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"Let us put it like this: A spiritual—that is, significant—phenomenon is ‘significant’ precisely because it exceeds its own limits, serves as expression and symbol of something spiritually wider and more universal, and entire world of feelings and thoughts, embodied within it with greater or less felicity—that is the measure of its significance."
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

"Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual."
— Andrei Tarkovsky

I will never forget the first time I saw Andrei Rublev. A friend had told me about a Tarkovsky retrospective at the Film Forum, which at the time was just off Varick Street in lower Manhattan. I had never heard of Tarkovsky, and when I arrived at the theatre, I was surprised to find hundreds of Soho types lined up around the block, all dressed in black, smoking Egyptian cigarettes and looking like extras from a Fellini film. It was then that my friend informed me, "The movie is in black and white, is three-and-a-half hours long, and in Russian with subtitles." I entered the theatre, expecting the worst.

The film, about a fifteenth-century Russian icon painter, began with a peasant taking a flight in a homemade hot-air balloon, followed by a scene of a jester being beaten senseless by soldiers, proceeded into lengthy discussions among various monks about art, and portrayed an unexplained crucifixion in a snowbound Russian village. Thirty minutes into the film, I was hopelessly lost. It was then that I began to notice little things: The quality of light on water droplets as horses splashed through a puddle. The play of evening shadows on an ancient stone wall. The loveliness of birdsong that provided a peaceful counterpoint to the horror of the blinding of a troop of artisans, victims of internecine warfare. I did not know how to fit all the pieces together, but I knew that I was in the presence of genius, and wanted to learn. Six years later, I am still learning.

In words, many images in Tarkovsky’s films seem so mundane, so ordinary—horses eating a cartload of apples spilled upon the beach, a mysterious wind that caresses a field of buckwheat, a father and son planting a dead tree beside a sparkling sea. For Tarkovsky, the world is overflowing with spontaneous perceptions, moments of creation that act as doorways to truth and the infinite. In his treatise on the aesthetics of cinema, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes, "The image is an impression of the truth, a glimpse of the truth permitted to us in our blindness. The incarnate image will be faithful when its articulations are palpably the expression of truth, when they make it unique, singular—as life itself is, even in its simplest manifestations."

Tarkovsky was, throughout his career, straining to portray the numinous, to somehow glimpse the unseen through the depiction of ordinary scenes and subjects, filmed in an utterly fresh and original way. He believed in a reality beyond that which we can apprehend through our senses, a superabundant reality that lends an astonishing beauty and pathos to our interactions with one another and the world at large. Ingmar Bergman credited Tarkovsky with the invention of "a new language which allows him to seize hold of life as appearance, life as a dream," and called him "the finest contemporary filmmaker." Considering the limitations Tarkovsky was forced to work within—the strictures of the Soviet film industry—it is a miracle his visions ever saw the light of day.

Tarkovsky and Soviet Cinema

Before the appearance of Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s (October, Battleship Potemkin), Russia had contributed little to world cinema. Lenin, recognizing the power of visual images—"of all the arts, for us the most important is cinema," in his words—set about to create a film industry tailored to the goals of the Revolution: "Cinema can and must occupy an important place in the process of cultural revolution as a medium for broad educational work and communist propaganda, the organization and education of the masses around the slogans and tasks of the Party." Toward that end, Eisenstein developed the theory of montage, loosely based on the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Montage is achieved through the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate images, for example, a shot of "bourgeois capitalists," a cut to a herd of swine, culminating in an image of the murder of unsuspecting proletarians. Eisenstein left the synthesis of these conflicting images to the mind of the filmgoer, intuiting that conclusions reached by the audience would be more powerful than direct indoctrination in Marxist philosophy.

The other major movement in Soviet cinema, socialist realism, was developed in the 1930s. Socialist realism was a reaction to the perceived psychologizing and surrealist tendencies in Western cinema. Rather than dealing with the inner struggles of the individual, the aim of socialist realism was to put forth a vision of Marxist utopia and to provide a model of the average citizen as warrior for the Revolution. It was in direct competition with Christianity, as is shown in the following release from a conference on the cinema:

In Church only one drama is performed and always one and the same, year in, year out, while in the cinema next door you will be shown the Easters of heathen, Jew and Christian, their historic sequence, with their similarity of ritual. The cinema amuses, educates, delights the imagination by images, and liberates you from the need of crossing the Church door. The cinema is a great competitor not only of the public-house, but of the church. Here is an instrument which we must secure at all costs!

Socialist realism put forth enormous energy to the end of redirecting faith in a transcendent reality to faith in society as it would be once the goals of Marxism were fulfilled.

Tarkovsky, born in 1932 into the comfortable Moscow household of Arseniy Tarkovsky, a well-regarded poet of the people, was surrounded by works of classical art, literature and music. As a teenager, Andrei spent long hours with his father, listening to Bach, gazing at books of Russian religious art, and attending to the recitation of his father’s poetry. These classical influences, as well as a love of the woods and fields he experienced on visits to his grandmother’s dacha in the country, are foundational in all of Tarkovsky’s films, and seem to have engendered a hunger for more than can be accounted for in the materialist philosophies put forth in Soviet art and literature.

There is little biographical information available on Tarkovsky. We know little about his early experiences in the Christian faith and what led him, a member of the intelligentsia, into the Orthodox church. What is known is, by the time his first feature film, Ivan’s Childhood, arrived on the scene in 1962, Tarkovsky had developed a deeply religious aesthetic sense. Ivan’s Childhood, the story of a twelve year old Russian scout on the German front in World War II, at first glance resembled the socialist realist films of the time: A young hero sacrifices his life in the service of the Motherland. However, Tarkovsky attempted, through the use of dreams and a complex system of symbols and images, many of them Christian, to represent Ivan’s longings for his mother—killed by German soldiers—and his twin desires to return to the innocent beauties of childhood and to wreak vengeance upon the enemy. Tarkovsky succeeded in placating the Soviet censors by the startlingly realistic portrayal of life in wartime, and his religious consciousness registered profoundly in the sensibilities of the Russian people. Ivan’s Childhood placed Tarkovsky in the forefront of Soviet directors, much the same way One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich propelled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into the literary world the year before.

Tarkovsky’s second feature, Andrei Rublev, initially met the same fate as Solzhenitsyn’s novels after Ivan Denisovich—official suppression by Soviet authorities. Whereas the religious themes in Ivan’s Childhood were cloaked in obscure symbolism, Rublev treated the protagonist’s crises of faith openly. Completed in 1966, Rublev would not be released until 1971, where it was described as "the most profound, most powerful and most moving historical film ever to appear on the Russian screen." Andrei Rublev garnered prizes in festival competitions around the world, and subsequently has been acclaimed as "one of the top fifteen films ever made." Tarkovsky was now recognized worldwide as the best Russian director since Eisenstein, and the Communist Party grudgingly allowed him to continue to make films with an unprecedented freedom of expression.

Tarkovsky often complained bitterly about the struggles he endured in the attempt to complete each of his films in the Soviet film system. His diaries are filled with ideas for dozens of films, but he was only able to complete seven in his 25-year career, largely due to bureaucratic entanglements. Scripts had to be approved by the official censors (however, Tarkovsky would often alter his films significantly in the final stages), and Mosfilm, the leading film agency, controlled the pursestrings. Tarkovsky would never again receive the epic-sized budget he had been granted for Rublev. After Rublev, Mosfilm deliberately withheld permission for the entry of his subsequent films into most international competitions, yet each film, surreptitiously submitted into festivals such as Cannes, Telluride, London or Paris, received major prizes, and were usually awarded the highest honors.

Increasingly bewildered by his inability to receive approval for his film ideas, Tarkovsky and his wife, Larissa defected to the West after completion in Italy of his sixth film, Nostalghia, in 1983, leaving behind his son, Andriuschka. The rest of his life was devoted to the attempt to persuade the Soviet authorities to release his son, and to the completion of his final film, Sacrifice, in 1986. While he was filming Sacrifice in Sweden, Tarkovsky learned that he had a malignant tumor. He died in Paris in December 1986.

Images and Themes in Tarkovsky’s Films

Poetic Reasoning

Whereas Eisenstein had utilized the theories of montage to create artificial links between images where there were none, Tarkovsky applied laws of "poetic reasoning" to the creation of his films from Andrei Rublev onward. Tarkovsky felt his task was to unveil relationships between images and events that were created by God in the universe, rather than imposing relationships upon an audience in order to manipulate them into a prescribed point of view. Tarkovsky was especially drawn to the internal logic of Japanese haiku, where three very different images are combined to form a whole much larger than the parts. Concerning this circuitous method of arriving at new perceptions, Tarkovsky wrote, "The birth and development of thought are subject to laws of their own, and sometimes demand forms of expression which are quite different from the patterns of logical speculation. In my view poetic reasoning is closer to the laws by which thought develops, and thus to life itself, than is the logic of traditional drama."

Tarkovsky’s films each have their own dreamlike inner coherence, but there are a number of images which remain constant from film to film, providing unifying links which provide clues to the cinematic language Tarkovsky has created. In several films, at moments of crisis, a jug of milk will spill onto the floor and shatter, underscoring the splintering of heretofore comfortable domestic relationships. Characters will, without warning, suddenly be lifted off or struck to the ground by an invisible hand. For example, in a dream sequence at the beginning of Ivan’s Childhood, Ivan, to his delight and astonishment, is raised through the trees and begins to fly over the Russian landscape. In Tarkovsky’s final film, Sacrifice, after Otto, the postman has fallen, he gets up and declares, "An evil angel touched me." When characters are at the threshold of some great moment of self-discovery or spiritual illumination, they will inexplicably fall to the ground, as if humbled by the hand of God. In several films lovers will, without warning, suddenly rise into the air, levitating in the act of lovemaking.

There are no easy explanations to these images, but they seem to point to an interpenetration of the seen and unseen worlds, visible manifestations of the spiritual battles that are continually being waged around us. Tarkovsky believed that deliberately leaving his images open-ended would allow their meanings to continue to grow in the mind of the viewer, and refused to limit imagination with easy explanations. Tarkovsky says, "What I’m interested in is not symbols, but images. An image has an unlimited number of possible interpretations." It is this refusal to explain the inner logic of Tarkovsky’s films that make them so intriguing—and baffling. Rather than providing direct connections between scenes, events and images, Tarkovsky relied on the laws of associative linking to provide oblique relationships that, when added up, would create a mood that would strike the viewer on a pre-conscious level. However, there are certain themes that Tarkovsky explores throughout his films, and I will examine three in particular.

Fragmented Relationships

The heroes and heroines of Tarkovsky’s films are filled with intense, yet unmet, longings. Ivan, having lost his family to the hands of the enemy, tries to fulfill his hunger for his parents by latching on to the officers at the front and inflicting vengeance upon the Germans as a spy. Andrei Rublev takes a vow of silence after he murders a Tartar invader in the defense of a young woman, and for the rest of his life is alienated from God, doing acts of penance in an attempt at restoration with Him. Kris, in Solaris, spends most of the film attempting to make up for his failures that led to the suicide of his wife. The families in Mirror and Sacrifice have long ago abandoned any pretense of communication, and live desperately in an intensely private verbal violence.

Tarkovsky’s parents divorced when he was a child and his own first marriage painfully disintegrated, possibly explaining the pervasive lack of hope among the relationships in his films. He repeats several techniques throughout his films to visually express his characters’ inner turmoil and alienation. Mirrors abound in his films, and often his characters will speak to one another’s mirror image, rather than to each other. In carefully staged scenes, the characters will stare off into different directions, aiming their words into thin air, even though they work into one another’s hearts like daggers. Tarkovsky often used long takes—sometimes as long as ten minutes—to follow a character ever-deeper into his own world of relational isolation.

The most notable of these long takes occurs near the end of Sacrifice when Alexander, in the fulfillment of his vow to God destroys all of his families possessions in a method guaranteed to separated himself from them forever. In this shot, the camera is an impassive observer following Alexander as he burns down his house, the family returns, horror-stricken, and he is taken away in an ambulance. In this one seven-minute sequence, we see the violent, irrevocable journey of a brilliant man from a domestic, mundane existence to the frontiers of spiritual isolation where his only solace will be God. An interesting aside: While Tarkovsky was filming this uninterrupted take, the camera jammed and the house had to be rebuilt from scratch and burned down again.

Guilt and Loss

Throughout the film Sacrifice, there is the sound of coins dropping onto the floor. The protagonist, Alexander, overcome with a sense of his own guilt and worthlessness, has made a wager with God in that he will give up everything he owns, even the only thing he loves in the world, his son, if only God will spare the world from impending nuclear disaster. The constant aural presence of the coins reminds us of the tremendous cost Alexander must pay if God is to grant his prayer to redeem the world. Alexander receives God’s acknowledgment of the wager when he experiences a vision in which he observes himself trudging through the mud where silver coins lie next to the sleeping—or dead—form of his son. The coin scene in Sacrifice is nearly identical to an episode in Andrei Rublev, when the monks are walking through the mud immediately preceding an invasion where the church’s treasury is looted, and the sacristan is tortured with the words, "Tartar-faced Judas" being hurled towards the Church, stealer of the peasants’ earnings.

In Mirror, the son has a moment of dejá-vu when he drops a pocketful of coins, saying "I feel like I’ve been here before." Later in the film, we learn that exactly the same thing happened to his father in a scene where his grandmother is selling her most precious possession—her earrings—in order to provide food for the family Tarkovsky uses the simple medium of coins to intimate the bargains and sacrifices we make in our moments of desperation, reminding us of the story of Abraham and Isaac and ultimately of the Great Sacrifice made on our behalf by the Father. In making connections from film to film the images begin to build into a personal vision that strikes us at the heart of our own guilt and betrayal, and, with a shock of recognition, we realize that Tarkovsky is telling us that we, too, are like Judas—we are all accomplices in a crime of universal magnitude and in profound need of redemption.

Memory

Tarkovsky’s films are filled with specific objects and events from his own childhood memories—ceramic milk jugs, lace curtains, children watching a barn burn down in the rain—for he believed that simple homely images from his own life would register deeply in the mind of the viewer, calling forth the viewer’s own subconscious childhood associations. For his autobiographical film, Mirror, he reconstructed his grandmother’s wooden dacha, and even went so far as to plant the neighboring field in buckwheat, waiting a year for the grain to ripen in order to recreate the landscape as he remembered it. However, these memories tend to resonate with a greater intensity in the Russian heart, battered as it is with the drabness of decades of socialism, than with Western audiences. The belief that individual memories are of inestimable value in the economy of existence was a revolutionary idea to Tarkovsky’s audience in the Soviet Union, indoctrinated as they were to years of collectivist teaching that the individual must be subservient to the state.

Tarkovsky wanted to call the Russian people to an examination of their national memory, as well. In Ivan’s Childhood and Mirror, he interspersed newsreel footage with narrative events, grounding the thoughts and actions of his characters in moments of shared tragedy and grief familiar to all Russians. Scenes from the Spanish Civil War and World War II form a backdrop of pathos to the sufferings of the characters in these films, reminding us that the alienation and pain experienced in his stories has been multiplied millions of times in the history of this tortured nation.

The events that occur in Tarkovsky’s films, though they are brilliant storytelling, are external means that point to internal spiritual development. It is futile to attempt to merely recall plots and story lines—not the least because they are so complex and ambiguous—in order to arouse interest in Tarkovsky’s works. It is the images, the manipulation of the external world to portray the inner struggles and longings of the characters, that give his films their power. We often feel as if we are undergoing a dream where the surface events have an enormous meaning that lies just beyond our grasp, yet resonate deeply with that which lies most deeply hidden in our own lives, aching to be exposed.

The Responsibility of the Artist

Art is not merely self-expression, but in its purest form is a selfless act of communion. Tarkovsky believed that self-expression is meaningless unless it meets with a response in the other. Rather than merely hearing one’s own echo, the artist seeks to create "a spiritual bond with others." True artistic communication is neither didactic nor a soliloquy, but occurs when we bring our longings, fears and questions into dialogue with the other. The artist must not only exhibit his strengths, but expose his weaknesses, for only humility can destroy the walls that separate the artist from the patron. It is a sacrifice on the part of the artist to bring his doubts, bewilderment and half-formed beliefs into the presence of another, knowing that he will likely be misinterpreted and misunderstood, but the greatest artists have always been willing to take that chance.

Tarkovsky wrote, "The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of self can only be expressed in sacrifice." The sacrifice that Tarkovsky alludes to in his writings includes vulnerability and even humiliation before his audience, but it is more than that. The artist points to unseen realities, to larger questions of purpose and meaning, and in doing so, reminds us that, though the universe is astonishing in its richness, beauty and complexity, we are but a vapor that lasts a short while.

In Tarkovsky’s words, "The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good." Any artist or prophet who is willing to devote his life to the illumination of this great and simple truth—"You are going to die, so what manner of man ought you to be?"—will necessarily suffer persecution, and therein lies the sacrifice. It is not a popular message. But any artist or prophet who believes in the core of his being that Something exists beyond the reach of his five senses can afford to do no less. He has not been given the option.

Tarkovsky and the Western Audience

Goethe said that it is as hard to read a great book as it was to write it. It is our relationship with reality that allows us to bear the ideas and spiritual judgments that the author has endured—to suffer along with the author in his wrestling with truth. If we have not suffered well, we cannot read well.

Tarkovsky’s films are bewilderingly complex and confusing, especially to Western audiences used to the conventional narrative structures of mainstream Hollywood films. The viewer is often left adrift with the beginning of each new scene, wondering how this event or that image fits into the plot, and often does not even learn the identity or purpose of a character until well into the film. Halfway through any Tarkovsky film, there are bound to be more questions than answers. One film critic describes the ambiguous nature of Tarkovsky’s narrative structure:

In almost every case Tarkovsky either ignores or thwarts the narrative expectations that most viewers will apply to interpreting the film’s structure: To make sense of the films, and to respond to their strong inner coherence, we have to learn to ask different questions and to tolerate an unusual amount of both narrative ambiguity and denial—or diversion into different channels—of what we consider to be legitimate narrative demands.

The average Western film requires nothing from the viewer. Its narrative structure sets up a series of questions in order to preserve an air of suspense—"What will happen to this character?" "How will he/she overcome the problem of a difficult marriage?" "Will Lassie bring the insulin to the diabetic hunter with the broken leg before he dies?"—then logically answers each question and dilemma, so the viewer leaves satisfied that a resolution has come about. A typical Western film gives us what we want by telling us what we already know. As Tarkovsky says, "Generally people look to familiar examples and prototypes for confirmation of their opinion, and a work of art is assessed in relation to, or by analogy with, their private aspirations or personal position."

Tarkovsky knew that in real life there are few such pat resolutions to the tragedies and dilemmas in our lives. In most of his films, the questions are not so easy. For example, in Andrei Rublev, the question, "Will Andrei ever paint again?" does not even come up until halfway through the film. Far more important is our identification with Andrei’s sufferings, questions pertaining to the purpose of art, and crises of belief. In Sacrifice, we are deliberately left with the question, "Was this all a dream, or did the events of Alexander’s night with the witch really happen? Did Alexander, in fact, avert a nuclear holocaust?"

Tarkovsky is in a sacred dialogue with creation, and wants the viewer to join in the dialogue. The only way to gain our participation is to undermine our expectations from the outset by giving us less information than is necessary to form absolute judgments about his films. He knows that to truly see, we must first admit our blindness, that by groping around in the darkness of our understanding we may, for the first time, experience some corner of life as it really is.

Tarkovsky realized that his films were difficult to comprehend, and that multiple viewings were necessary to extract the deep truths buried within. He acknowledged that the film audience is unused to this level of demands, since most directors do all of their thinking for them, and wrote,

The beautiful is hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth, for whom it is contraindicated. But the profound lack of spirituality of those people who see art and condemn it, the fact that they are neither willing nor ready to consider the meaning and aim of their existence in any higher sense is often masked by the vulgarly simplistic cry, ‘I don’t like it!’ ‘It’s boring!’ It is not a point that one can argue; but it is like the utterance of a man born blind who is being told about a rainbow. He simply remains deaf to the pain undergone by the artist in order to share with others the truth he has reached.

Grappling with Tarkovsky’s films over the years has been like learning a new language. I have seen most of his films four or five times, read numerous treatises, and had long discussions with other lovers of his work, yet often feel as if I am only scratching the surface of his films. But the rewards that have come from the effort are inestimable—glimpses of profound beauties, insights into devastating psychological realities, rumors and intimations of Glory. For me, Tarkovsky, more than any other director has portrayed the doubts, fears and joys that await the stalker of truth upon his often sad and lonely pilgrimage through life.

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