October 17, 2017 (XXXV:8) Andrei Tarkovsky NOSTALGHIA (1983), 125 min.

(The online version of this handout has color images.) Cannes Film Festival 1983 Won Best Director, Andrei Tarkovsky tied with Robert Bresson for L’Argent (1983). Won FIPRESCI Prize, Andrei Tarkovsky Won Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, Andrei Tarkovsky Nominated Palme d'Or, Andrei Tarkovsky DIRECTED BY Andrei Tarkovsky WRITTEN BY Andrei Tarkovsky & Tonino Guerra PRODUCED BY Manolo Bolognini, Renzo Rossellini, Daniel Toscan du Plantier (uncredited) CINEMATOGRAPHY Giuseppe Lanci FILM EDITING Erminia Marani, Amedeo Salfa CAST Oleg Yankovskiy…Andrei Gorchakov (as Oleg Jankovsky) Erland Josephson…Domenico Domiziana Giordano…Eugenia Patrizia Terreno…Andrei's Wife Laura De Marchi…Chambermaid Delia Boccardo…Domenico's Wife Milena Vukotic…Civil Servant ANDREI TARKOVSKY (b. April 4, 1932, Zavrazhe, Ivono, Russia—d. December 28, 1986, Paris) my be the most famous Soviet filmmaker since Sergei M. Eisenstein. Tarkovsky, the son of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky. studied music and Arabic in Moscow before enrolling in the Soviet film school VGIK. He shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivanovo detstvo (1962), which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. This resulted in high expectations for his second feature Andrei Rublyov (1969), which was banned by the Soviet authorities until 1971. It was shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival at 4 o’clock in the morning on the last day, in order to prevent it winning a prize—but it won one nonetheless, and was eventually distributed abroad partly to enable the authorities to save face. Solyaris (1972), had an easier ride, being acclaimed by many in the West as the Soviet answer to Kubrick’s 2001 (though Tarkovsky himself was never too fond of it). The director ran into official trouble again with Zerkalo (1975), a dense, personal web of autobiographical memories with a radically innovative plot structure. Stalker (1979) had to be

completely reshot on a dramatically reduced budget after an accident in the laboratory destroyed the first version, and after Nostalghia (1983), Tarkovsky defected to the West. His last film, Offret (1986) was shot in Sweden with many of Ingmar Bergman's regular collaborators, and won almost an unprecedented four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. He died of cancer at the end of the year. TONINO GUERRA (b. March 16, 1920 in Santarcangelo di Romagna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy—d. March 21, 2012, age 92, in Santarcangelo di Romagna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy) is the son of a fisherman/fishmonger father and an illiterate mother whom he later taught to read and write. Guerra began to orally compose dialect poems while imprisoned in a German concentration camp during World War II, and he published his first collection, I Scarabocc (Scribblings), in 1946. His longtime collaboration with famed Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni began with L'Avventura, the breakthrough 1960 film that brought international renown to the director, who co-wrote the script with Guerra and Elio Bartolini. In the preface to his published screenplays, Antonioni said that he and Guerra “have long and violent arguments ... and that makes him all the more helpful.” Guerra, who worked with American, Greek and Russian directors, said in a 1993 NPR interview that each filmmaker had made him aware of different aspects of himself. “Fellini is

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always immersed in his childhood, in his background, in his memories,” he said. “Coming from Rimini, which is near my own hometown, he obliged me to look here locally, to look into my own memory, my own childhood.” On tonight’s director, the writer said: “His preoccupation with his spirituality raised all my own spiritual doubts.” He shared three Academy Award nominations for writing for director Mario Monicelli’s Casanova 70 (1966), Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1967) and Fellini’s Amarcord (1976). “I think he's one of the greatest writers of our time whose medium happens to be the screenplay,” said Howard A. Rodman, vice president of the Writers Guild of America, West and a professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. In 2011, the frequently honored Guerra received the Writers Guild of America, West's Jean Renoir Award for Screenwriting Achievement. At the time of his death, he’d written for over 111 films. GIUSEPPE LANCI (b. May 1, 1942 in Rome, Lazio, Italy) began acting as director of photography in 1977, after an internship as assistant operator and car operator in Bertolucci's Strategy of Spider (1970). In addition to Tarkovsky, Lanci has worked with Roberto Benigni, Daniele Luchetti, Liliana Cavani, Pasquale Pozzessere. Speaking to an Italian reporter about his working relationship with Tarkovsky, Lanci relayed, “Andrei told me that cinema used time as a narrative element, while photography is usually constant throughout the sequence of a sequence. Dynamic photography takes time to give a different consistency to the film. An example is in nature with weather conditions: if on a cloudy day at a certain time the sun goes out the light conditions change, or in an interior if someone enters a dark room and lights up the light there is a change of conditions of lighting. All this however is always linked to precise actions. Nostalghia has expanded this discourse, and variations of ‘natural’ light have been added to variations that no longer correspond to any logic but to emotional motives.” OLEG YANKOVSKIY (b. February 23, 1944 in Dzhezkazgan, Karaganda Oblast, Kazakh SSR, USSR [now Jezkazgan, Kazakhstan]—d. May 20, 2009, age 65, in Moscow, Russia) was born to an aristocratic family exiled to Kazakhstan under Josef Stalin in the 1930s. Those in the West who knew Yankovsky only from a handful of films, principally two of Andrei Tarkovsky’s most haunting and poetic works, The Mirror (1975) and Nostalghia (1983), could have little idea how much he was revered in his own country, in both Soviet and post-Soviet times, equally on stage and in films. According to the Guardian¸ the actor was masterful at “humanizing political figures, by expressing certain deep emotions, lifting his portrayals of Communist Party leaders in The Bonus (1974), and in Wrong Connection (1977) above the popular film stereotypes.” He is perhaps most famous in Russia for the title role in The Very Same Munchhausen, the 1979 television movie of the tales of an 18th century aristocrat who travels to the moon and dances with Venus. An English-language film of the stories was made in 1988 starring Uma Thurman and Sting. Among the few films he made abroad was Sally Potter’s The Man Who Cried (2000), in which he played Christina Ricci’s Jewish father, who emigrates to the US from Russia. Right before he died, friend and fellow actor Robert De Niro visited Yankovsky while in Moscow for the opening of the Nobu restaurant. “I was happy to see him and his

son and his grandson, and have him see my son,” De Niro told reporters at the time. “It was a good reunion.” During this time, Yankovsky was being highly praised for his dignified and spiritual performance of the Metropolitan Philip, the only adversary of Ivan the Terrible, in the film Tsar (2009), directed by Pavel Lungin, showing at the Cannes Film Festival. It was Yankovsky’s last role before dying of cancer at 65. ERLAND JOSEPHSON (b. June 15, 1923 in Stockholm, Stockholms län, Sweden—d.February 25, 2012, age 88, in Stockholm, Stockholms län, Sweden) is the only actor to appear in Ingmar Bergman movies in every decade from the 1940s through to the new millennium. Josephson appeared in 14 Bergman films: It Rains on Our Love (1946), To Joy (1950), The Magician (1958), Brink of Life (1958), Hour of the Wolf (1968), The Passion of Anna (1969), Cries & Whispers (1972), Scenes from a Marriage (1973), The Magic Flute (1975), Face to Face (1976), Autumn Sonata (1978), Fanny and Alexander (1982), After the Rehearsal (1984), In the Presence of a Clown (1997), and Saraband (2003).In addition to acting in Bergman's films, Josephson also co-wrote Bergman’s All These Women (1964), one of Bergman's rare comedies and his first film shot in color. Apart from Bergman, Josephson’s most fruitful collaboration was with Tarkovsky starring in his last two films, Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). He also wrote several plays, novels and memoirs and directed the film Marmalade Revolution (1980). As a fellow writer and director, and a lifelong friend, he often spoke perceptively about Bergman’s work. “A man obsessed with failure has succeeded better than others in portraying it,” Mr. Josephson once wrote. “This could be referred to as the Bergman vaccination method.” The actor was offered Richard Dreyfuss’s role in Jaws 2 (1978). But turned it down with the words: “I rather have intellectual battles with Liv Ullmann [Bergman’s actress/muse], than fighting with some shark.” DOMIZIANA GIORDANO (b. September 4, 1959 in Rome, Lazio, Italy) is known for her roles in Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), Nostalghia (1983) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990). She is famous for her long, flowing locks which were rumored to be the reason the actress was hand-picked by Neil Jordan for the role of Madeline in Interview with the Vampire. (Plus the director cited tonight’s film as inspiration.) Giordano is also a published poet and photographer. PATRIZIA TERRENO (b. date and place unknown) has acted in only seven projects: Corsa in discesa (1989), Nostalgia (1983), Adua (1981, TV Mini-Series), Bel Ami (1979, TV Mini-Series), Il prato (1979) and The Green Tree (1966 ANDREI TARKOVSKY, from World Film Directors, V. II. Ed. John Wakeman. The H.W. Wilson Co., Inc NY, 1988 Russian director, born in Laovrazhe, Ivanova district, Soviet Union. He is the son of the distinguished poet Arseniy Tarkovsky and the former Maria Ivanova Vishnyakova. Tarkovsky studied under Mikhail Romm at VGIK, the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. In the course of his studies he made two short films, There Will Be No Leave Today (1959), and his

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diploma piece, Katok i skripka (The Steamroller and the Violin, 1960). The latter, which won a prize at the New York Film Festival, is about the friendship that develops between the tough driver of a steamroller and a frail boy violinist who as a consequence is drawn out of his comfortable but claustrophobic little world into one that is wider and more challenging. The story is told very delicately and imaginatively through the eyes of the child, with a “masterly use of soft lighting and ...subtle gradations of atmosphere.” The photography is Vadim Yusov, a fellow-student who has been Tarkovsky’s cameraman on all his films, and the script is the work of Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, another of Tarkovsky’s contemporaries at VGIK and himself among the most promising of the young Soviet directors. Tarkovsky graduated in 1960 and has been a Mosfilm director ever since. The harsh poetry of his unique vision emerged fully in his first feature film,Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s Childhood, 1962). Ivan, played by Kolya Burlayev, is an orphan working with a group of partisans during the Second World War, We first see this twelve-year-old waif returning from a scouting expedition, crossing no-man’s-land, peering through mist and barbed wire, studying the swiftly flowing river that he has to cross to get back to his own side. His parents have been killed, his village has been destroyed, he has escaped from a Nazi concentration camp, and he lives only for revenge. He does not live long; years later in Berlin after the victory, his comrades find a folder recording his capture and fate. A sense of almost unendurable tension is built up by the camerawork and editing, in which the grim reality of the present is intercut with flashbacks, so that war and childhood, war and nature, are constantly contrasted. The same sort of story has been told hundreds of times before, but Ivor Montague, pointing out that this is generally true of Tarkovsky’s plots, goes on : “It is how they are presented that becomes a commentary on man, his experience and the universe….The tragedy here, however, is much worse because more inescapable. Ivan’s fate is sealed before ever the film begins….From the moment we see the wide-eyed creature in the mist, the contrast between the skinny, hungry, sometimes blubbering boy and the expert spy, professional, authoritative, competent, indispensable, the two bound into a single being—a soldier who had known torture and triumph alike, a child on whom grown men depend—we know he cannot survive….The film is not disfigured by the unnaturally cheery or the conventionally hysterical. With one blow it annuls a whole cinémathèque of the war films of all lands.” Ivanovo

detstvo won fifteen awards at international film festivals, including the Golden Lion at Venice and the Grand Prize in San Francisco. It was followed by Andrei Rublev, a film about the medieval monk who became the greatest of all icon painters. Tarkovsky wrote the film in collaboration with Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky and shot it in black and white, except for the coda in which Rublev’s icons are displayed in all their richness. Completed in 1966 and shown at Cannes in 1969, it was not released in Russia until 1971, by which time it had acquired an enormous underground reputation. It is not clear why the film was shelved for so long—the religious-philosophical issues that may have worried the Soviet censors remain intact at the center of the picture, while the criticism that it “does not correspond to

historical truth” (the excuse for its withdrawal from the 1971 Belgrade Festival) is unconvincing, since almost nothing is known of the life of the real Andrei Rublev. Although Walter Goodman has pointed out that “Komsomolskaya Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist youth organization, criticized Tarkovsky, a devout Christian, for depicting Rublev, a much-revered fifteenth-century monk, as a suffering, self-questioning artist rather than a native genius who helped bring about a Russian renaissance in the final decades of Mongolian-Tatar rule.” The film consists of ten loosely connected episodes covering the most prolific years of the painter’s life, 1400-1425. Russia had not still been freed from the yoke of the Tartars, and the world Rublev knew was a brutal one of feudal violence and casual cruelty. The church itself was engaged in a ruthless

campaign against the vestiges of paganism. The film dramatizes the conflict in the artist between revulsion and compassion toward the suffering around him. In one episode Rublev is invited by the venerable icon painter Theophanes the Greek to assist him in painting a new church, and we see that their professional rivalries are colored by religious differences. Against the traditional icon-painter’s emphasis on original sin, Rublev assets his belief in the human being as the dwelling-house of God—a belief increasingly threatened by his own disgust at the horrors he sees around him. Later, as he paints new murals for the cathedral, the Tatars and their Russian allies raid the town. They batter in the doors of the cathedral and slaughter everyone who has taken refuge there. Rublev, with his murals wrecked, at last takes violent action to protect a deaf-mute girl. He saves her life but cannot save her sanity, and she is born away by the Tatars. Taking a vow of silence, Rublev resolves to paint no more. His wanderings take him to a devastated village. The prince’s guard

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arrives, seeking a craftsman capable of casting for their master’s glory one of those gigantic bells that were considered the mystical voices of Russia. The village bell-founder has died of plague, but his son Boriska boasts that he knows the secret of casting.In fact, his only secret is a half-crazy belief that the task can be accomplished, but he drives everyone relentlessly until the new bell is triumphantly rung. This achievement restores Rublev’s faith in humanity and art, and he goes on to affirm that faith in the paintings that form the dazzling color montage at the end of the film. Tarkovsky has said: “I do not understand historical films which have no relevance for the present. For me the most important thing is to use historical material to express Man’s ideas and to create contemporary characters.” And in fact, though Andrei Rublev was beautifully shot on locations in which Rublev worked, and period details are meticulously observed, the film’s significance far transcends its localized historical setting. It is a universal political parable, in which the major human responses to war, disorder, and oppression are richly dramatized. It is also a meditation on the responsibility of the artist, and one of obvious relevance to Tarkovsky’s own situation in the Soviet Union. David Thomson praised the film for its portrayal of a world that is “as teeming a hell on earth as a Breughel—and quite as vivid and authentic,” but dismissed Tarkovsky’ thesis as “threadbare.” This was not the view of most critics, many of whom shared Nigel Andrew’s conviction that Andrei Rublev was “the one indisputable Russian masterpiece of the last decade.” Tarkovsky’s screenplay for Solaris (1971) was adapted from a science fiction novel by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem—one that concentrates not on gadgetry but on psychology. Scientists in a space station circling a remote planet find themselves subjected to an agonizing process of self-exploration, for the planet’s strange ocean has the capacity to punish intruders by materializing people and episodes out of their past lives, forcing them to relive their most painful mistakes and sins. Penelope Houston called this film “Russia’s answer to 2001, not in its display of space hardware but in the speculative quality of its ideas,” and Gavin Millar praised it as “an absorbing inquiry into the cause of love and the links between time, memory, and identity.” This “very beautiful and mysterious film” received the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. The film (unlike the book) opens in a Russian country estate with lakes and gardens like a Turgenev setting, where the astronaut-psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is visiting his parents. From there we follow this rather stolid hero on his journey to the space station hovering above Solaris. The arrival has been widely described as masterly—the space station, seemingly derelict, is in fact inhabited by two scientists, each of whom is insanely absorbed in his own resurrected tragedy. Kelvin is himself soon confronted by his wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), long dead by suicide, but now apparently alive again. Faced with the woman he has already failed, Kelvin at

first tries to exorcise her. But since she is alive in his mind, from whence Solaris has conjured her, he can no more destroy her than he can help her. Tarkovsky himself has explained that “the point is the value of each piece of our behavior, the significance of each of our acts,even the least noticed. Nothing once completed can be changed….The irreversibility of human experience is what gives our life, our deeds, their meaning and individuality.” It might be argued that this is also the theme of Zerkalo (The Mirror/A White, White Day, 1975). This controversial film is presented as a work of autobiography, showing Tarkovsky himself at different ages up to and including the present, but concentrating on his boyhood during the Stalinist terror in Peredelkino, the artists’ village near Moscow. Tarkovsky’s mother is portrayed by several actresses as she was at various ages, and his father’s poems play an important role in tying together a film of great complexity. It is, as Herbert Marshall wrote, “many-layered, jumping back and forth in space and time, from objective to subjective visualisations.” The material it draws upon ranges from the director’s memories and dreams to newsreels of the spanish Civil War and the Soviet-Chinese confrontations on the Ussuri river. It cuts without warning from

black and white to color, from passages with background music to others with none. Herbert Marshall sees the film as “a kind of inverted mirror reflection of Ivan’s Childhood, that being an objective biography of a boy in the Stalin days.” Marshall finds it often puzzling and enigmatic—“several films intertwined.” In Russia, where its indictment of Stalinism caused great anxiety, it was harshly attacked by party

critics as an elitist film. Even the veteran director Sergei Gerasimov, who recognized it as “an attempt to analyze the human spirit” by “a man of very serious talent,” complained that “it starts from a subjective evaluation of the surrounding world, and this inevitably limits the circle of its viewers.” It was released in Russia in 1975 but relegated to the “third category,” which means that only a few prints were made for showing in third-class cinemas and workers’ clubs, thus denying the filmmakers any financial reward. Ivor Montague writes: “I do not think that anyone can ‘enjoy’ Tarkovsky’s films. They are too tense, too agonizing, at their best too spellbinding….Remember, he comes of a generation that, in the years he was the age of the boy in his first feature, was losing its homeland twenty million dead. But when one has seen any one of his films once, one wants to see it again and yet again; thoughts chase after one another like hares in March. David Thomson is one of a minority who think Tarkovsky is overrated—”the grandeur of Tarkovsky’s films should not conceal the gulf between his eye for poetic compositions and any really searching study of people or society.” But for the young Ukrainian director Sergei Paradjanov “Tarkovsky is a phenomenon...amazing, unrepeatable, inimitable

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and beautiful….First of all, I did not know how to do anything and I would not have done anything at all if there had not been Ivan’s Childhood….I consider Tarkovsky the Number One film director of the USSR….He is a genius.” Turning once again to science fiction with social and psychological underpinnings, Tarkovsky made Stalker (1979), which was loosely adapted from a 1973 novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The setting of the novel had been North Americas, but Tarkovsky transferred the story to a gulag-like industrial wasteland that, although the actual locale is never specified, is clearly meant to be in the Soviet Union (the film was shot on location in Estonia). The story unfolds in a mysterious realm known only as the “Zone,” where there is a “Room” in which one’s wishes or fantasies are fulfilled. However, the hazardous zone can be traversed only with the aid of a “stalker,” who illegally guides travelers through the forbidden area. Tarkovsky’s first film to be made largely outside of the Soviet Union was Nostalghia (Nostalghia, 1983). Filmed near the Vignoni thermal baths in the Tuscan hills, Nostalghia is about exile, in part, and chronicles the life of a Russian who has gone to Italy to study the life of a Russian who lived there in the seventeenth century.”Gortchakov (Oleg Yanovsky),” wrote Vincent Canby in his New York Times review, “does very little research and a lot of musing, which often takes the form of lovely flashbacks [and] fantasies ….Loveliness, I’m afraid, is really what this movie is all about….Tarkovsky may well be a film poet but he’s a film poet with a tiny vocabulary. The same images, eventually boring, keep recurring in film after film—shots of damp landscapes, marshes, hills in fog and abandoned buildings with roofs that leak.” Although critical of Tarkovsky, Yvette Biro in the Village Voice was more open to the film’s beauty. “Nostalghia,” she wrote, “is sumptuously—sickeningly, as mentioned in the film itself—beautiful, but partly for that very reason, suffers from disproportion and embarrassingly loses its way in the desperate hunt for beauty.” John Coleman asked in the New Statesman “whether the difficulty of [Tarkovsky’s] work is justified by its rewards, whether all the enigmatic angst on display here is much more than the exteriorisation of a private depression...those mists, those pools, above all that obsessive driving rain….? The film won a special prize at Cannes. Later in 1983 Tarkovsky directed a production of Boris Gudonov at Covent Garden in London. Then in July 1984, he defected to the west, saying that his application to Moscow for permission to extend his stay abroad had gone unanswered, and that he would not be allowed to make films upon his return to Russia. Discussing his past difficulties with the regime, Tarkovsky said: “I have worked for twenty-four years in the Soviet Union, for the state organization on which all movie activity depends, and have produced only six films. I can say that in those twenty-four years I have been unemployed for eighteen.” He remained in Western Europe. His last film, Offret/Sacrificatio (The Sacrifice, 1987), was filmed on location on Gotland, in the Baltic, with cinematography by Sven Nykvist. Sacrifice tells of an aging intellectual and the act of faith by which he apparently saves the world. Alexander (Erland Josephson), his family, and their friends have gathered at his summer house on a primitive Swedish island to celebrate his birthday. The dinner is a revelation of domestic treachery and spiritual malaise.

Exhausted, Alexander has fallen asleep when an unspecified catastrophe—possibly a nuclear accident—occurs. The air grows very cold, and an eerie glow illuminates a landscape transformed to hoarfrost, ooze, and rot. A visiting neighbor, the local postman, tells Alexander that if he spends the night with an island woman, a reputed witch, the world can be saved. Alexander does, and awakens the next morning to find the landscape restored to its summery beauty. What seems to have been an old man’s nightmare may in fact have been a perilous journey of the spirit, but Alexander cannot tell us—he has lost his reason. In a 1986 interview, Tarkovsky said of The Sacrifice, “The issue I raise in the film is one that to my mind is most crucial: the absence in our culture of room for a spiritual existence. We have extended the scope of our material assets and conducted materialistic experiments without taking into account the threat posed by depriving man of his spiritual dimension. Man is suffering, but he doesn’t know why. I wanted to show that a man can renew his ties to life by renewing his covenant with himself and with the source of his soul. And one way to recapture moral integrity...is by having the capacity to offer oneself in sacrifice.” Sacrifice was produced by Svensk Filminstituet with additional funds from Swedish and American television and from a French company. A visually beautiful, slow, and intensely personal work, it is also extraordinarily resistant to any purposes but its own: it could not possibly be exploited for either commercial or propagandistic ends. A few months after Sacrifice opened at the New York Film Festival, Tarkovsky died in Paris of lung cancer. He had been married twice. He had a son by his first marriage to Trina Rausch, and one by his 1970 marriage to Larissa Tegorkina.

Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Andrey Tarkovsky. University of Texas Press Austin, 1986, 2000 I wanted to make a film about Russian nostalgia—about the state of mind peculiar to our nation which affects Russians who are far from their native land. I saw this almost as a patriotic duty in my understanding of the concept. I wanted the film to be about the fatal attachment of Russians to their national roots, their past, their culture, their native places, their families and friends; an attachment which they carry with them all their lives, regardless of where destiny may fling them. Russians are seldom able to

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adapt easily, to come to terms with a new way of life. The entire history of Russian emigration bears out the Western view that ‘Russians are bad emigrants’; everyone knows their tragic incapacity to become assimilated, the clumsy ineptitude of their efforts to adopt an alien life-style. How could I have imagined as I was making Nostalghia that the stifling sense of longing that fills the screen space of that film was to become my lot for the rest of my life; that from now until the end of my days I would bear the painful malady within myself? Working all the time in Italy I made a film that was profoundly Russian in every way: morally, politically, emotionally…. I have to say that when I first saw all the material shot for the film I was startled to find it was a spectacle of unrelieved gloom. The material was completely homogeneous, both in its mood and in the state of mind imprinted in it. This was not something I had set out to achieve; what was symptomatic and unique about the phenomenon before me was the fact that, irrespective of my own specific theoretical intentions, the camera was obeying first and foremost my inner state during filming: I had been worn down by my separation from my family and from the way of life I was used to, by working under quite unfamiliar conditions, even by using a foreign language. I was at once astounded and delighted, because what had been imprinted on the film, and was now revealed to me for the first time in the darkness of the cinema, proved that my reflections about how the art of the screen is able, and even called, to become a matrix of the individual soul, to convey unique human experience, were not just the fruit of idle speculation but a reality, which here was unrolling incontrovertibly before my eyes. But to return to when Nostalghia was first conceived and started…. I was not interested in the development of the plot, in the chain of events—with each film I feel less and less need for them. I have always been interested in a person’s inner world, and for me it was far more natural to make a journey into the psychology that informed the hero’s attitude to life, into the literary and cultural traditions that are the foundation of his spiritual world. I am well aware that from a commercial point of view it would be far more advantageous to move from place to place, to introduce shots from one ingenious angle after another, to use exotic landscapes and impressive interiors. But for what I am essentially trying to do, outward effects simply distance and blur the goal which I am pursuing. I am interested in man, for he contains a universe within himself; and in order to find expression for the idea, for the meaning of human life, there is no need to spread behind it, as it were, a canvas crowded with happenings. It would perhaps be superfluous to mention that from the very start cinema as American-style adventure movie has

never held any interest for me. The last thing I want to do is devise attractions. From Ivan’s Childhood to Stalker, I have always tried to avoid outward movement, and have tried to concentrate the action within the classical unities. In this respect even the structure of Andrey Rublyov strikes me today as disjointed and incoherent…. Ultimately, I wanted Nostalghia to be free of anything irrelevant or incidental that would stand in the way of my principal objective: the portrayal of someone in a state of profound alienation from the world and himself, unable to find a balance between reality and the harmony for which he longs, in a state of nostalghia provoked not only by his remoteness from his country but also by a global yearning for the wholeness of

existence. I was not satisfied with the scenario until it came together at last into a kind of metaphysical whole. Italy comes into Gorchakov’s consciousness at the moment of his tragic break with reality (not merely with the conditions of life, but with life itself, which never satisfied the claims made on it by the individual) and stretches above him in magnificent ruins which seem to rise up out of nothing. These fragments of a civilisation at once universal and alien, are like an epitaph to the futility of human

endeavor, a sign that mankind has taken a path that can only lead to destruction. Gorchakov dies unable to survive his own spiritual crisis, to ‘put right’ this time which—evidently for him too—is ‘out of joint’. The character of Domenico, at first sight somewhat puzzling, has a particular bearing on the hero’s state of mind. This frightened man to whom society offers no protection, finds in himself the strength and nobility of spirit to oppose a reality he sees as degrading to man. Once a mathematics teacher and now an ‘outsider’, he flouts his own ‘littleness’ and decides to speak about the catastrophic state of today’s world, appealing to people to make a stand. In the eyes of ‘normal’ people he appears mad, but Gorchakov responds to his idea—born of deep suffering—that people must be rescued not separately and individually but all together from the pitiless insanity of modern civilisation… In one form or another all my films have made the point that people are not alone and abandoned in an empty universe, but are linked by countless threads with the past and the future; that as each person lives his life he forges a bond with the whole world, indeed with the whole history of mankind….But the hope that each separate life and every hunan action has intrinsic meaning makes the responsibility of the individual for the overall course of human life incalculably greater. In a world where there is a real threat of war capable of annihilating mankind; where social ills exist on a staggering scale; where human suffering cries out to heaven—the way must be found to reach another. Such is the sacred duty of each individual. Gorchakov becomes attached to Domenico because he feels a deep need to protect him from the ‘public’ opinion of the well-fed, contented, blind majority for whom he is simply a

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grotesque lunatic. Even so, Gorchaokov is not able to save Domenico from the role he has implacably assigned himself—without asking life to let the cup pass him by… Gorchakov is taken aback by Domenico’s childlike maximalism, for he himself, like all adults, is guilty of a measure of compromise—that is how life is. But Domenico makes up his mind to burn himself alive in the crazy hope that this final, monstrous publicity act will bring home to people that his concern is for them, and make them listen to his last cry of warning. Gorchakov is affected by the total integrity, almost holiness of the man and his action. While Gorchakov merely reflects on how much he minds about the world’s imperfections. Domenico takes it upon himself to do something about it, and his commitment is total: his final act makes it clear that there was never any act of abstraction in Domenico’s sense of responsibility. By comparison, Gorchakov’s agonising over his own lack of constancy can only appear banal. It is of course arguable that he is vindicated by his death, since it reveals how deeply he has been tortured. I said that I was startled to find how accurately my own mood while making the film was transferred onto the screen.: a profound and increasingly wearing sense of bereavement, away from home and loved ones, filling every moment of existence. To this inexorable, insidious awareness of your own dependence on your past, like an illness that grows ever harder to bear, I gave the name ‘Nostalghia’….All the same I should advise the reader that it would be simplistic to identify the author with his lyric hero. We naturally use our immediate impressions of life in our work, since these, alas, are the only ones at our disposal. But even when we borrow moods and plots directly from our own lives, it still hardly ever means that the author could be said to be the same as his subject. It may be a disappointment to some to realise that an author’s lyrical experience seldom coincides with what he actually does in real life… An author’s poetic principle emerges from the effect made upon him by the surrounding reality, and it can rise above that reality, question it, engage in bitter conflict; and, moreover, not only with the reality that lies outside him, but also with the one that is within him. Many critics consider, for instance, that Dostoievsky discovered yawning abysses abysses within himself and that his saintly characters and villains are equally projections of him. But not one of them is completely him. Each of his characters epitomises what he sees and thinks of life, but not one could be said to embody the full diapaison of his personality. In Nostalghia I wanted to pursue the theme of the ‘weak’ man who is no fighter in terms of his outward attributes but whom I nonetheless see as a victor in this life. Stalker delivers a monologue in defense of that weakness that is the true price and hope of life. I have always liked people who can’t adapt themselves to life pragmatically. There have never been any heroes in my films (apart perhaps from Ivan) but there have

always been people whose strength lies in their spiritual conviction and who take upon themselves a responsibility for others (and this of course includes Ivan). Such people are often rather like children, only with the motivation of adults; from a common-sense point of view their position is unrealistic as well as selfless. … Like Stalker, Domenico works out his own answer, chooses his own way of martyrdom, rather than give in to the accepted, cynical pursuit of personal material privilege, in an attempt to block, by his own exertions, by the example of his own sacrifice, the path down which mankind is rushing insanely towards its own destruction. Nothing is more important than conscience, which keeps watch and forbids man to grab what he wants from life and then lie back, fat and contented. Traditionally, the best of the Russian intelligentsia were guided by conscience, incapable of self-complacence, moved by

compassion for the deprived of this world, and dedicated in their search for faith, for the ideal, for good; and all these things I want to emphasize in the personality of Gorchakov. I am drawn to the man who is ready to serve a higher cause, unwilling—or even unable—to subscribe to the generally accepted tenets of a worldly ‘morality’; the man who recognises that the meaning of existence lies above all in the fight against the evil within ourselves, so that in the course of a lifetime he may take at least one step towards spiritual perfection. For the only alternative to that way is, alas, the one that leads to spiritual degeneration; and our everyday existence and the general

pressure to conform makes it all too easy to take the latter path…. As to my next film, I shall aim at even greater sincerity and conviction in each shot, using the immediate impressions made upon me by nature, in which time will have left its own trace. Nature exists in cinema in the naturalistic fidelity with which it is recorded; the greater the fidelity, the more we trust nature as we see it in the frame, and at the same time, the finer is the created image; in its authentically natural likeness, the inspiration of nature itself is brought into cinema. Of late I have found myself addressing audiences, and I have noticed that whenever I declare that there are no symbols or metaphors in my films, those present express incredulity. They persist in asking again and again, for instance, what rain signifies in my films; why does it figure in film after film, and why the repeated images of wind, fire, water? I really don’t know how to deal with such questions. Rain is after all typical of the landscape in which I grew up; in Russia you have those long, dreary. persistent rains. And I can say that I love nature—I don’t like big cities and feel perfectly happy when I’m away from the paraphernalia of modern civilisation, just as I felt wonderful in Russia when I was in my country house, with three hundred kilometres between Moscow and myself. Rain, fire, water, snow, dew, the driving ground wind—all are part of the material setting in which we

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dwell; I would even say of the truth of our lives. I am therefore puzzled when I am told that people cannot simply enjoy watching nature, when it is lovingly reproduced on the screen, but have to look for some hidden meaning they feel it must contain. Of course rain can just be seen as bad weather, whereas I use it to crate a particular aesthetic setting in which to steep the action of the film. … I would concede that the final shot of Nostalghia has an element of metaphor, when I bring the Russian house inside the Italian cathedral. It is a constructed image which smacks of literariness: a model of the hero’s state, of the division within him which prevents him from living as he has up till now. Or perhaps, on the contrary, it is his new wholeness in which the Tuscan hills and the Russian countryside come together indissolubly; he is conscious of them as inherently his own, merged into his being and his blood, but at the same time reality is enjoining him to separate these things by returning to Russia. And so Gorchakov dies in this new world where things come together naturally and of themselves which in our strange and relative earthly existence have for some reason, or by someone, been divided once and for all. All the same, even if the scene lacks cinematic purity, I trust that it is free of vulgar symbolism; the conclusion seems to me fairly complex in form and meaning, and to be a figurative expression of what is happening to the hero, not a symbol of something outside him which has to be deciphered…. Clearly I could be accused of being inconsistent. However, it is for the artist both to devise principles and to break them. It’s unlikely that there are any works of art that embody precisely the aesthetic doctrine preached by the artist. As a rule a work of art develops in complex interaction with the artist’s theoretical ideas, which cannot encompass it completely; artistic texture is always richer than anything that can be fitted into a theoretical schema. And now that I have written this book I begin to wonder if my own rules are not becoming a constraint. Nostalghia is now behind me. It could never have occurred to me when I started shooting that my own, all too specific, nostalgia was soon to take possession of my soul for ever. Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them into a darkened room where, for two hours, they watch the play of shadows on a sheet? The search for entertainment? The need for a kind of drug? All over the world there are, indeed, entertainment firms and organizations which exploit cinema and television and spectacles of many other kinds. Our starting-point, however, should not be there, but in the essential principles of cinema, which have to do with the human need to master and know the world. I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes

there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrate’s a person’s experience—and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: ‘stars’, story-lines and entertainment have nothing to do with it.

From Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews. Edited by John Gianvito. University of Mississippi, Jackson, 2006. “Andrei Tarkovsky: I Am for a Poetic Cinema” Patrick Bureau / 1962 He’s thirty years old. He was born on the shores of the Volga, but his family is from Moscow. A family of poets, of intellectuals, preoccupied with painting and music. Tarkovsky

can be classified within the ranks of what we call “the Soviet New Wave.” But how is it that he came to cinema? “After having studied for a time the problems of Eastern civilization, I spent two years as a worker in Siberia in the field of geological research and then returned to Moscow. There I enrolled in the Moscow Cinematographic Institute where I was the student of Mikhail Romm. I received my diploma in 1961. I had directed two shorts, one of them was The Steamroller and the Violin. In summary it was an exercise in eclecticism before going to work at Mosfilm and directing Ivan’s Childhood. ˆ PB: What did you want to express in your first film? AT: I wanted to convey all my hatred of war. I chose childhood because it is what contrasts most with war. The film isn’t built upon plot, but rests on the opposition between war and the feelings of the child. This child’s entire family has been killed. When the film begins, he’s in the midst of the war. PB: Have you put into the film some part of your own personal experience? AT: Truly no, since I was very young during the last war. I therefore translated the feelings that I had experienced because this is a war we are unable to forget. PB: What were your shooting conditions? AT: I shot four months during the summer of 1961 and devoted nearly two months to editing. The film cost 2.5 million rubles which is a medium-sized budget. PB: Can it be said that you are part of the new wave of Soviet filmmakers? AT: It’s possible but I hate these schematic definitions. PB: I dislike then as much as you but I am trying to situate you in the stream of Soviet production. If you prefer, can you tell me what Russian cinema represents for you? And in what ways do you feel most connected to it?

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AT: There are nowadays in the USSR diverse tendencies which pursue parallel paths without upsetting one another too much, and in terms of this I am able to position myself. For example, there is the “Gerasimov” tendency that looks, above all, for truth in life. This tendency has had a great deal of influence and a large following. Two other tendencies are beginning to define themselves and appear to be more modern. One can trace their origins to the period of the 1930s. But it was only after the Twentieth Congress that they were able to free themselves and to develop, that their locked up energies were able to be released. What then are these two tendencies? On one side, it is “poetic cinema,” illustrated by Chukrai’s Ballad of a Soldier and The Man who Followed the Sun by Mikhail Kalik, which one could compare to The Red Balloon by Lamorisse but which in my opinion is far superior. I believe I could be situated within this tendency of poetic cinema, because I don’t follow a strict narrative development and logical connections. I don’t like looking for justifications for the protagonist’s actions. One of the reasons why I became involved in cinema is because I saw too many films that didn’t correspond to what I expected from cinematic language. On the other hand, there is what we in the USSR call the “intellectual cinema”of Mikhail Romm. In spite of the fact that I was his student, I can’t say anything about it because I don’t understand that kind of cinema. All art, of course, is intellectual, but for me, all the arts, and cinema even more so, must above all be emotional and act upon the heart. Kalvin Henely, “Nostalghia,,” (Slant, May 30, 2013) Unlike Abbas Kiarostami, a poet of contemporary cinema whose films stopped being about Iran when he stopped making films there, Andrei Tarkovsky, arguably Russia’s preeminent poet of the spirit, proved that while a Russian director could leave his homeland in the name of artistic freedom, he could still be imprisoned by the memories he took with him. In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky wrote that he wanted Nostalghia, his first film after leaving Russia to escape censorship, to be “about the particular state of mind which assails Russians who are far from their native land.” Shot in Italy and written by Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, the film explores this acute form of nostalgia through a spiritually wearied poet, Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovskiy), who’s traveled to Italy to research the life of a composer who studied in Bologna during the late 1700s before returning to Russia to hang himself. And so while Tarkovsky, at this point a wearied poet himself, literally had a whole new country’s worth of material to be inspired by and work from, he created instead a moody, deeply inward-facing film that, save for an anti-commercialism line about the overabundance of Italian shoes, hardly addresses the characteristics of its setting and instead, as Tarkovsky wrote, attempts to peer into the “universe within [man].”

Filmmaking, more than any other art, is best suited for capturing physical movement (action, violence, sports, sex), but it’s not particularly adept at capturing the movements of the soul. At his best, Tarkovsky was able to depict soul-searching better than perhaps any other director. In Nostalghia, Gorchakov’s feelings—his sense of nostalgia for Russia, his search for

meaning in his life, his aversion to the modern world—aren’t only conveyed through Tarkovsky’s signature, typically black-and-white/sepia-toned and slowed-down memory sequences that feature women or a country home shrouded in fog, but through Gorchakov’s prominent inaction, which is established in the opening scene when he turns down an offer by his comely translator, Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), to look

at Piero della Francesca’s painting Madonna del Parto by saying “I want nothing more just for myself.” In fact, Gorchakov’s relationship with Eugenia, besides a way for Tarkovsky to ambiguously castigate the modern woman, it would seem, serves only to show how detached Gorchakov is from both socializing and his animal instincts, as he shows little, if any, interest in her as a person or a bare-breasted woman; she appears in one scene in which she delivers a bizarre monologue that would suggest a relationship between her and the off-camera Gorchakov and to which he has no response except to say that she’s “insane.” Indicative of his psychological state, the only person who does spark an interest in the torpid Gorchakov is Domenico (Erland Josephson), a local madman who reportedly locked his family up for seven years because he thought the apocalypse was coming. Tarkovsky’s films remain so important today because of their ineffable spirituality, which has all but vanished in today’s technological world marked by information, science, and an increasing detachment from nature. Tarkovsky believed that for cinema to reach its full potential as an art form, it has to bypass the financial interests that shape it. His films certainly testify to that: Their slow pacing has often challenged audiences (especially throughout the first half of Solaris), causing some critics to accuse Tarkovsky of entirely disregarding the viewer when making his films. With Nostalghia, the filmmaker said he wasn’t interested in “development of the plot, in the chain of events,” and the film could, likewise, be accused of shunning the audience, but that would only be if you couldn’t tune into Tarkovsky’s expressive, transcendental wavelength. If you’re in the right frame of mind, you’ll appreciate the raindrops that can be heard and seen falling on multi-colored bottles as Gorchakov silently and ponderously strolls through a remarkably detailed set piece; the psychologically suggestive saws that can be heard buzzing through both his dreams and reality; and slow zooms that, combined with some lighting effects, unexpectedly, gradually reveal new details in a couple of atmospheric scenes. It’s within these “difficult” durational scenarios that Tarkovsky manages to elucidate something resembling spirituality. The penultimate scene in the film exemplifies this the most: Gorchakov, after learning from Domenic about the supposedly spiritually fulfilling task of

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walking a lit candle across a hot mineral pool, attempts it on his own—and in real time over nearly 10 minutes. Perhaps Tarkovsky’s most opaque film, Nostalghia is nonetheless one of his most personal. Not only are Tarkovsky’s own feelings about leaving Russia and his family reflected in Gorchakov, but another side of him is reflected in Domenico. When Gorchakov visits Domenico in his home, a bombed-out looking space with a ceiling that lets rain in and the illogical equation “1 + 1 = 1” scrawled on the wall, Domenico takes a bottle of olive oil, pours two drops in his hand, and says, “One

drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two.” What Tarkovsky and Guerra, who has used a similar message in his script for Red Desert, are saying is that Gorchakov and Domenico are two sides of the same coin: The artist and the madman understand each other because they are part of the same person. Because of how abstract Nostalghia is, this is merely one of many allegorical aspects of a film that leaves itself open for interpretation.

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2017 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXXV

October 24: Wim Wenders Wings of Desire 1987 October 31: Mike Nichols Postcards from the Edge 1990

November 7: Tran Anh Hung The Scent of Green Papayas 1993 November 14: Hayeo Miyazaki The Wind Rises 2013 November 21: Andrey Zvyagintsev Leviathan 2014

November 28: Pedro Almodóvar Julieta 2016 December 5: Billy Wilder Some Like it Hot 1959

CONTACTS:...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu...for the series schedule,

annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto list@buffalofilmseminars.com....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.