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Tarkovsky with a
photograph of the house from The sacrifice [1]
Les Murray, "Travels with John Hunter" in the collection
Conscious and verbal (Potts Point, N.S.W. : Duffy
& Snellgrove, 1999), 10. What has
become perfect, everything ripe - wants to die! [2]
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spake Zarathustra, trans.
R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1969), 331. All further
references are to this edition with page numbers supplied in
the text. "Death," as
Adrian Martin has noted, "has a knack of turning the final
work of an artist into his or her 'testament' -
simultaneously the summation and apotheosis of everything
that preceded it."[3]
Tarkovsky's final film, The sacrifice (Offret
sacrificatio, Sweden 1985), still in editing stage when
its director was diagnosed with terminal cancer, has
certainly appeared to many as just such a final summation
and testament, an impression amply confirmed by the
director's poignant dedication of the work - with "hope and
confidence" - to his young son, Andrejusja. Yet, for all its
undoubted brilliance and its emotional intensity, its
striking imagery and its technical virtuosity, the film has
generally been judged by even its most favourable critics as
a flawed masterpiece, certainly a "mature" work and
something of a summa of the familiar Tarkovskian
themes and motifs but ultimately also a work strongly
undermined by considerable narrative and thematic confusion.
[4] [3]
Adrian Martin, Once upon a time in America (London:
British Film Institute, 1998), 9. [4]
Mark Le Fanu speaks for many when he refers to it as "this
last great, tragically flawed film"; see The cinema of
Andrei Tarkovsky (London: British Film Institute, 1987),
133. For more on negative reaction to the film, especially
in Germany, see V. T. Johnson and G. Petrie, The films of
Andrei Tarkovsky: A visual fugue (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 309, footnote 19. As is widely
known, the film had a long gestation. The idea for the film
had first come to Tarkovsky whilst he was still in the
Soviet Union and long before he had even thought about
making Nostalgia (Italy/Russia 1983). It was
originally titled The witch and the focal point, as
Tarkovsky himself recounts, "was to be the story of how the
hero, Alexander, was to be cured of a fatal disease as a
result of a night spent in bed with a
witch."[5]
In 1983, while in Cannes with Nostalgia Tarkovsky
signed a contract for the project, at this stage still
called The witch, with Anna-Lena Wibom and the
Swedish Film Institute. He continued to work on the script
for the rest of that year, during which, however, he altered
a number of details, changed the name to The
sacrifice and, crucially, added an apocalyptic
nuclear-war scenario. The part of Alexander, which Tarkovsky
had originally written for Anatoly Solonitsyn, was
re-written for Erland Josephson, who had played Domenico,
the "holy fool" of Nostalgia. Josephson had been one
of Bergman's favourite actors and the film was scheduled to
be shot by Sven Nikvist so, not surprisingly, the entire
project took on a Bergmanesque feel. All these changes thus
altered the original conception, leading to the film as we
now have it: [6] [5]
Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in time, trans. Kitty
Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989),
217. [6]
My references will all be to the 142 minute version of film,
now on Artificial Eye video and distributed by
Foxvideo. After a long
credits sequence superimposed over a detail of Leonardo's
unfinished Adoration of the magi (which is
accompanied by the "Erbarme dich" of Bach's St. Matthew
passion and which ends with a slow upward pan along the
central tree in the painting), the film begins with
Alexander and his young son busy trying to plant a withered
tree against a luminous sea, with the father all the while
recounting something resembling a Zen parable to his
son.[7]
Otto, the postman, soon arrives on his bicycle, bearing a
number of congratulatory telegrams. We thus learn that it is
Alexander's fiftieth birthday and he and his family are soon
to be joined in their celebrations by both the postman and
Victor, a close family friend and a medical doctor who has
recently performed a throat operation on the young boy, or
"Little Man" as he's continually called, which has left the
boy unable to speak. [7]
The story actually comes from the Lives of the
fathers and was recorded by Tarkovsky in his diary in
March 1982. See Andrei Tarkovsky, Time within time: the
diaries 1970-1986, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (London:
Faber and Faber, 1994), 303. Alexander, a
retired actor and now successful journalist, philosopher and
academic, is outwardly calm and collected but actually
undergoing something of a personal crisis and patently
afflicted by what one can only call existential malaise. In
the course of the day's rather demure "celebrations" we
learn more about Alexander and his past life - and also
about Otto's experience and knowledge of paranormal
phenomena - until, abruptly, in the early evening, an
ominous TV broadcast appears to confirm that the sound of
jets (or missiles), which we have earlier heard streak
overhead, is related to the definitive outbreak of an
all-out nuclear war. As the child sleeps in his cot and the
rest of the company, muted and despondent, settles
downstairs to await the end, Alexander in the upstairs study
of his beloved house makes a vow to God: if God (in whom
until this point he has not believed) will perform the
impossible and restore the world to its previous state,
Alexander will henceforth live in silence, forsaking
everything that is dearest to him, including his young son
and his beloved family home. Later that night
Otto, the postman, visits Alexander in his study and urges
him to go immediately to sleep with Maria, a part-time
servant girl who lives on the other side of the island but
whom we have seen earlier in the film in Alexander's house
and who, Otto insists, is a witch, "of the best kind". This,
Otto declares - is the only way to return things to their
previous state. Alexander borrows the postman's rickety bike
and, in the dead of night, cycles to Maria's house. After
ritually washing his hands and then recounting a
pathos-laden story connected with his mother, Alexander is
able to convince the meek and accomodating Maria to make
love with him. Their sexual union concludes in a levitation
of their entwined bodies which is strongly reminiscent of
similar scenes in Tarkovsky's earlier
films.[8] [8]
Specifically the scene appears to merge both the young
mother levitating alone above her bed in Mirror
(USSR, 1971) and Kris and Hari levitating together in
Solaris (USSR, 1975). When Alexander
awakes in the morning, back in the study of his own house,
he discovers that electrical power has been restored and it
appears in fact to be the previous day. Ostensibly in order
to keep his vow to God, he now tricks the others away from
the house and then methodically but gleefully sets fire to
it. As the house burns in a long and sustained conflagration
Alexander scampers about through the surrounding sodden
ground, behaving halfway between a madman and a naughty
child. The fire brings back the bewildered family who try
unsuccessfully to restrain his antics while, from the other
side, Maria, the "good witch", also appears. An ambulance
(somehow) immediately arrives, and after some semi-comical
to-ing and fro-ing - Alexander is also now respecting his
vow of silence and is thus unable to explain his actions -
he is eventually bundled into the vehicle and driven away.
We follow the ambulance as it drives past the "Little Man",
watering the tree which they had been planting at the
beginning of the film (the previous or the same day? we
don't know). Maria, who has
also reached this spot on bicycle to catch a final glimpse
of the ambulance, watches in silence as it disappears into
the distance and then cycles off along the same path from
which Otto had originally come. "Little Man", lying
peacefully and leisurely nestled at the foot of the tree,
looks at the sky through its branches and utters his first
and only words: "In the beginning was the Word. Why was
that, papa?" The film ends with a slow upward pan along the
tree's trunk (repeating the upward pan along the painted
treetrunk of the Leonardo Adoration which had opened
the film) and then a final shot of the bare branches against
a glittering expanse of water over which appears Tarkovsky's
dedication of the film to his own son. Brilliantly
photographed and with a soundtrack as haunting as Tarkovsky
ever achieved, the film exhibits all the signs of a great
and culminating work and yet, as we've already said, has
also seemed to many to be severely compromised by thematic
and narrative confusion. Part of the film's narrative
weakness, as a number of critics have pointed out, appears
to derive from the lack of mesh between the story of the
witch and the pact with God. Johnson and Petrie express a
common complaint when they write: [9]
Johnson and Petrie, 172. And indeed it
would seem fair to say that if Alexander has made a
pact with God which he intends to honour, his sexual
encounter with Maria - even if she is a "good" witch,
something which really receives no visible confirmation in
the film - would seem to be not only very odd in Christian
terms but also superfluous in narrative terms. A similar problem
with logical and narrative coherence has been suggested in
Alexander's final and spectacular gesture of burning the
house: how can burning the home of his loved ones, the ones
for whom he makes the pact with God, be an
appropriate self-sacrifice for
Alexander?[10]
As Philip Strick, a longtime admirer of Tarkovsky, wrote in
his review of the film in 1987: [10]
The difficulties associated with determining the precise
nature of the sacrifice in The sacrifice have been
well discussed by Mark Le Fanu, both in his review of the
film in Sight and sound (Autumn 1986, 284-285) and in
the chapter devoted to The sacrifice in his book,
The cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (London: British Film
Institute, 1987). See also the very fruitful discussion in
the final section of Peter Green's "Apocalypse and
Sacrifice", Sight and sound, Spring 1987,
117-118. [11]
Philip Strick, "Offret (The sacrifice)", Monthly
film bulletin, vol. 54, no. 636 (January 1987),
7-8. And there would
seem to be a whole host of other unresolved
obscurities in the film, not least the significance of the
enigmatic return at various points to the unfinished
Adoration of the magi by Leonardo. Nevertheless, and
in spite of all these enigmas and aporias, there has
been general critical consensus in reading Alexander's
sacrifice in The sacrifice in Christian terms and in
seeing Alexander himself as an extension of the
self-immolating Domenico of Nostalgia. and thus as
the last and culminating instance of the Tarkovskian "holy
fool". Tarkovsky's own remarks about the film, in
Sculpting in time and elsewhere, also consistently
characterized it as a "parable" exemplifying the
specifically Christian notion of
self-sacrifice.[12]
And yet, as I hope to explore here, an emphatic reference to
"Nietzsche's dwarf" very early in the film opens up the
tantalizing possibility of a more eccentric, but in some
ways perhaps richer, interpretation of this frustratingly
enigmatic final work. The reference to
"Nietzsche's dwarf" is made by Otto, the postman, in the
film's very first postcredits sequence (a long single shot
which, at nine and a half minutes, is the longest in any of
Tarkovsky's films). After chiding Alexander for always being
"so gloomy", Otto suggests that he is probably like most
people, living their lives as though waiting for something
else, "something real and important" to happen. It's at this
point that he confesses to being often assailed by thoughts
of "[...] that dwarf, that notorious [...] -
You know, that....hunchback! From Nietzsche! The one that
sent Zarathustra into a fainting fit!".[13] Now, although
this reference to Nietzsche has often been noticed, it has,
curiously, never been further explored, presumably because
it has been regarded as mere badinage in the mouth of the
rather garrulous Otto or perhaps just name-dropping on the
part of Tarkovsky.[14]
And yet this lack of critical attention is indeed curious,
especially since its occurrence so early in the film would
seem to suggest an important role for it. Alexander (played
by Erland Josephson who, we should remember, had actually
played the role of Nietzsche in Liliana Cavani's Beyond
good and evil [Italy/France/Germany 1977])
explicitly recalls this reference to Nietzsche later on in
the film when Otto comes to the study to urge him to go
sleep with Maria.[15]
There would also seem to be a thinly-veiled allusion to
Nietzsche's essay On truth and lie in an extramoral
sense in Otto's outburst: "The truth! What is the
truth?" and his story of the cockroach running around a
plate as an exemplification of
perspectivism.[16]
In any case, Otto's reference to Nietzsche here at the
beginning of the film can hardly be a case of mere
name-dropping or quoting the odd neat epigram because
"Nietzsche's dwarf" really evokes nothing less than the
entire so-called "doctrine" of the Eternal Return, the
notion which is generally regarded as Nietzsche's "thought
of thoughts" and at the very heart of his attempted
"revaluation of all values".[17] [12]
In "A propos du Sacrifice", published in
Positif (no.303, May 1986), Tarkovsky stated: "Dans
ce film, je montre un des aspects de cette lutte si on vit
en sociétè et qui est la conseption
chretiénne du sacrifice de soi." (3) ["In this
film, I show one of the aspects of this struggle if one
lives in society, and that is the Christian conception of
self-sacrifice".] [13]
Although the film sometimes differs from the
recently-published screenplay, the reference to Nietzsche's
dwarf appears in both, which suggests a strong place for it.
See Andrei Tarkovsky, Collected screenplays, trans.
William Powell and Natasha Synessios (London: Faber and
Faber, 1999), 519. [14]
Layla Alexander Garret who worked with Tarkovsky on The
sacrifice reported that he loved to quote Nietzsche on
the set (see Sight and sound, Jan 1997, 23).
Strangely, however, there is no mention of Nietzsche in
Tarkovsky's diaries during all this time. There is a
reference to "the eternal return" in the last entry for 1981
explicitly connected with the project for The witch
(which Tarkovsky at this point admits is not quite the right
title) but it seems to derive from one of Seneca's
Letters which he has just quoted; see Time within
time, 292. [15]
"Is this another of your little Nietzschean items?" he asks.
To which Otto answers: "Do you have any other way out?
You've no alternative." Collected screenplays,
548-549. [16]
See Tarkovsky, Collected screenplays, 532. At this
point there is a slight, but not significant, divergence of
wording between the printed version and the film, although
the problematization of the nature of truth is present in
both. [17]
The Eternal Return (or Eternal Recurrence) is perhaps
the most highly discussed but also most highly
contested topic in Nietzsche scholarship. For an
illuminating and systematic treatment of the notion see
especially Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche's thought of the
eternal return (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1972) and her later The problem of time
in Nietzsche, trans. J. F. Humphrey (London and Toronto:
Associated University Presses, 1987). See also Bernd Magnus,
Nietzsche's existential imperative (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1978) and Karl Löwith,
Nietzsche's philosophy of the eternal recurrence of the
same, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997). Critical neglect
of this reference to Nietzsche is even more puzzling,
however, when one considers that Nietzsche's doctrine of the
Eternal Return is a philosophical re-interpretation of the
theme of Time for Time was, after all, a major obsession
with Tarkovsky. As is well known, Tarkovsky's preferred way
of characterizing the art of filmmaking was as a "sculpting
in time", which was the title he gave to his volume of
reflections on the cinema, and his published diaries were
also significantly titled Time within time. One might
further note that Nostalgia, Tarkovsky's previous
film, is as much a quest for lost time as for lost place
and, as Johnson and Petrie have pointed out, the temporal
duration of many of the shots in this, Tarkovsky's final and
culminating film, really push cinematic time close to its
absolute limit.[18]
Considered within this context, then, an explicit reference
to Nietzsche's doctrine of the Eternal Return must appear
highly charged with significance.[19]
Indeed, it hardly seems surprising to learn that Tarkovsky
himself had, at one point, actually considered changing the
title of the film from The sacrifice to, in fact,
"The Eternal Return".[20] At this point,
however, we should turn to Nietzsche himself in order to
explore this complex notion a bit further. Nietzsche's
"dwarf", as Otto rightly calls him, appears early in part
three of Thus spake Zarathustra, in the
section entitled "Of the vision and the riddle". (176 ff.)
There Zarathustra narrates what he calls "a riddle and a
parable" to sailors on a ship, in which he recounts his
solitary attempt to reach the top of a mountain during the
course of which he is abruptly assailed by his "devil and
arch-enemy", the Spirit of Gravity. "Half-dwarf, half-mole;
crippled, crippling", the Spirit squats on Zarathustra's
shoulders, weighing him down with leaden words and leaden
thoughts, paralyzing him to the point where Zarathustra is
forced to confront the great nay-sayer with his "most
abysmal of thoughts", a thought he knows the dwarf cannot
endure. What Zarathustra then recounts is generally regarded
as the fullest expression of the Nietzschean doctrine of the
Eternal Return and is thus worth quoting in full: Then something
occurred which lightened me: for the dwarf jumped from my
shoulder, the inquisitive dwarf! And he squatted down
upon a stone in front of me. But a gateway stood just
where we had halted. "Behold this
gateway, dwarf!" I went on: "it has two aspects. Two
paths come together here: no one has ever reached their
end. This long lane
behind us: it goes on for eternity. And that long lane
ahead of us - that is another eternity. They are in
opposition to one another, these paths; they abut on one
another: and it is here at this gateway that they come
together. The name of the gateway is written above it:
'Moment'. But if one
were to follow them further and even further and further:
do you think, dwarf, that these paths would be in eternal
opposition?" "Everything
straight lies," murmured the dwarf disdainfully, "All
truth is crooked, time itself is a circle." "Spirit of
Gravity!" I said angrily, "do not treat this too lightly!
Or I shall leave you squatting where you are, Lamefoot -
and I have carried you high!" "Behold this
moment!" I went on. "From this gateway Moment a long,
eternal lane runs back: an eternity lies behind
us. Must not all
things that can run have already run along this
lane? Must not all things that can happen
have already happened, been done, run
past? And if all
things have been here before: what do you think of this
moment, dwarf? Must not this gateway, too, have been here
- before? And are not
all things bound fast together in such a way that this
moment draws after it all future things? Therefore
- draws itself too? For all things
that can run must also run once again
forward along this long lane. And this slow
spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this
moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway
whispering together, whispering of eternal things - must
we not all have been here before? - and must we
not return and run down that other lane out before us,
down that long, terrible lane - must we not return
eternally?" Thus I spoke,
and I spoke more and more softly: for I was afraid of my
own thoughts and reservations. Then, suddenly, I heard a
dog howling nearby. Had I ever
heard a dog howling in that way. My thoughts ran back.
Yes! When I was a child, in my most distant
childhood: - then I heard
a dog howling in that way. And I saw it, too, bristling,
its head raised, trembling in the stillest midnight, when
even dogs believe in ghosts: - so that it
moved me to pity. For the full moon had just gone over
the house, silent as death, it had just stopped still, a
round glow, still upon the flat roof as if upon a
forbidden place: that was what
had terrified the dog: for dogs believe in thieves and
ghosts. And when I heard such growling again, it moved me
to pity again. Where had the
dwarf now gone? And the gateway? And the spider? And all
the whispering? Had I been dreaming? Had I awoken? All at
once I was standing between wild cliffs, alone, desolate
in the most desolate moonlight. But there a
man was lying! And there! The dog, leaping,
bristling, whining; then it saw me coming - then it
howled again, then it cried out - had I ever heard
a dog cry so for help? And truly, I
had never seen the like of what I then saw. I saw a young
shepherd writhing, chocking, convulsed, his face
distorted; and a heavy, black snake was hanging out of
his mouth. Had I ever
seen so much disgust and pallid horror on a face? Had he,
perhaps, been asleep? Then the snake had crawled into his
throat - and there had bitten itself fast. My hands
tugged and tugged at the snake - in vain! they could not
tug the snake out of the shepherd's throat. Then a voice
cried from me: "Bite! Bite! Its head off!
Bite!" - thus a voice cried from me, my horror, my hate,
my disgust, my pity, all my good and evil cried out of me
with a single cry. You bold men
around me! You venturers, adventurers, and those of you
who have embarked with cunning sails upon undiscovered
seas! You who take pleasure in riddles! Solve for me
the riddle that I saw, interpret to me the vision of the
most solitary man! For it was a
vision and a premonition: what did I see in
allegory? And who is it that must come one
day? Who is
the shepherd into whose mouth the snake thus crawled?
Who is the man into whose throat all that is
heaviest, blackest will thus crawl? The shepherd,
however, bit as my cry had advised him; he bit with a
good bite! He spat far the snake's head - and sprang
up. No longer a
shepherd, no longer a man - a transformed being,
surrounded with light, laughing! Never yet on
earth had any man laughed as he laughed! O my brothers,
I heard a laughter that was no human laughter - and now a
thirst consumes me, a longing that is never stilled."
(178-180) [18]
Johnson and Petrie, 178-179. [19]
It seems signficant, too, that Tarkovsky, at least in the
film, is at pains to name Nietzsche specifically because,
for a Russian filmmaker, another non-philosophical source
for the idea of the eternal return would have been closer to
hand. The notion appears in nuce in the mouth of the
devil who appears to Ivan in chapter 12 of part 4 of The
brothers Karamazov: "Why, you keep thinking of our
present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated
a billion times. Why, it's become extinct, been frozen;
cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements,
again 'the water above the firmament', then again a comet,
again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth - and the
same sequence may have been repeated endlessly, and exactly
the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably
tedious..." Fyodor Dostoevsky, The brothers
Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Heinemann,
1974), 683. Curiously enough, in the published screenplay,
after Otto has talked about Nietzsche's dwarf and expanded
on what the notion of Eternal Recurrence entails, Alexander
answers: "That's already been done! Another,
Svidrigailov...Don't think that you invented it!"
Collected screenplays, 519. What's most curious is
that Alexander is citing Dostoevsky but not referring to the
relevant passage from The brothers Karamazov quoted
above; the allusion is instead to one of the major
characters in Dostoevsky's Crime and punishment who
commits suicide at the end of the novel without ever making
any reference to the notion of Eternal Return. [20]
Reported by Natasha Synessios in her introduction to the
screenplay; see Tarkovsky, Collected screenplays,
509. In the sections
that follow the recounting of this remarkable vision
Zarathustra continues to spar with his dwarf, the Spirit of
Gravity, repeatedly invoking and refining this strange and
difficult idea of Eternal Recurrence which he estimates to
be his "richest gift" to mankind. The notion itself had
already been presented in a more concise form inThe gay
science under the telling rubric, "The greatest
weight": [21]
See Friedrich Nietzsche, The gay science, trans. with
commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books,
1974), 273. In this formulation the notion seems closer to
its presentation in the passage from The brothers
Karamazov, cited above (see footnote 19). Clearly such a
thought, "the hardest of all thoughts to bear", can either
lead one to despair if one judges one's life not to have
been worth living (but then why continue to live?) or to a
supreme and willing re-affirmation of every aspect of one's
existence if one has the courage to "become what one is" and
to respond, as Zarathustra himself does, with: "Was
that life? well then, once more!" (178) Eternal
Recurrence, then, is presented by Nietzsche/Zarathustra as
the most effective antidote to nihilism; but what exactly
is nihilism? Nietzsche was to give a variety of
answers to this question in different
contexts.[22]
Nevertheless, personified in the dwarf, the Spirit of
Gravity that weighs down, crushes and sickens the human
spirit, nihilism - even, and perhaps especially when
it takes the form of idealism - betrays its essential nature
as a failure to value the present moment in its eternal
"nowness", thus manifesting a dissatisfaction with, and
ultimately a hatred of, the world, life and oneself. For
Nietzsche nihilism is an existential ailment or nausea, a
sickness typified by a yearning for a different, better
world or condition but a yearning which, in its
"otherworldliness", inevitably deprecates and de-values
this earth and this life.[23] [22]
For a concise discussion of the range of Nietzsche's
conception of nihilism see chapter 2 of Alan White's
Within Nietzsche's labyrinth (London: Routledge,
1990). [23]
See Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's existential imperative,
42, 144 ff. The symptoms of
nihilism are a gloomy world-weariness, a nay-saying to life,
a sort of looking at the world from the backside up, as
Zarathustra puts it: That is what
the fanatics and hypocrites with bowed heads whose hearts
too are bowed down preach: "The world itself is a filthy
monster." For they all
have an unclean spirit; but especially those who have no
peace or rest except they see the world from
behind - these afterworldsmen! I tell
these to their faces, although it doesn't sound
pleasant: The world resembles man in that it has a behind
- so much is true! There is much
filth in the world: so much is true! But the world
is not itself a filthy monster on that account."
(222) Zarathustra
offers some advice to these world-weary
nay-sayers: None of you
wants to step into the death-boat! How then could you be
world weary? World-weary!
And you have not even parted from the earth! I have
always found you still greedy for the earth, still in
love with your own weariness of the earth! Your lip does
not hang down in vain - a little earthly wish still sits
upon it! And in your eye - does not a little cloud of
unforgotten joy swim there? There are many
excellent inventions on earth, some useful, some
pleasant; the earth is to be loved for their
sake. [...]
But you world-weary people! You should be given a stroke
of the cane. Your legs should be made sprightly again
with cane strokes![...] And if you will not again
run about merrily, you shall -pass away!
(224) Considered
against this backdrop Alexander's maudlin tirade against
"how the world goes", in the scene following the one where
Otto has recounted his obsession with Zarathustra's dwarf,
must appear decidedly redolent of nihilism and enervating
world-weariness. Alexander's monologue at this point seems
to be a continuation of Domenico's moralizing denunciation
in Nostalgia just before he sets fire to himself on
the Roman Campidoglio but the accusations here soon become
more self-reflexive, more filled with self-loathing and
bloated with logorrhea: "Words, words, words," Alexander
finally quotes wearily and in obvious exasperation; and then
"Why can't I do something?"[24]
Significantly, at this point, "Little Man", who has
disappeared offscreen during Alexander's monologue, abruptly
jumps onto his shoulders and knocks him to the ground.
Having already appeared seated on his father's shoulders in
the previous scene and now looking like a "wounded demonic
goblin", as Mark Le Fanu characterizes
him,[25]
the child here uncannily evokes the dwarf's crushing effect
of Zarathustra.[26] [24]
The allusion to Hamlet (which Tarkovsky hoped to film
at some stage) appears in the film but is missing from the
published screenplay. Nevertheless, as Paul Coates suggests,
Alexander's disgust with the wordiness of his own monologues
in the film "may stand for the self-sickened state of a
logocentric culture". See Film at the intersection of
high and mass culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 158. [25]
The cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, 127. Paul Coates has
also suggested that "When Little Man precipitates himself at
Alexander's neck, he is for a moment the demon-child of
[Ingmar Bergman's] Hour of the wolf
[Sweden 1968]". See Coats, 161. [26]
Here the divergence between the published screenplay and the
film is considerable and a comparison is illuminating. In
the screenplay as Alexander concludes his gloomy jeremiad
against human culture and civilization the boy becomes
exuberant and runs around turning summersaults until he
decides to lie down motionless on the ground some way off
and play dead. Alarmed, Alexander calls out to him and
eventually runs and kneels to examine him in terror, at
which point the boy "Suddenly leaps to his feet, with a
burst of laughter, silently as usual, and begins to dance
around his father, extremely satisfied with his joke."
Tarkovsky, Collected screenplays, 524. In the film
the boy wanders off whilst Alexander continues his monologue
about civilization as one big mistake. Then, when the father
notices the boy's absence and begins to look around
anxiously for him, he abruptly jumps back into screenspace
onto his father's shoulders, knocking both of them over and
bloodying his own nose. Only a few seconds later Alexander
faints and experiences the first of the apocalyptic
visions. The subsequent
outbreak of a nuclear war, then, on the very day of
Alexander's fiftieth birthday, locates him at something very
much like the portal of the Moment where Zarathustra had
been forced to confront his own Spirit of Gravity. Indeed
for twentieth-century man, the definitive outbreak of a
nuclear war must surely count as a sort of absolute
moment, a decisive instant breaking world history into two,
with an eternity running off in both directions. And
significantly, although he had originally denied to Otto
that he has lived until now as in a sort of animated
suspension, waiting for a "real" moment of reality to
happen, Alexander's first reaction to the news of the
outbreak of war is: "I have waited my whole life for this".
This decisive event, this eternal moment during which
Alexander glimpses with terrible clarity the waiting boat to
the great Nothingness, thus forces him to a confrontation
with his own "dwarf", his own nihilism, his habitual
devaluation of present life and time in favour of an
otherworld elsewhere and at another time. And if Alexander
is being forced to confront his own nihilism here, his own
self and his own past, undoubtedly, beneath the
all-too-transparent mask, lies Tarkovsky's own
visage.[27] If one considers
the fundamental role played by Alexander's house in
fostering his nihilism and his nay-saying to life- and the
figure of the house is, in any case, always a fairly
transparent symbol of the self - Alexander's setting fire to
the house at the end of The sacrifice must now appear
- at least from within the Nietzschean context sketched in
above - less a penitential gesture of Christian self-denial
and more a joyful act of affirmative
self-transfiguration.[28]
In fact, as Philip Strick unwittingly saw clearly enough in
his review of the film quoted earlier, what we are
witnessing is indeed something of a Zoroastrian fire ritual
although one in which the Nietzschean Zarathustra's supreme
exaltation of the moment (his "greatest gift to mankind")
has redeemed the moralistic pessimism of his historical
forebear and namesake.[29] [27]
The strong autobiographical dimension of the film has often
been noted. Johnson and Petrie, for example, write that
"Although Nostalgia may seem more autobiographical
than any other film since Mirror, The
sacrifice combines intimate details of Tarkovsky's
personal and family life with his spiritual, philosophical
and religious preoccupations." (187). For Johnson and
Petrie, in fact, "One of the film's problems may in fact
arise from Tarkovsky's attempt to 'burden' his hero with all
his own philosophical and moral, as well as his personal,
concerns" (182) although Tarkovsky himself had no
compunction in admitting that he saw no boundaries between
his life and his films. [28]
For a richly-poetic analysis of the burning house in
Tarkovsky's films, although making no reference to
Nietzsche, see Petr Král's brilliant "Tarkovsky, or
the burning house", in this issue of Screening the
past. [29]
In Ecce homo Nietzsche explained why he had chosen
Zarathustra to be the instrument for his revaluation of
values: "Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of
good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the
transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as
force, cause and end in itself, is his work. [...]
Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality;
consequently he must also be the first to recognize it."
Basic writings of Nietzsche, trans. edited and with
commentaries by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library,
1968), 783-784. Furthermore,
given the insistence with which the dacha, the
Russian house, has appeared and re-appeared in Tarkovsky's
previous films, what is being consigned to the flames here,
transfigured and volatilized in this great and final
conflagration in perhaps the last scene that the director
would ever film, is not just Alexander's house but
all of Tarkovsky's houses, all those nests of stored
memories and congealed time, anchoring the self to the past
and fatally undermining the joy of the present through a
yearning for another time, another place, another state, in
a word: domiciled worldweariness. And perhaps Tarkovsky's
aim here is even more specific for if, as has sometimes been
noted, Nostalgia and The Sacrifice may be read
as forming something of a diptych,[30]
then the supreme exaltation of the present Moment and the
redemption of past time which is being enacted in
Alexander's/Tarkovsky's burning of the house in The
sacrifice is a precise inversion of that final, stunning
but immobile (and immobilizing) image which both sums up and
seals Nostalgia like the engraved portal of a
mausoleum. As Paul Coates has suggested, "the closing
section of The Sacrifice can then be read as an
immolation of the darkness of
Nostalgia".[31]
Indeed, more than an "immolation" one should speak of an
"overcoming" for if the burning house of The
sacrifice stands as the definitive act through which
Alexander vanquishes his previous world-weariness (and
simultaneously, with the generosity of a gift, also
liberates the others who have been subjected to its
enervation), it would also seem to function as a precise
antidote to, and an overcoming of, the cloying attachment to
the past so beautifully congealed in the final image of
Nostalgia. [30]
See Johnson and Petrie, 170. [31]
Coats, 159. It's significant,
nevertheless, that, even as it precisely inverts the final
emblematic shot of Nostalgia, the image of the
burning house is not itself the final shot of The
sacrifice . Instead, the film closes one step further
on, as it were, with the child/Little Man regaining his
power of speech in order to express innocence and
wonderment. As with Alexander's sacrifice, this conclusion
has also been most commonly read in a Christian key and yet
it too might also be interpreted from a Nietzschean
perspective for the child, as an allegory of an affirmative
attitude to existence and a delight in what Nietzsche called
"the innocence of Becoming" is, in fact, the third and
highest of the Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit taught by
Zarathustra, the bearer of the gift of Eternal
Recurrence:"The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new
beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion,
a sacred Yes."(55) Seeing the
burning house of The sacrifice as a positive
reversal, and thus as a redemption and overcoming, of the
final, beautiful but gloom-laden image of Nostalgia,
also opens up the possibility of a revaluation of the
significance of the Leonardo Adoration which hovers
over The sacrifice in a similar way to that in which
Piero della Francesca's Madonna del parto (Pregnant
Madonna) hovers above the whole of
Nostalgia. It would seem
significant that in both films these respective religious
images of birth engender fear or dread. At the beginning of
Nostalgia Andrei refuses to go with Eugenia to look
at the Madonna whilst in The sacrifice Otto
eventually confesses to always having found Leonardo
"sinister", preferring instead Piero della Francesca. At one
level the significance of each painting seems to be
clarified by each film's final explicit dedication:
Nostalgia being dedicated to Tarkovsky's deceased
mother; The Sacrifice, appearing to repeat the
gift-giving of the Magus to the Child in the painting, being
dedicated "in hope and confidence" to Tarkovsky's son. And
yet if expectant motherhood is what is conveyed in Piero
della Francesca's Madonna why should Andrei be so
loath to look at it? If a gift is all that is conveyed by
the Leonardo Adoration, why should Otto be terrified
of it and why should Alexander himself, in the published
screenplay, also think, as he looks at the dark glass of the
Adoration: "The picture really is very
terrifying"?[32] [32]
Tarkovsky, Collected screenplays, 549. Perhaps some
light might be thrown on the matter if we were able to
determine what exactly is the gift that the Magus is
offering to the Child. We are shown the relevant detail of
the painting for several minutes as the credits appear but
when the camera moves to pan up along the tree trunk we are
none the wiser as to what the proffered chalice contains.
Evidence about Leonardo's own intentions is scarce but the
tradition suggests that the three magi (who originally were
learned Persian, possibly Zoroastrian, priests and
not kings)[33]
brought the Child gold, in homage to his kingship,
frankincense, in homage to his divinity and myrrh, a
fragrant ointment used in embalming, as a foreshadowing of
the sacrifice of his death.[34]
Might it not be this latter "gift-as-sacrifice" which is
being offered to the Child in the Leonardo Adoration,
presaging his fated death on the Cross even as it celebrates
his birthday?[35]
But if the myrrh thus remembers forward to the tragic
destiny of Christ even as it celebrates his entry into life,
it also betokens Nietzsche's notion of amor fati, the
joyful acceptance of one's fate which, in its temporal
aspect, is a conjoining of the past and the future in the
eternal moment of the affirmative
present.[36]
In fact, as if to underscore the way in which this gift
coalesces past and future into the present, the face of the
Christ-child seems already to be wrinkled with
age. The assimilation
of time present to time future enacted by the gift-sacrifice
of the myrrh in the Leonardo Adoration might then
perhaps be juxtaposed with the Madonna of
Nostalgia. The forward
thrust toward the future and fulfilling moment of birth
which is being hailed as close at hand in the Madonna del
parto is nevertheless heavily compromised by the
world-weary nostalgia which suffuses the entire film from
start to finish.[37]
Appropriately dedicated to the director's deceased mother,
Nostalgia's temporal drift is, however, not in the
future direction of birth but clearly drawn towards the
past, a past which has become distilled as a congealment of
time. But this backward nostalgic drift, patently
contradicting and negating the imminent birth being
announced in the Madonna , is finally and decisively
reversed by the Adoration of The
sacrifice for not only has the child who was announced
in the previous film now been born, but the gift of myrrh
presages his future. A fated future marked out for certain
death but a fateful future which may be joyfully embraced,
since it is also already inscribed with resurrection and
eternity. In the end then perhaps this is the ambivalent
gift that Tarkovsky is offering us as well as his own son:
an injunction to live and love our own life as no other for
only in this life and this moment is eternity realized and
only by embracing our own fate can we become who we
are. As Tarkovsky's
culminating film and testament The sacrifice is
undoubtedly a complex work which resists neat explication
according to any single schema. Nevertheless, as I hope I
have succeeded in demonstrating, at least some of the film's
emotional and philosophical richness undoubtedly derives
from Tarkovsky's willingness to engage, at some level, with
the Nietzschean doctrine of the Eternal Return. And yet if,
as I've suggested, it is with that final searing image of
the burning house that Tarkovsky achieved his supreme
exaltation of the present by volatilizing all the past time
he had so carefully hoarded in previous films, Fate itself
would seem to have intervened to mark the scene forever as
always and already doubled. For, as all now know, at the
first setup for the burning house Sven Nikvist's camera
jammed, as did the auxiliary camera, and so nothing was
recorded on film. With great effort and at great expense the
house was rebuilt and a fortnight later the conflagration
was filmed a second time, resulting in the final scene as we
now have it. One wonders if, on that second occasion,
Tarkovsky was inwardly gnashing his teeth or mentally
smiling at the cosmic irony and repeating, together with
Zarathustra: "Was that life. Well then, once
again!" [33]
For a full discussion of the origin of the magi see
Gilberte Vezin, L'Adoration et le cycle des mages dans
l'art chrétien primitif (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1950), 7 ff. [34]
SeeJames Hall, Dictionary of subjects and symbols in
art, intro. by Kenneth Clark (Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press,1979), 6. [35]
Here one might recall Otto's gnomic assertion as he presents
Alexander with the huge original seventeenth-century map
that he has brought him as a birthday present: "Of course
it's a sacrifice. Why wouldn't it be? Doesn't every gift
involve a sacrifice? Otherwise what sort of a gift would it
be?" [36]
Amor fati, Nietzsche's term for the willful and
joyful acceptance of one's fate, even (and especially) in
all its most questionable aspects, is the major correlative
of the Eternal Return and Nietzsche's formula for
affirmative self-creation. Its clearest statement is given
in Ecce homo, the book significantly subtitled "How
One Becomes What One Is": "My formula for what is great in
humanity is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be
different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.
Not merely bear what's necessary, still less conceal it -
all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is
necessary- but love it." Basic writings of
Nietzsche, trans and edited, with commentaries by Walter
Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968),
714. [37]
Tarkovsky himself confesses that "when I saw all the
material shot for the film [Nostalgia] I was
startled to find that it was a spectacle of unrelieved
gloom." Sculpting in time, 203. Is this why Otto
accuses Alexander of "being so gloomy" just before he refers
to Nietzsche's dwarf?
9666 words
Abstract
| Printer
version
not the
foreknowledge of death
but the project of seeing conscious life
rescued from death defines and will
atone for the human. [1]
...But everything unripe wants to live: alas!
[2]
The
sacrifice as Testament
Unfortunately,
the merging of the original and new story lines produces
disharmony and confusion on the level of plot: an
unexplained double sacrifice is created when Alexander
both sleeps with the witch, as encouraged by the
new soothsayer, the postman Otto, and burns down
his house and becomes mute, thus fulfilling his vow with
God. This results in a frustrating absence of thematic
and philosophical coherence that ultimately damages the
film.[9]
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? [11]
Nietzsche's
dwarf and Zarathustra's gift
"Stop,
dwarf!" I said. "I! Or You! But I am the stronger of us
two - you do not know my abysmal thought! That thought
you could not endure!"
What, if
some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your
loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you
live it now and have lived it, you will have to live once
more and innumerable times more; and there will be
nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every
thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or
great in your life will have to return to you, all in the
same succession and sequence - even this spider and this
moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I
myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned
upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of
dust!'[21]
"To the
pure all things are pure" - thus speaks the people. But I
say to you: To the swine all things become
swinish!
There
stands the boat - over there is perhaps the way to the
great Nothingness. But who wants to step into this
"perhaps"?
The Leonardo
Adoration and amor fati
The Eternal
Return again
See also Petr Král's piece in the Classics section, "Tarkovsky, or the Burning House", Screening the past 12 (March 2001).
