A Preface: On Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and Nostalgia
Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not. ––Heraclitus
The idea of return requires two loci that are different in character either topologically or conceptually, but in each case they are also of the same or similar genus for the subject of return to possibly situate in them in the first place. A return also requires an impulse of the subject, and a rather peculiar and resolute one to say the least, for it is in the opposite direction of which one “should” be going and back to something that has already been known and experienced. At the same time, a return signifies sameness and difference, affirmation and rebel.
Nostalgia is one particular kind of return, a return like no other: it is not only an impulse of return in the topological and perceptual sense, but already a return in itself, and such in the conceptual and idealistic sense, thanks to memory and imagination Consequently, nostalgia is not so much the return of the subject, but about the subject–in nostalgia, the destination of the return becomes an ever-changing representation through and of the subject itself. The “home-land” is never there, while the aura of it is realized in ever-renewing fashion by actively abandoning the material fantasy of this place and diving into the l'étranger that is to be constantly appropriated by the subject as part of the self–the return begins as soon as the departure. With such return, the two loci meet, melt and react as representations. As a result,one can say that the value of return as nostalgia lies in anything but return in its literal sense. It is a return more aggressive and explorative than most ventures and also impossible to fully realize. Here, man will never find what he seeks, like a sailor who is determined to reach the end of the horizon. Instead, it is the World who “folds up” and contemplates upon itself through man, so that it can take its chance to care for and possibly heal itself beyond time and space, for only man is capable of “existing”, remembering, and fighting with such vanity.like a sailor who is determined to reach the end of the horizon. Instead, it is the World who “folds up” and contemplates upon itself through man, so that it can take its chance to care for and possibly heal itself beyond time and space , for only man is capable of “existing”, remembering, and fighting with such vanity.like a sailor who is determined to reach the end of the horizon. Instead, it is the World who “folds up” and contemplates upon itself through man, so that it can take its chance to care for and possibly heal itself beyond time and space , for only man is capable of “existing”, remembering, and fighting with such vanity.
There was no way Tarkovsky could go back to Russia after 1979, before he made Nostalghia–an urge to go back, perhaps, for the very first shot of the film is already whispering it. The camera follows the car moving to the left, then it feels no obligation to follow it anymore, so it sits still. The car disappears. Several seconds later, the car returns to the frame, and this time much closer to us. The motif of the return appears multiple times in the entire film, as for another example, in the shot sequence beside the pool starting from 32:23, it is the camera itself that takes up the task–it pans from the right side of the pool to the left, and back to the right again.
When it comes to the semi-autobiographical plot, Tarkovsky also shows little restraint in telling of his one-and-only homeland and how firmly it is bound to him. In the film, he crowns those precious moments of “return” to Russia in his iconic and masterful dream sequences, where the vast land, the cattle, the dog, the folk song and the Russian mother form a symphony of memory.
Indeed, whether in terms of plot or rhetoric, there is no way to question Tarkovsky's love and longing for his homeland, Russia. However, one ought to hesitate before applying it as the sole theme of the film.
It is rather evident that the “prelude” of the film–that is, when the opening credits are shown–is in fact itself a nostalgic dream of the same sort, since the rhetoric and visual elements are similar to those in the actual film, and like many other dreams, it starts off with the Russian folk song, which draws the audience further into the vast land and people of Russia. However, the humming of the Russian woman is soon replaced by something almost contrasting–the Requiem by Verdi– solemn, pathetic, and, more importantly, somehow “orthodox” to our ears. Despite all the artistic mastery and cultural significance this piece bears, it appears almost as a cruel disruption, as if reality is squeezing into the harmonious serenity found only in dreams –it is Italy where the protagonist finds himself. The birthplace of Renaissance,Italy is where man last time made his crucial “return” and thus re-recognized beauty, science, and himself–or at least man thought he did. As the prelude progresses, one then finds out that the two pieces of music accompany the prelude alternatively till the end, hinting that, before the actual film, the struggle has already begun, and the l'étranger shows no signs of receding–it “has” Tarkovsky by flesh and blood. As this film implies, Italy, or, in a broader sense, Euro-centrism, has imprisoned Tarkovsky as much as it has spellbound him.and the l'étranger shows no signs of receding–it “has” Tarkovsky by flesh and blood. As this film implies, Italy, or, in a broader sense, Euro-centrism, has imprisoned Tarkovsky as much as it has spellbound him.and the l'étranger shows no signs of receding–it “has” Tarkovsky by flesh and blood. As this film implies, Italy, or, in a broader sense, Euro-centrism, has imprisoned Tarkovsky as much as it has spellbound him.
It is widely regarded that the “proper” method of perspective in painting was invented in Italy during the Renaissance, by Giotto or Brunelleschi no matter. From then on the people on the continent thought they had known the proper way to see and represent. When the second half of the 19th century finally saw revolutionists like Cézanne who managed to shatter the foundation of such “prejudice”, on the other hand, the birth of camera had helped perpetuate it to a further degree. In fact, it has never been the only or even common way of seeing, for there have been people who can see differently all along–the Russians, the Chinese, the Africans, etc., and it can be evidently shown in their arts, where there is no absolute point of perspective from which everything properly lays out–in those arts, such point either moves or dissolves.Then the idea of a Russian director itself contains an unresolvable tension, for anything laid out in his genius Russian mind will have to be captured by a mechanical eye that is purely European. Tarkovsky infuses such frustration to the protagonist, imprisoning him, time and time again, in the long and narrow hallway of his hotel that seems as if constructed solely by four dark beams radiating from that ever-so-conspicuous vanishing point overlapped with himself. In this film, European architecture, no matter how grandeur, solemn and harmonious , cannot avoid being depressive and constraining at the same time.imprisoning him, time and time again, in the long and narrow hallway of his hotel that seems as if constructed solely by four dark beams radiating from that ever-so-conspicuous vanishing point overlapped with himself. In this film, European architecture, no matter how grandeur, solemn and harmonious, cannot avoid being depressive and constraining at the same time.imprisoning him, time and time again, in the long and narrow hallway of his hotel that seems as if constructed solely by four dark beams radiating from that ever-so-conspicuous vanishing point overlapped with himself. In this film, European architecture, no matter how grandeur, solemn and harmonious, cannot avoid being depressive and constraining at the same time.
It was during Renaissance that the European thought they had known beauty, thanks to the re-appreciation of ancient Greek and Roman art as well as the emergence of contemporary geniuses like Raphael and Leonardo. Beauty, then, was prudently studied, so that it can be determined by specific measures and proportions, and it thus has its examples of perfection. Beauty is the Madonna by Raphael, Mona Lisa by Leonardo, or David by Michelangelo, and there is no way any of them can be overturned. In the film, we don't lack such examples¬–the Italian heroine by all means exemplifies this seemingly indisputable idea of beauty. However, it turns out that she can in no way cure the protagonist, who constantly dreams of a Tartar woman appearing as a mother figure with a physiognomy distinct from that of the Caucasians¬–Tarkovsky chose not even a Slavonic,but a woman with Asian blood to draw enough distinction.
It was, again, during Renaissance that the European returned to draw serious attention to books, the material embodiment of knowledge and wisdom. One of the most exemplary figures of the time is Petrarch, who gathered a huge collection of ancient books and manuscripts and idled Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the founder of the Library of Alexandria. In them lie the will to knowledge, the confidence in man, and the unswerving belief in the Babel Tower, that knowledge can be put to order, stack up like bricks and, in doing so, ultimately reach the Providence. And what says Tarkovsky? In the dream of Revelation, that is, when the protagonist walks down the street and sees Domenico the mad man in the mirror, the street is covered with books–soaked in sewage, tore up, and abandoned for good.
This wouldn't have happened if the vital bearer of knowledge, language, were competent. The role of the translator echoes the blasphemy of Babel, and the Italian heroine, who still indulges herself in a bridge that never was after Babel, is destined to fail in any kind of proper communication, either with people or art.
Europe, and humanism along with it, is facing its doom, and Tarkovsky sees it so clearly that he desperately seeks the cure. In many of his films, he created characters like caricatures of value and thought–artists, writers, scientists, mystics– and hoped that their debates could rise in spiral circulation and eventually reach some kind of answer. However, his characters, willful as they are, remain as static as Domenico on his fixed bicycle, and ultimately melt into Tarkovsky's own poetic canvas. He presses his lens onto art works, holds there for so long, counting on the aesthetic consciousness and historical significance they possibly manifest, only to bring them distortion and deprive them of their time-bearing texture. He values Beethoven's Choral Symphony as beyond anything purely musical or artistic in general,as if it is the key to end human struggle once and for all, but when Domenico sets himself on fire, the broken speaker simply fails the music, turning Ode to Joy into the howling of the sirens–it seems that Tarkovsky himself is aware of the sense of futility in his quest, but he refuses to accept it so easily.
Like many of his great compatriots, Tarkovsky turns to God almost inevitably. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky expresses his inexplicable resonance with Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and the two giants do share some similarities: profound understanding of European culture, firm attachment to homeland and childhood, sharp insight in worldly/empirical matters, the ability to see through the mirage of truth, and, most importantly, the belief that God is Love, that Love can cure mankind. In a non-topological dimension, Tarkovsky's camera does not shoot the object from afar, like Kubrick, or pierce though/exploit the object, like Bergman–Tarkovsky's camera holds it, and even fondles it, for all are brothers, and are thus capable of love. And like Tolstoy, Tarkovsky also cannot break away from messianism. At the end,the protagonist takes up the role of the great savior: he walks on the lake, carries the light, and ultimately finishes his passion. In this post-Nietzsche era, it is hard to argue that such pseudo-miracle is enough, while Tarkovsky's possible response to Nietzsche in The Sacrifice remains, depending on one's personal understanding, either ambiguous or too obscure. Moreover, Tarkovsky's love still situates in the dimension of universal love, that is, love for mankind, while in the pursuit of “loving your neighbors” , the director seems to often fall short. As what has been mentioned previously, Tarkovsky's characters usually bear too much of his designations(or perhaps too little?) to liberate themselves from his canvas,and thus it becomes impossible for them to acquire the status as real human beings so as to invoke neighborly love that is as vital to reach the God the director sets up in mind. However, this is indeed a bit too much to ask for from a film director, whose medium of expression is supposed to rely mainly on images rather than dialogues and is limited to lasting only three hours at most, not to mention that even Tolstoy, a writer infamous for his prolificacy and narrative genius, is still questioned over the same conundrum.a writer infamous for his prolificacy and narrative genius, is still questioned over the same conundrum.a writer infamous for his prolificacy and narrative genius, is still questioned over the same conundrum.
And the man who possibly holds the key to solving this conundrum happened to appear on Tarkovsky's schedule for his next film after The Sacrifice, and, as the director passed away in 1986, will be on it forever. In the diary of April 30, 1970 , Tarkovsky mentioned Dostoevsky, saying that "there's almost certainly no point in screening the novels. We must make a film about the man himself. About his personality, his God, his devil, his work." And yet towards the end of his life , Tarkovsky was seriously developing an adaptation on The Idiot–after sixteen years, what's so unique about Dostoevsky's novels that it changed Tarkovsky's mind? One can find some threads when linking this question to Tarkovsky's aforementioned struggles. In addition to the equally firm reliance on Love and/as God,Dostoevsky have his characters possess the magic to make the reader love them as real and distinct individuals, individuals made of flesh and blood, who, with impulses from their very depth of nature, often carry out exciting debates resembling the boiling water, where values and ideas clash, collapse and reach delirium. All these are made possible by torments, both to the characters and possibly to the author himself, a man who was once one group away from execution and suffered from epilepsy and poverty all his life–perhaps this is also why the writer attracted Tarkovsky as much as his novels. Dostoevsky knows torment like a brother, and can thus expound it to the extreme in his characters, whose pain and struggle are so great that they are shown the way to God,and yet so real that they reach out from the paper to the reader–just like Dante having his Virgil, accompanied by those characters of torment, Dostoevsky hoped, his readers can find the way to Paradiso.
And what sort of torment can better nostalgia in both uniting mankind–the universal–and yet preserving and reverencing each individual's own existence–the particular? What sort of return can better nostalgia in bringing two worlds of the World together so as to look further for the possible cure to its disease? If Babel had not happened, nor the Death of God(in the Nietzschean sense), the crisis of history, the two World Wars, the doom of logo-centrism, and so on, would Tarkovsky express his nostalgia for Russia in the same way? Or is he to feel such nostalgia that a film is required at all? In such era of apocalypse, when Italy, the place where nostalgia once as collective consciousness redefined man's being, this time gently invokes this special torment from the opposite end and in a Russian heart who breathes European air,there is no way to fix our eyes only on a glowing homeland constructed out of fantasies, nor is it possible to limit an art work to the artist's personal will and existence.
Tarkovsky's camera wanders between the pillars in the Italian church, just like himself, rebelling against the lines of perspective violently imposed on it, but as much as Tarkovsky torments in his personal struggle, it is instead the makers of his torment who find new light, and they did it through him.
It can be argued that the art of poetry achieves relatively its fullest development in Europe and in the Indo-European language, and its close relation to truth and man's very existence has been apprehended by certain people and addressed numerously by poets, critics and thinkers in different fashions. Hence this art shares the chance with religion, science and some others to possibly provide the key to end human struggle. However, western poetry has been almost limited to phonetic language alone, and as the very foundation of such language is getting challenged more and more fiercely, this art is in danger of serious collateral damage. Hence it demands a new medium of expression which, apart from possessing formidable artistic potential, could minimize the distortion in communication and is thus as valid and universal as possible.
In common sense, a film is constituted of scenes, scenes of shots, and all these are based on the content or progression of the plot those specific units contain–they are written in prose. And no matter how the plot varies, without changing the film speed, they almost always occlude onto the lapse of time in an orderly fashion. In accordance with what Kant proposed in his Critique of Pure Reason, these films, just like all worldly matters to the eyes of man, seem to follow time as their master. And it is with Tarkovsky that this relation seems getting overturned. Disobeying the common principles of continuous editing by subtly liberating and vitalizing the camera, Tarkovsky owes his unique cinematic aesthetics to the vast land of Russia, where earthly and empirical materials remain in raw and flowing multiplicity,untouched by man's will to knowledge and order. In so doing, cinema claims its own sovereignty, and becomes the master of time–in the world of this particular art form, to say the least, time has never been objective or transcendental. And also in so doing, Tarkovsky proposes cinema, an art of representation, movement and time, as a more competent medium for poetry. His film, like poems, is written in verse, verse consist of time, and time sculpted by movement. It makes punctuation according to how it breathes, and an entire stanza ends only when it has made its last sigh, as no one would consider the first shot of Nostalghia, that is, the aforementioned “shot of return”, as the first scene, if the idea of scenes were valid here at all, for the camera movement never stops and has not prepared its denouement. Instead,the shot is smoothly followed by the following ones in the church, and the first full “sentence” or “stanza” is likely to end with the long zoom-in closeup of the icon in the church. It is only with such overall designation that the famous “candle shot” can achieve the impact that it now has on the audience. It is simultaneously a shot of progression and repetition, expectation and suspense, the moving and the still, and even life and death, where time solidifies and is sculpted out from its stream, and where from sterile everydayness bursts out the flaring essence of being-in-the-world. In comparison, the symbolic indication in it seems more suitable as some secondary commentary.It is only with such overall designation that the famous “candle shot” can achieve the impact that it now has on the audience. It is simultaneously a shot of progression and repetition, expectation and suspense, the moving and the still, and even life and death, where time solidifies and is sculpted out from its stream, and where from sterile everydayness bursts out the flaring essence of being-in-the-world. In comparison, the symbolic indication in it seems more suitable as some secondary commentary.It is only with such overall designation that the famous “candle shot” can achieve the impact that it now has on the audience. It is simultaneously a shot of progression and repetition, expectation and suspense, the moving and the still, and even life and death, where time solidifies and is sculpted out from its stream, and where from sterile everydayness bursts out the flaring essence of being-in-the-world. In comparison, the symbolic indication in it seems more suitable as some secondary commentary.and where from sterile everydayness bursts out the flaring essence of being-in-the-world. In comparison, the symbolic indication in it seems more suitable as some secondary commentary.and where from sterile everydayness bursts out the flaring essence of being-in-the-world. In comparison, the symbolic indication in it seems more suitable as some secondary commentary.
A unison of two distinct cultural traditions, Tarkovsky's poetic style is the artist's best answer to this era of apocalypse as well as his own nostalgia, but only if he realized it. After the “passion” of the protagonist, the last shot of Nostalghia can lead to completely distinct interpretations based on the perspective taken. It is anyhow arguable that the shot itself, free from the film's emotional hegemony, can be seen as a visualization of the great unison between two cultures–a neutral, if not positive, connotation. However, once following the director's own pathos, one could only see the shot as of grave melancholy and pessimism: the protagonist, holding on to a small part of his homeland, seems trapped in a European cathedral that is already laid in ruins. Then from here one sees a matter for regret: Nostalghia,being Tarkovsky's second to last work, still busies itself blending symbolic motifs and monologues like an alchemist (though truly a masterful one, make no mistake), while Tarkovsky's most special and original gift–his poetic aesthetics in cinema, the ability to “sculpt in time”–had developed and ripen long before this film and as early as in Andrey Rublev in 1966–no wonder he was criticized in Nostalghia for being a poet of cinema with “too little a vocabulary”. Were Tarkovsky able to embrace his syncretic nature and explore more about cinema's poetic possibilities, instead of sacrificing most of his creative vigor in expressing love, representing torment or deducing from problems, mankind could have reached closer to what it is destined to fall short of, for perhaps, following what Tarkovsky himself stated about Dostoevsky,those human affairs are required more for creating an artist and not necessarily arts, especially when it concerns artists and arts that aim so high as to seek the answer to human existence.
Then we have the conclusions, where one may come to recognize that Tarkovsky didn't just make one film about nostalgia–instead, he is, and has always been, the quintessential nostalgic director. As a special form of return, nostalgia symbolizes Tarkovsky's unique poetic style in cinema, which made him reach out the farthest and thus come closest to an answer to human struggle, something Tarkovsky sought for his entire life. Nostalghia the film, on the other hand, does claim its unique place in the director's oeuvre– not for artistic significance or personal resonance alone, but more for its possible role as a preface to this great name in the world of cinema: it provides an explication on the overarching theme that has simultaneously defined Tarkovsky as both an extraordinary artist and a common human being.
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