After reading this, I read all seven of Tarkovsky's novels this year. The most puzzling of them may be this one, followed by "Nostalgia". The understanding of other works is easier. This article doesn't mainly want to talk about this "Sacrifice", and I really don't understand this one too much. I just want to use the last work of Ta's to express a trivial respect for it.
It is said that Tarkovsky said in "Sculpting Time" that after watching "War and Peace", he could no longer bear the garbage in literature. To put it bluntly, too many things we watch now are garbage, and these dazzling things make us stay away from the classics almost forever. I'm ashamed to say that Tolstoy's masterpiece has also been lying in my kindle for a long time before I have time to read it. So aside from the presence of Tolstoy's name in Nostalgia, I don't see much connection to him. However, the shadow of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky runs through almost all of his works, especially in this "Sacrifice". Of course, Tarkovsky is definitely not an ideological carrier who only cites and cites widely. Take this "Sacrifice" as an example. The reflections on modern civilization and technological expansion expressed in the lines are very profound, and there may also be metaphors for war. Concerns about the future of mankind and belief in salvation.
The postman Otto in the film not only talks about Nietzsche, he even looks a lot like Nietzsche. This "Sacrifice" does have a stronger sense of stage or drama. Compared with "Mirror", the poetic performance is less. Although there are scenes of burning houses, I think the performance in "Mirror" is better. beauty. This postman is almost the incarnation of Nietzsche. He gave some prophetic warnings to the male protagonist, uttered the concept of "sacrifice", and guided him to seek Mary for redemption. There may be a series of metaphors here, and there must be a very heavy sentence "the death of God". Nietzsche said in "Zarathustra", "God is dead, and he was killed by us." God can be understood not only as the God of Christianity, but also more broadly as the fundamental belief of all human beings. Although I sensed the metaphor, I didn't understand who God is in this movie, maybe the "littleman". This movie may have the most characters in the seven novels. The group portraits of the characters are easily reminiscent of Tuo's "The Demons" and "Idiot" and then contact the poet in "Nostalgia". The appearance is very similar and deeply influenced by Tuo's Camus, although Camus is not a poet, but in the last paragraph of "Nostalgia", the long mirror holding a candle across the pool, the candle is extinguished, and the poet who walks over again and Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" explains the pushing stone. Sisyphus also echoed. My superficial understanding of the title of "Sacrifice" is to use burning one's own house as a metaphor to purify the greedy expansion of human civilization, the sin of technological development that has made society unrestrained, and hope that people's hearts will return to simplicity in order to seek redemption.
The image of the horse, which appears several times in Ta's films, connects him with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche in a cryptic or silent way. If you also know that there is a section in Tuo's "Crime and Punishment" in which a group of people whips a poor heavy horse, and the owner of the horse even beats it to death for fun, little Raskolnikov witnessed Miserable crying hugged the horse and kissed it. Nietzsche read Dossier in his later period and said, "I adore Dostoevsky today as I adore Pascal. I emphasize this because Pascal will give me infinite revelation, And Dostoevsky was the only one who gave me a high-level theory of Christianity." Soon he also witnessed horse abuse in Piazza Turin, followed by the story of him hugging the horse and crying and then going mad. In "Sacrifice" and "Nostalgia", there are important roles similar to "madman", but Tashi obviously does not agree with our attitude towards seeing and treating "madman", and even thinks that the "madman" in the movie has a certain A "sacred fool" color, I think what he wants to express is the objection to our confinement of "madmen" to highlight our "normal" or "healthy", which is in harmony with Foucault's claim that madness is a kind of power. The definition echoes the idea that people determine their "health" or "normal" by confinement of "crazy people". What we should do, perhaps, is to break down the barriers between people as much as possible, rather than confine each other in modern civilization. Thinking of this, I can't help but feel a little pessimistic. How difficult it is! The subtitles of the Ta's movie I watched are embedded in Russian and English, and can also match the Chinese subtitles, because the computer has been disconnected from the Internet recently and I still watched English subtitles. If possible, if you can watch it a second time, you can switch it as appropriate. English subtitles may be closer to the original meaning of Russian, and thinking in different languages will have different feelings.
This is my impression of Tarkovsky after reading seven novels this year. It is the purest film I have ever seen. This profound Russian soul stands silently with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
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