, with the
kind permission of Professor Daniel Gerould, from Slavic
and East European Performance, Vol 15 No 3, pps. 51-7,
Vol 16 No 1, pps. 51-7, and Vol 16 No 2, pps. 50-56.
The work of
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), whose career was cut short by
his premature death, is undoubtedly among the most
significant in the entire history of the cinema. In
Tarkovsky's work - coming after Fellini's - the attempt to
put cinematic images to the service of poetry, to make them
an instrument of the inner vision and of dreams, reaches its
apogee. Bernardo Bertolucci's observation, that "we never
forget a film's light", applies to Tarkovsky more than to
anyone else: his images, at once fiery and liquid - as if
they had arisen spontaneously from that union of fire and
water which is central to his oeuvre - act on us by the
extraordinary "aura", which alerts us at once to their
visionary quality. It is not simply
that everything in it is inseparably tangible, sensual, and
"spiritual", that the outward form of things cannot be
divorced from their emotive significance, from the
investigation of their inner meaning - his films are
unmistakable evidence of the functioning of one person's
subjective vision. They also somehow transcend the limits of
art by uniting deliberate creative endeavour with
sensitivity to mystery in its "natural" state. If
Tarkovsky's vision is utterly self-generating, it needs
spontaneous fixing, in images which the director did not
invent, but which he allowed to ripen within himself and
crystallize. A dark, irreducible kernel remains, like a
mysterious situation in life, or like those bewitching films
that owe their unique poetry less to the director's designs
than to the whim of circumstances. In brief these films are
created almost in the biblical sense, as something with an
independent existence; in them people and things seem to us
to have exceptional clarity, urgency, and grace, as if we
ourselves were in love and suddenly experienced the world
with redoubled intensity. In Tarkovsky's
last film, The sacrifice (Sweden-France 1986), we see
the hero, in a black-and-white sequence, running from a
house in which we have just seen a nude young woman in a
bedroom (or rather her reflection in a mirror - she is
partly hidden by a screen); we then see him wandering in a
large garden, where he picks up some small coins from the
mud and rotting leaves, before freezing into immobility
amidst the falling snow and the old trees, which, thanks to
the slowly panning camera, begin a slow dance around him.
The calm and self-evident power of this scene is redolent of
both a recollection and the sensation of waking from sleep,
but it is neither one nor the other. It is simply a visual
thought, remote from the strangeness of dreams and from
realistic description, and seeming to convey as precisely as
possible our inner breathing itself. It is not only at once
extraordinary and simple, but at the same time, in its
"content", literally inexhaustible... The lighting of
Tarkovsky's films consists of illumination and eclipse, the
light of revelation and of enigma. From the beginning,
objects possess for the director a kind of dark visibility,
which defies all preconceptions. An understanding - and a
spiritualization - of the world begins to take shape here,
as a language of signs, in which mystery alone speaks to us,
and in which sharp visual definition is more important than
abstract symbols and ideas: the bolts wrapped in strips of
surgical gauze and scattered in the grass (Stalker
[USSR 1979]), the pulsating skin of a wounded scalp,
or the wet circle left on a table by a teacup (The
mirror [USSR 1974]) speak to us first only via
their material or immaterial nature - or sometimes both,
like the bolts "lent wings" by the gauze - via their
presence, whether insistent or fleeting, which has all the
more meaning in itself for being inexpressible in words.
Likewise the mysterious groupings and "constellations",
which objects seem to produce almost of their own volition,
as if they wished to join in some secret conspiracy. We find
them at the level of details (including those gauze-wrapped
bolts, - in a way a paradigm representing the whole of
Tarkovsky's imagination), and of whole scenes: the car
buried in a bush at the side of the darkening road, along
which the hero of The sacrifice was driving to
complete his mission, stuck there (with a strip of fabric
flying in the breeze) like a palpable fragment of mystery in
the arteries of the world. The director's
vision literally breathes life into the material mass of
objects, awakens life in them, and shows us their secret
existence, or their hidden essence; the gradually fading
imprint of the cup on the table "breathes" (The
mirror), just like the cupboard in The sacrifice,
whose door twice opens beside one of the characters without
anyone touching it. The mark of the teacup and the wounded
soldier's pulsating scalp (The mirror) also take on
the force of a cryptic proclamation thanks to another
characteristic feature: their urgent, insistent appearances
are emblematic fragments of memory lodged in the
mists of one person's consciousness and resisting the
destructive force of forgetfulness and the passage of time.
The force which gives objects an intensified presence is,
paradoxically, their constant slipping out of direct reality
into internalized concepts, into the sphere of dreams and
ideas, where only the shimmer of blurred images survives.
Evidence of this is also provided by those mysterious
scenes, sometimes memory-like, sometimes dreamlike, in which
objects are replaced by the metaphors, and this also
signifies a paradoxical "compression" of them, rather like
the results of improbable accidents in silent comedy films.
We see this in the books spattered with earth, dreamily
recorded in Solaris (USSR, 1972), or the spectral
soldiers coated in sand who appear in the labyrinthine
The mirror in a scene from an old newsreel: earth and
sand seem to make palpable the burial of people and objects
in the depths of memory and history, and heighten their own
palpability - like the cream in those silent-movie bunfights
- to the level of "hyper-reality." Something similar is
displayed in those striking sequences - sometimes composed
solely of black-and-white images, as if purely in the mind -
which Tarkovsky inserts like independent lyrical interludes.
Some particularly fascinating examples are included in
The sacrifice (among them the hero's stroll in the
garden): the camera gradually explores from above a
staircase and a narrow litter-strewn courtyard, lingers on a
chair with a hole in the seat, and finally glides to a
puddle in which the decor of the yard is mirrored, as if
wishing to "internalize" it definitively, while looking back
up at it from the water, to return to reality and "real"
life. A single slow pan, literally welding together these
fragmentary pieces of reality, turns them into a condensed
definition of a whole unified world... A sequence which
is also an enigmatic recollection again owes its inner
cohesion to the collective placement of objects in the
memory. It is no accident that most such scenes are
dominated by water, the primal element, and some consist of
a prolonged glissade over the surface of water. Consider the
travelling shot in Stalker, monochrome and
technicolour by turns, when the hero dozes off on a grassy
island in a river and the camera gradually moves away from
the sleeper to offer a surprising survey of submerged
objects thrown into the water: a syringe, a sodden piece of
newspaper, a gold coin , and - a little way off - an
icon. The beginning of
the garden sequence in The sacrifice, when the hero
picks out of the mud and rotting leaf-mould the coins that
have fallen into it, along with the scraps of newspaper and
rag, is another such descent to the bottom. Like the bicycle
and the bottle raised from the bed of the drained reservoir
- coated in slime, just as the soldiers in The mirror
are covered in dust - where the hero carries out his mission
in Nostalgia (Italy-USSR 1983) the objects buried in
the mud come to embody those uncertain and varied treasures
that lie at the root of our memories and which are our only
riches. Remarkable only for the freshness that sparkles
before us, as it once did in childhood, the coin has no more
value (and no less) than the humus it has fallen into and
with which it is equated, as in the well-known story in
which a basket of leaves turns into a bag of gold coins and
vice versa; the objects coated in earth or slime are lent a
fabulous power of attraction and a value by the very thing
that strips them of their practical worth. Similarly, the
dilapidated, apparently burned residence of the hero of
Stalker seems at the beginning of the film at once
wretched and splendid, thanks to the paradoxical abundance
of stains on the door, cracks in the plaster and artistic
effects etched in by the dark outlines of the iron
bedsteads, in striking harmony with the network of cracks.
The boundaries between riches and poverty in Tarkovsky's
work are blurred. Just as in life, true luxury is concealed
beneath the most ordinary of things. The ascent to the
surface, signalled in The sacrifice at the conclusion
of the descent to the bottom of the courtyard, or rather the
spiritual uplift, which Tarkovsky seems to blend into (and
which is indicated, in a way, in Stalker by the
reflection of a tree suddenly falling into the water and
obscuring our view of the submerged objects), is possible
only after immersion in the primal waters of the past -
seemingly a redemptive return to the source. Tarkovsky's
images are not merely the product of his inner vision; they
also have the ability independently to increase and multiply
infinitely. Each one, inseparably literal and metaphorical,
with its own unique specificity and its figurative echoes,
expands and takes on multiple meanings, until it acquires
the autonomy and limitlessness of a poem in free verse
composition. Like a poem, it seems to hold the potential for
a complete narrative, captured, shimmering infinitely, at
its threshold. This multiplicity of meanings blurs the
linear nature of the narrative (or what was left of it) and
replaces it with the organization of the images in depth, in
layers formed one on top of another, thanks to which they
break free of their narrow limits and reach beyond them into
infinity, both in time and space. In this sense,
fixed-camera sequences are just as evocative as those shot
with a moving camera. In the opening scene of The
sacrifice the hero's son and a postman appear on the
shore of a bay, where the hero - before a motionless camera
- is transplanting a withered sapling. They approach as if
they were dragging along the vastness of the whole world
outside from over the horizon.[2]
Their garrulousness (the postman) and their silence (the
mute son) seem to form a complete, "synthesized" chord with
the hero's soliloquy, in which they gradually join. The
wealth of sound in Tarkovsky's films is legendary, however.
His unique "music", disturbing and soothing, intrusive and
discreet by turns, at odds with, and in harmony with the
images, is an inseparable element of the director's vision.
Even if we take only The sacrifice, we find images on
the screen accompanied by the sound of an unseen coin
tapping (as the tired hero falls asleep on the couch), a
loose sheet of corrugated iron clattering in the breeze (as
the introduction to a scene showing the hero's son asleep),
and distant music and ancient chants in Swedish or Japanese
(hence remote in space and time). The sounds themselves
transport the visual to a distant setting, to other lands
and other times, which provide the indispensable
counterpoint to its present reality. [2]
A comparable scene in which the outside world is drawn onto
the set can be seen in the classic silent comedy Calino
joue au billard (France 1910). Not only does the
cue-wielding hero smash mirrors and the imagined depths
behind them, lit by reflected candles in the room. He also
breaks into his neighbours' flats, evoking an angry reaction
from the tenants. [The Calino series, starring the
comedian Migé, was produced for Gaumont from 1909 to
1913, and created by Romeo Bosetti. - Ed.] This inner
accumulation of scenes is also an expression of a quest for
social oneness, or rather the blending of the individual
into the communal. Tarkovsky's vision, be it ever so unique
and personal, tends from the very outset to transcend
itself; the concrete tangibility of his images, "hyper-real"
to the point of being hallucinatory, is, as it were, filled
to the limit by an infinite quantity of barely perceptible,
quivering, teeming, detail, irresistibly spreading and
intermingling, against which the form of the images is no
more than a fleeting, fragile reflection, at once giving
shape to the image and eroding it. Suffice it to mention the
forest in Andrei Rublev (USSR 1966), with its
seething masses of ants and midges, murmuring streamlets and
rills, its web of branches and twisted roots - like streams
themselves, but made of wood - , and on this tangled
labyrinth the camera pauses for a moment, on the bank of a
stream. The seething life of nature seems to have fashioned
the living soil that gave birth to both Rublev's painting
and Tarkovsky's art itself. The ending, the remarkable
sequence showing the casting of the bell, also emerges from
a teeming procession of objects, places, sounds (the ominous
creak of the scaffolding, on which the bell is raised by a
rope), and individual and group actions. In the course of
the kaleidoscopic excursus through Rublev's paintings with
which the film concludes (in black and white), as with a
closing message of reconciliation, the works are first
fragmented into details which are hard to read, as if they -
the paintings - were meant to resemble the woodland
labyrinth, and only then do the icons emerge before us in
their entirety. Thus the quest for a particular vision (the
artist's work) could lead only through a return to primal
chaos and through dispersion into seething, anonymous life,
represented, to the hero of the film, by the experience he
gradually gains of the harsh world and the suffering of his
fellow human beings. It is true that
the creative individuality embodied in Rublev is also the
only force capable of giving meaning to the experience of
cruelty and evil, and including it in the nature of things.
When, after a survey of the icons, we see a colour scene
showing real horses at the water's edge, it is as if reality
itself can be made accessible thanks to the vision of the
artist. At the same time, however, the artist in Tarkovsky
applies this capability of his only when he is able to forge
a connection with reconciliation, when he can bow down
before the untold riches of the world and open up fully to
the life which is progressing through him, and of which he
is no more than an elected spokesman. In this sense art
finds its model in the paradoxical "work" of the aged madman
in Nostalgia, in which the blurring of boundaries
between poverty and wealth can clearly be seen, and in which
the artificial, man-made world order blends with the order
of nature, or rather, with its natural
"disorder".[3]
Here the old man - rather like a visitor - inhabits a
territory cluttered with pots and pans and empty,
unforgettably green bottles, endlessly flooded with shafts
of light and ringing currents of rainwater, bottles whose
"construction", however shaky and impermanent, changes the
decor into that of the most splendid exhibition hall, or
concert hall, that one could hope to visit. [3]
The need to have human order embrace primal chaos also finds
expression in a childhood recollection of the hero of The
sacrifice: when he once tried to clear his mother's
overgrown garden, he found, to his surprise, that he had
destroyed its charm. The overlapping
of different temporal planes also belongs among the
conjunctions and intersections of innumerable signs, events,
and movements of which Tarkovsky's images are composed and
which collectively go to form a scene. Such an intersection
is the scene in Ivan's childhood (USSR 1962) in which
the young hero leafs through a volume of Durer's etchings
and wonders whether they show the German enemy. His youth
interweaves with - and collides with - the supratemporal
nature of culture, which itself is interwoven with the
historical period of the Second World War. In this respect
the kernel of the director's entire work is The
mirror, in which the deliberate mingling of generations
and eras spans the uncertain waves of one person's memory:
the narrator's mother merges with his wife (both are played
by the same actress); at moments he himself is identified
with his father (if only in the commentary); different
events from the history of the family sometimes interweave
within the framework of a single scene. Together with the
varied spatial scenes, the temporal planes intermingle in
the extraordinary juxtaposition of images in which
Solaris and Nostalgia culminate. The hero's
own house, which the rapidly ascending camera unexpectedly
shows us surrounded by the sea (Solaris), is lost
here like a fragment of the past in the waters of oblivion
(as well as in the uncertainty surrounding the future of the
cosmos itself). Likewise the grass-covered islet in the
middle of a stream, on which the hero of Stalker
falls asleep (in foetal position), also recalls birth and a
safe union with the mother, and is symbolic of irreversible
disappearance (the islet, hardly bigger than the hero's
body, is itself no more than an embryo fashioned out of
turf), while in Nostalgia the Grecian or Roman ruins
in which the hero's humble Russian hut is set, as in a
frame, at the conclusion, bind the time of his childhood
into the memory of the whole of Western culture. An
unexpected change of scale, common to both scenes, is
repeated in The sacrifice, when in a nearby meadow we
find a replica of the hero's house reduced to the size of a
child's toy. As it was evidently placed here by the hero's
son, as a birthday present for his father, it suggests an
image of the future taking shape in the present, the
reduplication of the present in the future... The mysterious
labyrinth of The mirror, which drew together
fragments of various memories without integrating them into
a single whole, was judged "elitist" and incomprehensible to
the masses when first shot in Russia. However, the moral
that blazes forth with truly indomitable force is so
self-evident that this itself appears to be the reason the
film was proscribed. In spite of its anecdotal content and
chronological structure, by means of fragmentary memories
and fragmentary "archetypal" scenes, it creates a vision of
life which highlights all that is most nameless and
ordinary, and which forms, in a sense the obverse side of
History with a capital 'H'. And, in addition, the obverse
side of ideology: by celebrating specific gestures and
moments which plot the individual's path through life and
form his fragile memory (the namelessness of these gestures
provides a link with life in general), Tarkovsky at a stroke
places himself in opposition to all abstract schemas which
seek to subordinate life to some "higher" purpose. Thus,
The mirror is to the cinema what
Jiri
Grusa's
Questionnaire is to literature: an implied critique
of ideologies seen from below, from the standpoint of
everyday life, whose superstructure they aspire to be, and
which treacherously eludes the grasp of their
constructs. This critique is
fully apparent in the riveting and oft-cited cloudburst
scene: the narrator's mother returns through wet and
deserted streets to the printing works where she is a
proof-reader, driven by the hideous vision of a
"blasphemous" misprint (the details of which we never
learn), that she might have overlooked in an article about
Stalin. When she finally reads the proofs, and when she
confides her fear in a whisper to her friend, and the two of
them laugh with relief, her work-mates, who have come to
console her, also screen with their bodies a huge portrait
of Stalin on the wall... The underlying message of this work
goes far beyond mere political suggestiveness. It may also
be read in the striking scene at the end of the film, in
which the camera itself appears to glide along the ground,
revealing as it does so the ruins of an unfamiliar structure
- evidently the hero's own home, overgrown with grass and
thistles. This is reminiscent of Stalker, in which,
as the camera travels over the surface of the water, it
examines traces of a past life and, at the same time, links
them with timeless nature and its primal, elemental forces.
In spite of adversity in history, and the wounds inflicted
upon individuals, the simplest and most private human
existence has the same abiding value - the same real
value - as the grass on those ruins; precisely because, like
the grass, it is nameless and powerless. A return to
nature and the elements is omnipresent in Tarkovsky. Right
at the beginning of Ivan's childhood we see, lying on
the cracked ground split by tree-roots, the head of the
young hero, looking as if it were about to become part of
it. In Solaris, as the camera ends its glide over the
wet grass, we discover what seems to be the hero beside a
pool, but so close, and in such fragmentary detail, that at
first we can hardly recognize him in the grass, and take him
for a stone or a piece of wood. Fire and water, earth and
air reach into the most dramatic scenes, as if to transfer
the action of those scenes back to their ancient, timeless
roots, and thus give back to human gestures their lost
substance. In this sense they offer a corrective to History
and its ghosts; the printing-shop scene in The mirror
is literally awash with water, from the rain in the street
to the shower that the heroine takes at the end to wash away
the traces of her fear. The soldiers roaming on the deserted
beach, covered in sand, seem to have fled here from the fury
of battle with the idea of drawing new strength from their
contact with the earth. The hero of Nostalgia can
continue on his mission after descending into the flooded
basement of the ruined house; here he "communes" not only
with water, but also with fire (he burns a book and recites
a poem in praise of the flame of a candle). At the end he
meets a little girl, who is no more than an example made
flesh of a life brought back to its beginning and its
source. The hero's mission, moreover, is to keep alive the
flame of a candle carried across the bed of a drained
thermal bath, at the moment when a demented old man publicly
burns himself to death... The importance of newly-discovered
roots in Tarkovsky's work is shared by the concreteness of
objects, gestures, and the sounds which his films seem to
extract from time and magnify to hallucinatory proportions,
starting with the most ordinary of them: the simple movement
of a glass across the seat of a shaky chair in
Stalker becomes a whole dizzying journey. Here the
palpability of the world is sublimated, elevated to cosmic
significance, and also serves as the elemental and
irreducible basis of Tarkovsky's message itself. Hence the
predominant role allocated to female figures in The
mirror, and in fact throughout his oeuvre. They dominate
this key film not only because it deals with the war years,
when most men were away at the front. Women are also
omnipresent as the privileged guardians of the material
world and its day-to-day memory, which they maintain
securely and patiently - in a time of dire need - by means
of simple but magical rituals: killing a chicken, lighting a
fire, whose flames light up a pair of hands with a coral-red
glow, trying on (face to the mirror of the camera) some
ear-rings that gleam like discovered treasure in the
half-light of the room, while another woman stands by. Women
are directly linked with those items or materials, whether
common or rare, which by systematic use provide references
to an original, "pre-modern" world order: the old wash-basin
and pitcher (Solaris, The sacrifice), the
portable lamp (The sacrifice), the milk that is
common to The mirror and Andrei Rublev, and
which is so significantly spilt in The sacrifice by
the tremor announcing a new war, and with it, the end of the
world. In The
mirror, as they try on the ear-rings, the women, excited
by the darkness, exchange whispered confidences to do with
their femininity and their lot as wives and mothers -
lending their sensuality an almost magical air. All
Tarkovsky's female characters, incidentally, appear at once
calm and troubled, aristocratic and primitive. They give the
impression of being like "God's creatures", dedicated to
higher things, but also possessed by the devil. They seem to
hold the key to good and evil, love and hate. In The
sacrifice, when the hero's wife is seized by convulsions
on hearing of the approach of war, she writhes on the floor,
with her skirt riding up her thighs, as if shaken at once by
insatiability and an organic need to destroy. Harey, in
Solaris, and the Stalker's wife suffer similar
seizures (the latter after trying in vain to prevent her
husband leaving for the forbidden Zone). The heroine of
The sacrifice is symmetrically complemented by the
countrywoman Maria, who evokes at once Christian sainthood
(by her name) and a pagan priestess (beginning with her
"swarthy appearance");[4]
by the act of love with the hero she enables him to save the
world from destruction. But is she not also linked to the
cause of the impending disaster, as suggested by her
restless behaviour just before the announcement of
hostilities? Women in Tarkovsky's work are always morally
ambivalent, at once pure and impure, in their natural
physicality - which perhaps for that reason had to be
invested with a new meaning. Tarkovsky finds it in the
maternal aspect of femininity (in the broadest sense of that
word), which is clearly the thing that for him makes the act
of love an act of salvation (in The sacrifice).
Before making love, Maria ritually washes the hero - using
the old basin and pitcher - just as in Solaris the
hero's mother bathed him; similarly, after the first meeting
in the fields she follows him and urges him, in a motherly
way, to go home, fearing that he will catch
cold... [4]
This "polysemy" is a feature of Tarkovsky's work and of his
personal mysticism, which is not bound to any particular
religious system. The crown of thorns which appears in
Stalker has no greater significance than the
dressing-gown with the ying-yang symbol on it, worn by the
hero of The sacrifice. Both are merely stage
props. The descent to
the bottom, which in Tarkovsky's work precedes resurrection,
is, with regard to the identification of wife and mother, at
the same time, inseparably, a descent into the maternal
waters of memory and a momentary brushing against the base,
corporeal physicality to which women are closer than men,
and which must be known if one is to rise above it...
Tarkovsky's shots themselves have a "feminine" duality about
them: if their concreteness is systematically relieved and
illuminated by an inner - almost mystical - light, it is
only thanks to the glow of the ever-present sensuality, at
once concealed and dazzlingly revealed. History and the
suffering it brings with it are not set against daily life
in any Manichean sense in Tarkovsky's work. In The
mirror, the uncertainty of human destinies tested by
history finds a direct continuation in a fragmented vision
of history itself, in which the destruction it represents
seems to be turned against it. Mao's soldiers waving their
Little Red Books in the wilderness of the frontier zone,
hundreds of leaflets tumbling from a soaring balloon like
snowflakes onto the empty pavement of a city boulevard (seen
in aerial view) are no more than the ghosts of a remote and
uncertain history without a controlling hand, and, as it
seems, forever incomprehensible to history itself. In the
same way, the elemental and timeless forces of nature are
not merely that which history would like to cut us off from;
on the contrary, they manifest themselves through it and in
spite of it - just as the aforementioned leaflets form a
kind of snow - so that it even seems as if only the constant
renewal of an ancient menace lies concealed behind it. War,
which figures in all Tarkovsky's films, is more a mythic
than a social phenomenon: a dark trial, by which the forces
that drive the universe occasionally reveal to us their
displeasure, and perhaps even their age-old antagonism.
The sacrifice, in which war assumes apocalyptic
proportions (but remains preventable by personal sacrifice),
is in this sense only further confirmation; a similar vision
of war was earlier outlined in The mirror, Andrei
Rublev, and Nostalgia. Even Tarkovsky's
first-born, Ivan's childhood, still close to
patriotic films after the manner of Son of the
regiment (USSR 1946), [5]
sees in war a force capable of renewing our contact with
nature and "original" experience. The opening episode leads
into the first characteristic marriage of fire and water in
a dark cave resembling a dug-out (where the exhausted Ivan
warms and washes himself). Here the hero keeps count of
enemy units by using fir-cones and beech nuts - according to
the type of weaponry that passes - having gathered the cones
and beech-nuts and carried them in his shirt. [5]
Son of the regiment, a children's film based on a
famous Russian play by Valentin Petrovich Katayev
(1897-1986) and directed by Vasilii Pronin, concerns a group
of Soviet soldiers who adopt a boy they find while fighting
the Germans in World War II. In a prodigious career, Katayev
contributed to film scripts for Boris Barnet. Incidentally,
Roman Polanski first came to notice as a child actor playing
the lead in a Polish touring stage adaptation of Son of
the Regiment directed by Josef Karbowski in the '40s.
[Ed.] War is also a
seminal experience in the sense that it is an object lesson
in the impermanence of life, compelling us to consider the
inevitability of loss. It also defines the role of memory as
a purely spiritual property (the old man in Ivan's
childhood continues to live in the ruins of a house of
which only the doors are still standing), and relativizes
the significance of culture as an autonomous asset and as
humanity's memory (in the same film, old frescoes on the
walls of a cell are juxtaposed with the last messages of
condemned prisoners). One of the recurrent scenes in
Nostalgia, which is among the most enchanting moments
in any film ever made, also symbolically encapsulates
Tarkovsky's view of war. It is entirely in black and white,
and begins on a lonely farmstead somewhere in Russia. A
winding road leads away from the farmstead, across the woods
and meadows of a peaceful landscape. It is early morning, in
a house an unknown woman wakes, draws her curtains, -
whereupon a bird flutters into the room, - and joins other
women passing her door, having first, like them, put on a
long, dark coat over her white nightdress. The women walk
away from us, down the road, and at the edge of the forest
pass a prancing white horse, then they appear again before
us close to another bumpy road, and pass in anxious silence
in front of the camera with the timidity of worthy, but
startled crows. Then we hear the rumble of engines, and a
hoarse voice from an unseen loudspeaker reads out an
inaudible, but obviously alarming announcement: evidently
war has just broken out. The air is still ringing with the
news when the women begin to stir again, and - before they
leave the spot they turn towards the farmstead on the
horizon behind them. A huge, brilliant sun is just rising
over it. With those black-clad mothers and sisters we have
been cast out of Eden, and are now cut off from our
childhood, our home, and the promise of a long,
uninterrupted sojourn amidst the meadows and friendly
livestock of our own chosen land. And if the original Eden
still endures - apparently within our reach - in the ripe,
sunlit fruit that we have only to reach out for, in the
stillness of a new day, on which the world itself seems to
have just been born, we suddenly have no access to it. The
gods have reclaimed their own.[6] [6]
This scene is also notable for the consistent way in which
it translates a historical event (the war) into its effect
on individual (and anonymous) lives. (The official car
drives like an invisible phantom past the women.) The
natural spectacle of the sunrise literally robs the war of
the conclusion of this scene, by drawing all attention -
ours and that of the women - to itself. The film opens
with a wonderful scene (again in black and white), which
fatefully places the beauty of the world elsewhere,
in a place accessible only to our memories and our
nostalgia. After a falling white feather has slid over the
hero's tuft of white hair, the man bends and thoughtfully
picks it up, then glances back over his shoulder: on the
threshold of the same farm, shown in the sequence marking
the outbreak of war, in the translucent light of a fine
summer's day, under a tree, a large wooden wheel is
mysteriously turning, (or so it appears from afar). Tall,
white-clad women disappear in the house, to which they are
returning, like proud graces. That is all - but everything
seems to have been said; all the magic of childhood, of a
promised land seen in a dream, a dream triggered by memory
and reaching out into a real landscape, a dream peopled by
unfamiliar yet real phantoms. Just as real as our vain
longing to overcome the distance between these two worlds,
between the landscape before us and that other one, forever
remote... In its seething multiplicity and flickering light,
the tangibility of the world Tarkovsky shows us, and its
secret riches and beauty, are at once something that extends
us infinitely, and something that disperses us and sends us
for the space of a moment back to some long-lost horizons.
On one hand, it is true, the ever-present flickering leads
to mysterious signals and contacts, as if remote destinies
and whole empires were giving one another conspiratorial
signs: the white feather that floats down to the white tuft
of hair on the man's head; the milk that flows into the
stream from the murdered pilgrim's flask, and is carried on
the water to the distant spot where another unfortunate
perishes in the water (Andrei Rublev). On the other
hand, "dispersion" is a constant threat; the flickering is
the omnipresent breath of the cosmos and the "blinking" of
realities and lives disappearing forever into memory (hence
Tarkovsky's obsession with flickering, gradually dying
light, seen in The mirror, Stalker, and The
sacrifice). In Tarkovsky's
films uncertainty shimmers even under those (relative)
certainties, which form the moral basis of his world
view. As with nature and the elements: fire is at
once a purifying force and a destructive one (the hands
warmed by the flames in The mirror, and the fire in
the same film; the death by burning of the old man in
Nostalgia); water is linked both with the destructive
action of time and with the primal, "saving" unification of
the individual with the mother. And even a mother figure
does not represent any fixed certainty. In Ivan's
childhood the descent into the maternal depths of memory
(and the subsequent "ascent") has a nightmarish quality.
When the young hero, tired after his bath, falls asleep in
the dug-out, he sees his late mother from below - as if from
the very bottom - leaning over the rim of a well,
accompanied by Ivan himself, but a year or two younger.
Although they are looking down, their image ripples, as if
it were only a reflection on the surface. This alone is
giddying and disturbing, but this is not all; as the well
bucket suddenly begins to hurtle down towards the sleeping
boy, a sudden cut shows us his mother falling in the dust
beside the well, into which the same pail of water is
rapidly sinking (and then returning from the depths). The
rise and the fall are identified, the return to the source
(soil and water, memory) is, at the same time, birth and
death, a condition of the upward journey, towards the light,
and of being swallowed up by the darkness of the grave. The
maternal body of the big balloon which we see in The
mirror (in a long shot, from old newsreel footage),
surrounded by mysterious uniformed mechanics, hanging
suspended from smaller balloons, and sailing with it through
the air as if on the waters of some primal sea, also evokes
the image of an ideal world, but one forever locked within
itself (like the rising sun in Nostalgia). The
balloon appears to have risen into the air by itself,
without any crew, while its upward movement is balanced only
by the downward flight of the leaflets... In Tarkovsky's
work, childhood is also a treasure lost before it has begun.
The burning barn, shown at the beginning of The
mirror, on the far side of a clearing adjoining the
hero's home, spells the doom of that home itself, long
before the black and white sequence which shows it empty and
abandoned, "inhabited" only by the fluttering white spectres
of the curtains drying in the breeze. The creak of the
sheet-iron, which, with the flickering light, accompanies
the hero's son as he falls asleep in The sacrifice,
similarly announces the destruction of the house in which he
is growing up, and lays the foundations for his future on
this loss. Our roots are held only in uncertain, shifting
soil, which we inhabit and claim as our own solely via the
medium of memory and its flickering flashes of
illumination. Although balanced
on the edge of a precipice, human life and the world itself
are not bereft of meaning for Tarkovsky. In Stalker
there is a scene in which the camera slowly rises from the
clayey, moss-grown earth to a grey background which seems to
be empty, but in which we suddenly discern the waters of a
lake. It is bounded on the horizon by a row of trees, whose
reflections in the water look like fragile, immaterial
roots. The water resembles the materialization of a void,
and the trees seem to have inscribed a meaning identified
with the void itself, with an awareness of that meaning, and
acceptance of it. It is apparently a matter of simply taking
on board the strangeness of the world, without coming to
terms with it, but making it one's own. Here Tarkovsky
approaches Antonioni's probing of unknown expanses of the
universe. If he often brings the whole vast world into his
scenes, we are also - in Andrei Rublev and
Stalker - witnesses to the way his figures cluster in
mid-canvas, their heads and bodies forming huge
agglomerations, a kind of shared body, which lends people
something alien, and abstractly monumental. The focus then
shifts back to the distance, and rests there, for
comparison, marking out a possible displacement of human
boundaries. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with any
conquest of space; on the contrary, Tarkovsky constantly
reminds us that we occupy only a modest and relative
position in the universe. The hero simply disappears behind
some trees in mid-screen (as in the park with the melting
snow, in The sacrifice), or leaves a door open behind
him, as when we, inside the set, follow his progress round
the house in Solaris, and are suddenly left face to
face with the yawning rectangle of the door, expecting
somebody to appear in it. The role assigned to us by such
images in the totality of the universe is assuredly only
that of a small component needed to fill an empty space, but
in no sense an irreplaceable component: instead of a man,
the rectangle of the door is soon occupied by a grazing
horse, and only after this does the hero himself appear. The
only power we can aspire to lies solely in a paradoxical
blending into the fabric of existence. At the end of
Stalker, the little girl who sends glasses flying
from the table by merely looking at them, as she faces the
camera, demonstrates her supremacy here even if the glasses
really fall because of tremors caused by a passing train,
which happened to coincide with her look. If it is not given
to us to impose our will upon objects, we can at least link
our will to theirs. The loyalty of
Tarkovsky's heroes to what has been is possible only at the
price of an inner paradox, and in conjunction with the
courage to leap into the void. The emblem of their firm
roots in the past and in memory, presented by the burning
barn in The mirror (seen on the far side of a forest
clearing, over the heads of some people who seem to have
already been watching it), is matched like an echo and a
necessary counterweight by the recurrent motif of a house
which is open to the world, a motif which is characteristic
of this director's entire oeuvre. In The mirror
alone, it can be seen in several forms. The recurrent scene,
insistently repeated, of a table laid in a garden behind a
house, from which a gust of wind, - suddenly shaking the
surrounding woods, - strips the tablecloth and sends a lamp
crashing onto it, somehow takes the house out of itself and
brings it face to face with the elements and timeless
nature. The scene in which only the billowing curtains show
any sign of life amid the ruins does the same. The looted,
unroofed church in Andrei Rublev, into which both
snow and earthly time seem to fall, having been offered
sanctuary in it, stands open to nature and the
cosmos,[7]
thanks to the weather; just as they are received in
Nostalgia by a cellar given over to nettles and
water. Also in Nostalgia, in the old man's home, in
which bottles filled with water and light from outside seem
to be participating in some unfamiliar ritual, the "open
house" appears in its purest form, surpassed only when the
motif returns for the last time in The sacrifice.
Like "interiors" and "exteriors", isolation from the world
and receptiveness to changes in it, poverty and wealth blend
here too; the structure made of bottles is the greater and
the more realistic as a luxury for being gilded only by the
fleeting golden light of a moment. And the house is the more
credible as a house for not having its fragility disguised,
and remaining open to the breeze. In The sacrifice,
the hero's home is the very thing that is at stake; when it
is menaced by the spectre of war, the hero paradoxically
saves it, only in order to destroy it himself, - as the
supreme sacrifice and offering to the gods. By burning the
house down and going to live in an asylum, he achieves his
own salvation, by the voluntary sacrifice of his own
interests to those of others, thus merging forever into the
infinite oneness of creation. This merging into the
multitude had already been given definitive bewitching shape
at the conclusion of Ivan's childhood, in which it is
expressed in the agitation of the young nurse searching in
vain in the birch-grove for the particular tree under which
she experienced her first kiss. After hearing of Ivan's
death, we see the hero again as he was in his carefree
pre-war days, playing his flute with some friends on
a beach. When he steps apart from the group and turns his
back on them, so that they can hide from him, this is merely
a temporary distancing, after which the joy of the shared
game will be the greater. The significance of his heroic
death is similar: it is the price which he pays to be
forever at one with the community of man, and the order of
nature. Diagnostic here is the "flashback" scene in The
sacrifice which immediately precedes the hero's heroic
deed: seen from above, a crowd of people rushes to and fro
across a yard, as a last reminder of the mass on whose
behalf (and in whose name) the hero is acting. And if their
haste looks like panic before an air-raid, they could also
merely be trying to hide while he plays his
flute... [7]
"Outside history is falling like snow", said André
Breton. It is as if
cinematic art were in the process of rediscovering here, at
one of its most salient "subjective" moments, the
"objectivity" and anonymity which has long competed with
individual (and stylized) expression. There is even a double
sense to this: Tarkovsky's vision, and the respect he pays
to the "memory" of the most ordinary things (in the special
style of a kind of magical documentary) is anonymous; and so
is the altruism he propounds. The hero of The
sacrifice, a former theatre director, in the end stands
directly for the artist renouncing his individual ambitions
- and with them the cult of art as an independent
value-system - in order to take an active part in helping
the suffering. "All this talk! I'm sick of it! If only
somebody would stop talking and do something!" he
says right at the beginning of the film. And at the end,
when he has crowned his mission by burning down his own
house, he himself falls silent. His son, however, hitherto
mute, gains the power of speech, seeming to receive it from
his father... Here the burning
of the house corresponds to the blazing barn in The
mirror, or rather, it is an inverted replica of
it: a gesture which lays open the house, and contains within
itself the inevitable loss of the house, yet somehow blunts
the impact of that loss. Long before the house goes up in
flames its windows and doors fly open in the breeze and its
occupants scatter among the trees in the surrounding
grounds; the hero himself leaves it - twice in succession -
as if literally trying to shake off some spell. His flight
increasingly resembles a graceful dance of relief, as he
makes his way through the fir trees, out of sight of his
family, circles the building in a wide arc, casting
last-minute spellbound glances towards it, picks up an
abandoned bicycle, mechanically rings its bell, straddles
it, and rides off in the gathering dusk along the tracks
over the fields. A similar grace
certainly serves to lighten the concreteness of many of
Tarkovsky's scenes: gestures and whole actions, shimmering
landscapes and light effects, the movement of a glass or a
cloud are for the director all creative motifs, from which
he builds the whole - by means of repetition, variation, and
intersection - as in a musical composition. And here, of
course, lies the anonymity of his vision: the mute discourse
of the most ordinary objects is elevated to the intensity of
everyday revelations and miracles. The dance at the
conclusion of The sacrifice is that much "lighter"
for the fact that its grace and harmony is filled with an
awareness of human frailty; and the fact that it is also an
expression of the relativity of the boundaries between our
weakness and our strength, between power and impotence. In
spite of the gravity of the moment (and his "Russian"
melancholy), Tarkovsky nonetheless injects into the dance,
quite naturally, some little "gags", which seem to have
their origins in the freedom (poetic and human) that his
message suggests, - a freedom which "objectively" has a
place for humour too. We laugh when the hero's matches won't
light as he tries to set fire to his house; when, just
before the blaze takes hold, he reaches back on the balcony
from which he has begun to climb down a ladder, and quickly
drinks the brandy left there; and when, in front of the
burning house, he escapes from the ambulance almost as soon
as the ambulancemen have bundled him into it. The humour has
all the more impact owing to the ingenuous delight the hero
finds in this moment, along with the courage to see himself
- and come to terms with himself - in all his nakedness,
without illusions, and without striking
attitudes. The giddying
concluding scene of The mirror was also a dance. We
had left the narrator's mother, as a young woman, in the
background, on the far side of a wheatfield. In the
foreground, with the camera, we found her in an updated
version, much older and accompanied by two children, one of
whom let out a piercing cry. We then left them, retreating
into the darkness of a wood, where the trees gradually
concealed this group from our view. In one travelling shot
we have left childhood behind and locked it once and for all
into the memory of the whole human race, a memory to which
another travelling shot (mentioned earlier) and its musical
accompaniment clearly pointed, by scanning the grass growing
on the ruins, to a Bach accompaniment, like a characteristic
"synthesis" of eternal nature and supratemporal art. In
The sacrifice the concluding ritual is somewhat
different: the hero, his wife, the ambulancemen, and the
young peasant sorceress, darting about in front of the
burning house, over a meadow covered with puddles and light
from a now clear sky, celebrate both the locality, suddenly
illuminated by the light of the dying home, and the end of
that home itself. This scene is not merely the latest
version of the marriage of fire and water, but also the
definitive coming together of space and time, or rather, of
times: the past, which is burning with the house in the
middle of the field; the present moment in the lives of the
protagonists, darting agitatedly hither and thither; and the
future, which intrudes in the form of the ambulance, like a
foretaste of the hero's sojourn in the asylum. At the same time,
this sequence leads into another temporal loop, in which a
return to timelessness blends with a new beginning. And not
merely because life is being reborn from under the shadow of
an apocalyptic menace, in the way that the outbreak of war
in Nostalgia was marked by the expulsion of the women
from paradise, and an encounter - through the rising sun -
with primal innocence. When we (with the "sorceress" on her
bicycle) unexpectedly catch up with the ambulance, which
disappeared from view in the meadow, carrying the hero, we
again see the hero's son. He is lying by the water under the
tree his father planted, looking up at the branches that
spread against the flickering background like a vast web of
aerial pathways, and pronounces his first sentence, which,
furthermore, is "In the beginning was the word". One circle
has been squared, the story of the son may begin at the
point where that of his father, who has lost the power of
speech, ends. This scene also
provides a striking conclusion to the whole of Tarkovsky's
oeuvre, being a symmetrically inverted echo - no doubt
unconscious - of the opening of his first film, Ivan's
childhood, where the camera climbs a tall tree, while
the boy moves away from it through the forest. Both films
are, moreover, closely bound up with the biography of the
director: Ivan the orphan, and his loneliness amidst the war
remind us of Tarkovsky's own childhood; The sacrifice
was completed shortly before his death, before he could be
reunited with his son, to whom the film is dedicated ('with
hope and confidence') as a last testament, and who thus
inherits the fundamental trauma of his career. This only
bears out yet again the truth of the old axiom, that an
artist vouches for any work of inspiration with his
life... The future which
opens before the youthful hero at the conclusion of The
sacrifice - here we seem to be "conquering space", with
the girl on the bicycle and the spreading boughs of the tree
- had previously opened before the boy from The
mirror. There it blended with the dazzling light of a
summer ringing with the sound of cicadas, a light which
unexpectedly drew the boy out from under the window of his
house at the very moment when we approached the window with
the camera, after passing through its empty rooms. In The
sacrifice, it is all the more apparent that the "urge to
conquer" is a direct continuation of a loss freely accepted;
that the light linking father and son in the chain of
generations is the light of the void in which it is always
necessary to start anew. This film (the most "linear" of his
works) is in this sense a true summing-up of Tarkovsky's
philosophy, just as the labyrinthine Mirror dealt
(mainly) with his view of memory and Stalker with his
attitude to mystery. The message here
is also a memory directed towards the horizon, in a direct
continuation of the gesture by which the hero turns the
burning barn in The mirror into the act of setting
fire to his own house. The man making this gesture seems
also to find in it the answer he needs to his mother and all
women, to those evil-eyed, but restless agents of divine
power, to which his only connection is as a rejected
element, cast out into alien, earthly exile. Whatever pull
his earthly sisters may exert, he must ultimately turn away
from them to face the void which yawns before him. At the
end of Ivan's childhood, when the hero chases the
other children during the game of hide-and-seek, he first
catches up with a girl we saw him playing with earlier; he
does not stop, but runs on, leaving the girl behind him,
like a space rocket shedding its first stage (in
Stalker too, women are cast aside, left on the border
of the forbidden Zone). When the hero of Andrei
Rublev leaves the nocturnal bacchanalia of the pagan
sect, an unknown naked woman, leaning on a wooden fence,
watches him idly with a languid gaze, which she slowly
lowers to her own arms, enfolding him within herself. But
the man's path does not lie towards her eyes, but away from
them, as if they were his point of departure; even if he can
find the strength to break the maternal embrace of his
original home, he will confront it again - arms flung wide
to greet him - in the freedom and light of the surrounding
area. His only hope lies in breaking those primeval bonds;
only this propels him towards the unknown, like the branches
of that spreading tree in The sacrifice that assail
the sky above it. If he puts down roots, this must be right
in the fateful space between his drive to possess and his
alienation, between the lost paradise and an alien world,
between the fullness he has before him, and the emptiness
that awaits him. This does not
mean he must forget all he is leaving behind. "The ashes
will be poured into wine and drunk with it," we are told in
The sacrifice, "but the memory will endure for the
rest of your life." And it will undoubtedly live on solely
by its mystery, like Tarkovsky's films themselves. Here, as
elsewhere, the essence remains inexpressible.
9346 words
On
mystery
Glimpses of
infinity
Timelessness
versus History
On
alienation
Dancing in
the open air
A backward
glance
See also, Gino Moliterno's piece in the First release section, "Zarathustra's Gift in Tarkovsky's The sacrifice", Screening the past 12 (March 2001).
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