Tarkovsky and cinema

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http://jes.sagepub.com/content/42/1/68The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0047244111428847

2012 42: 68Journal of European StudiesVctor Erice, Maria Diaz-Caneja and Tony Partridge

The ruins of history

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Journal of European Studies

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The ruins of history

Vctor Erice

Translated by Maria Diaz-Caneja

and Tony PartridgeInstitute of Technology, Sligo

Editors note

In vol. 41(1), March 2011, theJournal of European Studiespublished an article on the Russian film

director Andrei Tarkovsky, Art as revelation: Andrei Tarkovskys films and the insights of Victor

Erice, by Tony Partridge and Maria Diaz-Caneja. Their article was inspired by the Spanish film

director Victor Erices The ruins of history, which appeared in Spanish in 2003 as the prologue to

Rafael Llanos bookAndrei Tarkovski: Life and Works. Victor Erice has since generously allowed

the JES to publish the first English translation of his text by Maria Diaz-Caneja and Tony Partridge.

AbstractWhat is the essential validity of Russian film director Andrei Tarkovskys work for contemporary

cinema? It is the fact that the symptoms of the moral disease of our civilization denounced by

Tarkovsky have intensified rather than reduced as the years have passed. Tarkovskys heroes

are the poor and the sick, children and mad people: spiritual orphans who carry the signs of

martyrdom. Yet their very fragility becomes the source of their salvation as they seek spiritual

fullness through the abolition of history. For contemporary man has become dispossessed of

tradition, a situation that has been characterized by Walter Benjamin, and latterly by Giorgio

Agamben, using images from the art of, respectively, Paul Klee and Albrecht Drer. In

contemporary culture there is a contradiction between art and history, and this contradiction is

the essential theme of Tarkovskys work.

KeywordsGiorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, revelation, Russian cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky

One question comes to my mind on evoking the memory of Andrei Tarkovsky 16 years

after his death: what is left in contemporary cinema of all he constructed, step by step,

with such intensity in his seven films what is left in the memory of his viewers, in the

Corresponding author:

Tony Partridge, Institute of Technology, Ballinode, Sligo, Ireland

Email: [email protected]

JES42110.1177/0047244111428847EriceJournal of European Studies1

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Erice 69

consideration of critics and professionals, in the interest of the new generations? The

answer probably encompasses more than one sense, not unconnected with the recent

political and social evolution of the world, and most notably of the country to which the

film maker belonged. Beyond the nature of such evolution (which on one hand caused

the complete failure of so-called real socialism and on the other hand caused theglobalization that has dragged down all types of markets and national sovereignty with

it), the passage of time has done nothing but intensify the symptoms of the moral disease

of our civilization denounced by Tarkovsky. This is the essential validity of his work.

Tarkovsky continues to be an example of the cultured film maker par excellence,

whose memory fundamentally remains through his films, but also thanks to the effort

of a minority of loyal followers throughout the whole world devoted to the task of

keeping alive his legacy. This book Andrei Tarkovski: el cine-icono de la Belleza

(Andrei Tarkovsky: Icon-Cinema of Beauty) by Rafael Llano, constitutes a proof that

speaks for itself of that determination.1Besides, it acquires a special significance fromthe fact of being published in Spain, where Tarkovskys films did not in general gain

the recognition they achieved in other European countries (e.g. in Italy, France, England

and Germany).

The fruit of extensive and meticulous labour, admirable in more than one aspect,

this work offers exhaustive documentation almost overwhelming not only about

the life and the cinema of Tarkovsky, but also about Russian culture in general. There

is a noteworthy nuance that is necessary to mention: more than the specifically cine-

matographic analysis of the films, which is perhaps left for another time, Rafael Llano

has been interested especially in their philosophical and religious dimension. Writtenfrom a feeling close to devotion, this work is called upon to occupy an outstanding

place among the increasingly abundant bibliography dedicated to the author ofAndrei

Rublev.

For my part, at the time of writing some lines that can serve as a prologue, I have

preferred to leave to the discretion of the reader the priority of naked immersion in the

pages of the book, since I would not like to give a more or less detailed assessment that

could condition, in some way, the purity of its reading. Nevertheless, I have wanted to

take this opportunity to give testimony of my own admiration for the cinema and

the figure of Andrei Tarkovsky: admiration not exempt from live contradictions which, as far as possible, and in a brief manner, referring to some notes, I will try to

express here.

I

Andrei Tarkovsky always maintained a radical critical view, which was often intransi-

gent, about cinema in particular and the culture of his time in general. Filmmaking for

him was not primarily a profession, but above all a vocation and a form of art. As such,

he lived, to the end of his days, with an accent of absolute sincerity and exigency. Forhim filmmaking became a cause with religious echoes. He spoke of the craft of directing

films as an act of dignity; and of art as a form of prayer. In a world as desacralized as

todays, one can understand how he has captivated and aggravated in equal measure.



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70 Journal of European Studies 42(1)

Belonging to the generation of Soviet film directors that made their first works shel-

tered by the political reform brought forward, in February 1956, by the 20th Congress of

the USSR Communist Party, the films Tarkovsky was able to make between 1960 and

19842emerged only intermittently out of long periods of forced silence, some of which

were shown for the first time far from the date of their production. They all remainedmarginal, not only to the socialist realism canons, but also to the Soviet avant-garde of

the twenties of the last century, a movement in which cinema played a major role, and

one that was subsequently annihilated by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

At the time of the ideological and cultural thaw, Tarkovsky distanced himself from his

contemporaries in order to perform a vindication of the culture previous to the 1917

Revolution, a culture represented mainly by the great literature of the nineteenth century.

His choice had an obvious sense if we remember that the writers of this period (Pushkin,

Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) were the first ones to provide Russian culture with a univer-

sal dimension, and their most famous books found in heterodox form a deep spiritualroot in the Christian ethic.

Despite incarnating the modernization of Soviet cinema at the beginning of his

career, Tarkovsky soon emerged as the heir of this nineteenth-century tradition. More

than an open break with the present, his choice, in principle, intended to re-establish

some links with the past, demonstrating the continuance of Russian history and culture

in the margin of the eternal debate between the old and the new, which never really

stopped existing. It is possible to understand the problems that this effort caused: his

struggle with a state bureaucracy that, from a certain time, put his work to one side,

subjecting him to very hard tests. Except in some cases, the films he made in the USSR,many of them classified by the administration as class C (only a few copies, for a small

number of semi-confidential projections), were accused of formalism of elitism too

by the zealous keepers of the official discourse judgement, it has to be said, that is

hardly different from the one frequently accorded by capitalist society.

It is not surprising that in both his life and his work Tarkovsky thought over and over

again about the different forms of exile. His exile in Europe, from 1983, was presided

over by great nostalgia for his native land, to which had to be added his difficulty in

adopting the manners of a cosmopolitan film director something that, for example, his

colleague and friend Andrei Konchalovsky achieved. This originated in his lack of beliefin an international art detached from its original roots. This is the reason that can explain

his resistance to taking on the role of dissident he denied that he really was one and

his reiterated confession of being, first of all, an artist eager to serve his country.

Tarkovskys personality could not be assimilated easily to any doctrinaire philoso-

phy or contained inside the narrow limits of an ideology. In this sense, he felt as dis-

tanced from Soviet communism as from the society of the Western market: he accused

both of a grave lack of spirituality and of worshipping the most common materialism.

Nevertheless, as a result of his exile in the West, as was inevitable he was introduced

to public opinion with the typical characteristics of a dissident underlining, most of

all, his anti-communist profile in an attempt to make of him a kind of Solzhenitsyn

of the cinema, a militant in a counter-revolution of a religious character. This treat-

ment was the main sign of a certain political instrumentalization, to which he, perhaps

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in an ingenuous manner, also contributed. The suffering he had to endure for exam-

ple, the long separation from his family brought him, in his Italian exile, to accept

solidarities which he described in terms of friendship such as the one with the

Movimento Popolare, of a Catholic and fundamentalist type. In any case, the last

years of his life were characterized, among other things, by his drawing near to theRoman Church.

II

Tarkovsky presented himself to the world with his first film, Ivans Childhood, which

obtained the highest award in the Mostra of Venice in 1962. Misunderstood, nonetheless,

by a sector of Italian left-wing critics, he was defended by Jean-Paul Sartre in a letter

written to the communist newspaperLUnit. Sartres text insisted on the consideration

ofIvans Childhoodas a deeply Russian and revolutionary work: In the midst, Sartrewrote, of the joy of a nation that has paid enormously for the right to continue the

construction of socialism, there is among so many other things a black hole, an

irremediable puncture: the death of a child in the middle of hatred and despair. Nothing,

not even the future communism, will redeem that (Sartre, 1964: 44). Sartre wondered

what hole the life and death of Ivan child, monster and martyr opened up in the

interior of societys conscience. Madness or reality? Sartre answers: both. And in that

to-and-fro movement between reason and delirium, wakefulness and sleep, the experience

of most of the main characters in Tarkovskys fiction will swing.

The poor and the sick, the children and the mad, all of whom are the expression ofthe weak man these were his only heroes. They are the other side of the positive

hero; they are the opponents that wreck the idea of the new man claimed by the revolu-

tion. All of them are, to a greater or lesser degree, conscious of living in a world that

makes individuals into real or symbolic orphans. Tarkovsky sets the scars that Ivan

carried on his body against the ideal models of socialist realism. For him they constituted,

without doubt, a sign of wars horror, and at the same time they are signs of martyrdom,

stigmas of sanctity.

Demiurge to the last, from Tarkovskys cinematographic look there transpired only

one possible view the one corresponding to an act of faith. His ideal paradigm is thelook of the Stalkers paralytic daughter a look which, acting on matter as if it was

the spirits wind, makes objects vibrate. This look is about a kind of miracle, and only the

innocent are able to do it. In any case, it is an event out of the ordinary one that tries to

cause a catharsis in the spectator, one that is present in those extraordinary endings to

which his films flow: endings that provoke so many interpretative yearnings in the

intelligence of the spectator.

Posed as allegories of a moral rebirth, almost all of them pass through the character of

a mad person or a child. For almost seven minutes inNostalgia, Gorchakov crosses over

St Catherines old thermal swimming pool, protecting the flame of a candle from thebreeze, and executing in this way poor Domnicos invented ceremony: one last act that

will bring him to death, and perhaps also to redemption. In The Sacrifice, before the

threat of a nuclear war, and in exchange for saving his people, in an act that will be inter-

preted by the whole world as pure delirium, Professor Alexander will fulfil his promise



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of giving up what he loves the most, burning his house and never speaking again. This is

the condition not only for the legend of the old monk, who watered a dead tree every day,

thus feeding the hope of seeing its roots renewed, to come true again; but also for

Alexanders son a child to recover at last his voice as he pronounces the last words

of the film: In the beginning there was the Word, why, daddy?Abandoned in the midst of the ruins of his intelligence, the destiny of the Tarkovskian

adult character par excellence brings us to either madness or childhood. It is a limit-

experience a Calvary of the soul for some, simple auto-castration for others that

entails the renouncing of the world and the assumption of silence. In the same way as

their Dostoevskian brothers, the majority of these characters are outcasts and even ridicu-

lous beings. Misunderstood by society, and also by relatives and friends, they make their

extreme fragility the source of their salvation. Unaware of being martyrs, they realize

their dream and their delirium in a metaphoric manner, in the hope of finding spiritual

plenitude through the abolition of history.

III

Madness was for Tarkovsky an element of the sacred and a carrier of a certain form of

subversion. Within this feeling he included Christian faith, in which he saw a fundamen-

tal element of the Russian culture; furthermore, he thought that without the sacrifice of

the Russian people, certain Christian values would have disappeared. That is why it is

noticeable that some scholars studying his work have raised the subject of the real faith

of the film maker, wondering about its true nature in these or similar terms: was this faitha deep innermost conviction or was it a cultural phenomenon, with roots in tradition and

lived in the adverse framework of a socialist state? This is a slightly absurd dichotomy, a

vain question deep down, since in this case what really counts is the expression that

Tarkovsky offers to the spectator through his films: a form that is characteristic of art

more specifically of poetry with the objective of transcending what is real, and not

intending the testimony or account of faith, but simply its revelation.

In Tarkovsky, Christianity forms part of a myth with its roots in peasant culture. In his

visual representation, his desire for integration passes through the union of earth and

water, shown in his cinema as the two essential elements an allegory in which the pan-theist and Christian conceptions are fused together, and where one perceives the echo of

the old claim by Leo Tolstoy: Let the useless and deceiving comedy of history be, and

lets begin to live in a simple way. In a nutshell, Tarkovsky is saying that if the individual

or the community want to reach a state of grace, they must attain the goodness and the

spontaneity of all that breathes in the worlds breadth. This is the only way to overcome

the essential division between Nature and history.

IV

Tarkovsky is a visionary film maker in whose style one can notice the difficulty, and the

effort, of filming: a feature that perhaps derives from the battle in his creations a battle

that, in cinematographic terms, was not always solved between thinking and action,

voice and expression. Eventually, the problem for Tarkovsky was how to make



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Erice 73

compatible the individuals exaltation and the idea of community. His protagonists,

condemned to loneliness or madness, cannot make any synthesis happen: their lives are

mostly the evidence of failure. The result is that, in Tarkovsky, community tradition and

social practice become dramatically separated, and his characters cannot reconcile the

two principles except by abandoning reality, either taking refuge in myth or shuttingthemselves away in silence.

V

The complete deterioration of his relationship with the authorities in his own country,

then the isolation and the difficult vicissitudes of exile, took Tarkovsky gradually

towards an increasing abstraction in his work. The plots of his later films take place in

a zone situated between life and fantasy a place that acquires the nature of a night-

mare and where the sign of sickness becomes gradually more present. These scenes arecrossed by a theatrical air (in The Sacrificeone notices Chekhovs imprint), where fic-

tion, sometimes of a pronounced allegorical character, revolves around the gradual

recovery of some of the archetypes of Holy Russia, usually gathered around the patri-

archal dacha.

Even among critics that had exalted him at the start, this evolution never stopped

provoking an intellectual fear and more than one summary judgment given to caricature.

According to the rougher accounts, Tarkovsky, in his struggle against the models made

up by socialist realism, surrendered eventually to exalting a certain type of irrationalism,

putting into circulation a rhetoric of the opposite sign, but as out of date as the officialrhetoric that he was questioning.

About these opinions, it has to be noticed first of all, that the recourse to the archetype

was not new in Tarkovskys films; present in them from the first titles, it was congruent

with the most essential features of his style. Secondly, the nature of his proposal, which

contained a reaction against the prevailing aesthetic academicism, also had a utopian

dimension that attempted to cause a salutary effect one that acted more as a radical

enquiry into what is in existence rather than to offer any solutions. Because, ultimately,

where do these characters in his films come from characters who often invoke thinkers

and artists of the past, who soliloquize out loud, who transmit to us their doubts anddistresses? Where do these humiliated and offended people come from, people whose

monstrous? characters carry them, with extreme drive, to personal sacrifice? They

come from a society that is controlled by an order that created one of the most atrocious

systems of repression of the twentieth century: the Gulag.

VI

A society is not only the story of the ideals that are inscribed in its most representative

monuments or in its constitutional texts; a society has the same value as the relation-ships between its people, the vitality of its community. In this sense, any serious discus-

sion about communism should be about these relationships rather than about its

principles.



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The result of the original project in which the 1917 Revolution in Russia was

inspired was not a socialist society, but a new statist, bureaucratized form of domina-

tion and exploitation, the opposite of the emancipatory, just and libertarian nature of

socialism. However, the fall of so-called real socialism, which was offered to the world

as an alternative to capitalism, must not imply, despite everything, the discrediting ofsocialism as an idea or a Utopia. The evils which are inherent in the very nature of

capitalism and its essential law the accumulation of profits still remain, becoming

even worse in its modern neo-liberal phase, giving rise to absolutely predatory forms of

growth. The reinstatement in Russia of a fierce capitalism, Mafia-style in more than one

aspect, is a revealing proof of the present state of things.

Although he had a fundamentally pessimistic view of historical evolution, although

he often stated that he was practically unacquainted with the subject of politics, and that

his personal identity matched that of an artist and a poet, if Andrei Tarkovsky was alive

now, what would he have thought of these matters?

VII

The complete rupture of tradition has opened up a time in which, socially, there does not

seem to be a connection between the old and the new. Only art appears anything like a

possibility for establishing a link capable of uniting humanity with its past. But the

contemporary man, who is dispossessed of tradition and the experience of cyclic time

that is inherent in it, is expropriated and drowned in the linear time which corresponds

with history.

VIII

Giorgio Agamben, commenting on the Theses on the Philosophy of Historyby Walter

Benjamin, has compared theAngelus Novus, a painting by Paul Klee, with theAngel

of Melancholy, a print by Drer. If, for Benjamin, the first one represented the angel of

history, for Agamben, the second one is the incarnation of the angel of art. The angel of

history, Agamben writes, whose wings have been entangled in the storm of progress,

and the angel of aesthetics, that fixes the ruins of the past in an atemporal dimension, areinseparable. And until man finds another form to individually and collectively reconcile

the conflict between the old and the new, thus appropriating in this way his own historic-

ity, it seems hardly probable that an improvement of aesthetics not restricted to bringing

this sundering to its limit, will ever occur (Agamben, 1999 [1994]: 10910).

The relationship and contradiction between art and history, defined by these words

by Agamben, do they not correspond maybe to the essential theme that throbs at the

bottom of Andrei Tarkovskys cinematographic work?

Notes1 Erice here refers to a talk given by Rafael Llano about his book,Andrei Tarkovski: Life and

Works. The title of the talk was Andrei Tarkovski: icon-cinema of beauty.

2 Tarkovskys films were actually made between 1960 and 1986, the year of his death.



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References

Agamben G (1999 [1994]) The Man Without Content, trans. G Albert. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.

Llano R (2003) Andrei Tarkovski: Life and Works;Andri Tarkovski: Vida y obra, prologue by

V Erice, 2 vols. Valencia, Spain: Filmoteca de la Generalitat Valenciana Coleccin

Documentos, no. 11.

Sartre J-P (1964) A Letter on the Critique of Ivans Childhood. In N Dunne (ed.) Tarkovsky.

London: Black Dog Publishing, 3545; originally published as J-P Sartre, La infancia de Ivn,

carta a Mario Alicata,LUnit, 9 October 1963. Spanish version in: J-P Sartre,Problemas del

marxismo. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1964.

Tony Partridgeis a Lecturer at the Institute of Technology, Sligo, Ireland. His main researchinterests are Greek and Russian philosophy, film theory and artificial intelligence. Recent

publications include Introductory talk for Medium Religion art exhibition (2009), avail-able at: http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstrinds/nostalghia.com/TheNews/GroysIntroduction.

pdf; From Russia with love, Letter of the month, Sight and Sound19(12) (2009) and

Art as revelation: Andrei Tarkovskys films and the insights of Vctor Erice,Journal of

European Studies41(1) (2011) as co-author.

Maria Diaz-Caneja is a Lecturer in Spanish at the Institute of Technology, Sligo, Ireland.Her research interests are the use of film for teaching and learning, and translation stud-

ies. She is the Honorary Vice-Consul of Spain in the North-West of Ireland and founder

and chair of the Sol y Sombra Spanish Society. She recently co-authored Art as revela-

tion: Andrei Tarkovskys films and the insights of Vctor Erice, Journal of European

Studies41(1) (2011).


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Tarkovsky and cinema