My presentation at the Potsdam Universität Symposium Andrej
Tarkovskij. Klassiker – Классик – Classic – Classico, 18-20 September 2014
From
the point of view of the philosophical interpretation, Sacrifice
is Tarkovsky's most controversial film. Nietzscheanism, Gnosticism
and Christianism, elements of Extreme-Oriental and archaic
Scandinavian cultures, objective realism and onirism - all are hiding
below the surface of the grandiose and terrifying Apocalyptic
parable. Do these different substrata coalesce into a unitary ideatic
structure and a coherent artistic discourse, or do they remain as
separate semantic nuclei, providing spectators with different reading
strategies different philosophical interpretations?
While
most commentators perceive the film as a soteriologic parable with a
Christian background and discourse, a more traditionalist (and less
artistically instructed) part of Christians are blaming the film for
heresy. Their voices are sustained by some Western commentators, who
don't see the connection between the film's Christian and gnostic
discourses. There are even very young american academic voices
accusing the film (and the filmmaker) for logical incongruences!
But
Tarkovsky asserted that “nothing in his films was hazardous”; he
also stated his film Sacrifice
would be understood at its true value within many years after his
death1.
Has the time arrived for a proper understanding of the movie? If the
discourses of all the film's substrata combine into a coherent,
unitary and symphonic structure, if they form together a vivid
organism, the answer has many chances to be positive.
While
the obvious, epic structure of Sacrifice
relies
on the motif of Apocalypse, seen firstly as the mythic motif of the
End of the World and secondarily, as The Revelation (worldwide
metanoia), the inner, symbolic film's structure relies on the Marial
archetype. Thus mystically, the answer to the provocation of
Apocalypse relies on the Holy Mother of God.
In
Sacrifice
the Marial archetype is concetrated in Leonardo de Vinci's painting
The
Adoration of the Magi, which
insistently appears in the film.
While
in his Soviet creation period, Tarkovsky conceived his films
symphonically, as a musical structure (which is more obvious in
Mirror),
in his Western period he conceived his films as paintings. This
happens both in Nostalgia
and Sacrifice.
Nostalgia's
dissipated narrative gravitates around the sober, simple and majestic
Madonna
del Parto,
Piero della Francesca's pregnant Virgin, while in Sacrifice,
Leonardo
da Vinci's enigmatic canvas reigns in the semantic centre of the
film, molding its subtle structure. The Renascentist vibration of the
half-shaded canvas overlaps with the cold monumentality of the
mise-en-scène and the clasicist manner of acting, creating
a mixture of rational and emotional language so specific to
Tarkovsky's poetics.
Read
in an eschatologic key, the mistery of Leonardo da Vinci's painting
clarifies
the deep meaning of Sacrifice.
Like in Nostalgia,
it's about the mistery of the salvation of the world and the birth of
“the new world”, of taking birth from a Virgin or an unordinary
woman. But the mistery's decoding is different. In order to
understand it, we must enter into the substrata of the great
Florentine master's unfinished painting.
A
fundamental imagistic theme of Christianity, The
Adoration of the Magi
entered
a long time ago into the iconographic program of Eastern and Western
churches. The characters usually represented in the classic icon are
the Madonna with Child, surrounded by the Magi. The canonic scene
focuses on the Nativity Cave, therefore it usually includes cattle
and Angels, sometimes the Righteous Joseph, shepherds and people -
witnesses of Christ's birth. The scene is similar to that of
Christmas, whose composition it sometimes includes. In the Middle
Ages and Renaissance the composition begins to include heroes and
architectural elements of the time, gaining a more worldly character.
But almost always the scene has a peaceful and gentle air, of
“pacifist” and universal harmony. Basically, no version of the
icon or of the religious painting contains any rattling of weapons or
threat of the war. But at Leonardo all these exist! We shall not
investigate the reasons of this compositional solution, adopted by
the Florentine master. For us only one fact matters: from the whole
panoply of classic Nativity scenes, Tarkovsky chooses this quite
encoded, faded and somewhat “unphotogenic” painting. It is known
even the director of photography Sven Nykvist proposed him to abandon
shooting the painting, because he couldn't succed to catch it on the
frame, but Tarkovsky remained uncompromising.
What
accounts for the crucial importance of the Italian master's youth
painting for the dialectics of Tarkovsky's last film? What accents
does it emphasize in the movie's internal structure? And what does
Tarkovsky want to convey to the audience through this painting?
First, the warning on the dangerous and self-destructive path that
humanity is moving - most comments on the film refer exactly to that;
but also the ardent and obstinate hope for the salvation of the world
through the mercy of God, sacrifice and love, the hope of redemptive
renewal of the world through the “birth of Infant Christ in our
hearts” (as Christians wish to each other on Christmas). This is
the inner renewal of man. When the protagonist browses the album of
Russian icons received as a gift, the first image we see is The
Resurrection of Lazarus.
Alexander's birthday becomes the day of resurrection of his soul, but
also the day of dramatic death of “the old man”!
On
the background of Leonardo's painting clearly emerge the Holy Virgin
with Child, the Magi and the two trees of Eden, placed right on the
center line - a rare compositional solution for this iconographic
theme.
But
the Infant (or the child), The Tree of Life and the humble woman (not
necessarily a virgin, but a chosen, uncommon woman) are the main
characters of Tarkovsky's film; as well as, in a sense, the Magi and
the scholars, who aren't exactly the ancient astrologers waiting for
the Christ, but “men
of desire”2,
looking forward to the
end of the old world and the beginning of the new world.
It
is
true, we can't say that about all the male characters in the film
(there are three), but only about Alexander, the “right and wise”,
educated and talented Alexander, aged in the expectation of the great
Revelation!
But
justice and wisdom aren't enough for saving the world: it's also
needed sacrifice and love. “And
though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my
body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing”3.
The
same Apostle Paul's verses have been heard in
Andrei Rublev,
but there everything was more clear and convincing: the level of the
discourse was mostly straight, “realistic” and not parabolic.
While Sacrifice
is
a parable, primarily addressed to the intellect. What else is needed
for the salvation of the world? The persuasion of the divine mercy.
All these can be made – claims the postman Otto - by the humble
servant Maria! Therefore, prior to carrying out his sacrifice
(renunciation to his family, burning his “body”, that is his
“house-as-a-soul”, the adoption of the covenant of silence),
Alexander ought to worship and bring his gifts - gifts of love - to
Maria, so that at her turn she transmits the request of saving the
world to God. This isn't a collage of Evangelical themes; the
relationships between motifs and characters aren't copied from the
Gospel, they are allegorical: direct meaning becomes figurative and
parable becomes reality. This is the “geometric-alchemical” law
for the symbolic solving of the last two Tarkovsky's movies.
The
director confessed that he buildt his films not by narrative laws,
but by visual laws: his films should be read like paintings with a
well-defined, multilayered geometric and vibrational structure, in
which temporal and ontic levels communicate with each other according
not to narrative principles, but to conceptual priciples. This is
most obvious in his western films. Hence their formal difference from
the movies made in his homeland. In those it was enough “to
live” (as both the director and his audience stated). Their
semantic symphonicity was so perfect, that any of their lingvistic
levels (or levels of experience) satisfied the spectators' needs.
While
his Western films, being filled with a more discoursive (rational)
message, it's not enough to be just “experienced” (lived), they
must be properly understood!
Otherwise
the multitude of ambiguities on the screen no longer blends into the
crystalline polarities of antinomic perfection (the binding agent of
their conjoining is the spectator's spirit), but agglomerates into
cascades of inconsistency, until all becomes “confusion”,
“chaos”, “fiasco”, as it happens in a lot of Western
monographs, from the pioneering ones to the most recent.
Despite
the accuracy of the historiographic and academic language, which they
generally prove, they decode many items according to their own,
Western historical and cultural context, perceiving exclusively in a
pragmatic way episodes with a heavy symbolic nature and missing the
symphonicity of the film's deepest layers. Nor do Tarkovsky's Western
movies, especially Sacrifice
escape from this kind of inadequate reading, subjected to
compositional conventions which are alien to the grammar of the
film4.
Like
Stanislaw Lem's Solaristics, the understanding of the Tarkovsky's
western films seems to be, for more than a quarter of a century (at
least in the West), at a dead end. But their proper comprehension is
imperative. For their semantic
simphonicity (rather
than that of homeland films) grows around theses of maximum
generality, just as religious experience develops around the dogma:
the living should be experienced, but also the dogma requires to be
well understood, as the two are mutually interrelated.
In
other words,
the edifice built by Tarkovsky in each of his films
(which is better noticeable in his last two) is
structurally, semantically and functionally, a cathedral:
a theandric space for the encounter between man and God, an eminently
living space, capable of self-regeneration, a pattern of any complete
work of art. This
is argued with the timer in one hand and the treaties of sacred space
theory in the other by the reputed film theorist Dmitri Salynski5.
But
let's look once more to da Vinci's painting. The diagonal between the
seated Virgin and the knelt magician closest to Her on the right
side, the only one gazing the divine couple into the eyes, dominates
the picture. Exactly with this simple and enigmatic fragment the
movie starts: the rectangular profile detail of the magician from the
right side, offering his gift to the Divine Infant, persist on the
opening credits more than 4 minutes!
It
is
important to observe the musical accompaniment of the opening
credits: it
is
Bach's oratory St.
Matthew Passion,
in which Apostle Peter repents before Christ for his betrayal:
“Erbarme
dich, mein Gott, um meiner Zähren willen! / Schaue hier, Herz und
Auge / weint vor dir bitterlich. / Erbarme dich, mein Gott”6.
The
insistent association between soundtrack and image helps to relate
Alexander to the magician on the right from Leonardo's painting. It
is
harder, however, to understand his close relation with Child Jesus.
As a secular intellectual, Alexander seems embarrassed or even
frightened of such a direct relationship with God, even if he longs
to spiritually transform his life.
Once
he finds out about the outbreak of the worldwide disaster, Alexander,
who, according to his words, has not hitherto had any relation with
God, kneels in solitude and clumsily prays for the first time in his
life. Alexander's close-up, with his desperate, imploring glance,
staring upwards, “to God”, seems a 90 degrees rotation towards
the audience of the magus's profile from Leonardo's painting,
insistently and imploringly staring at the Child Christ! But the
sincere and desperate prayer of the righteous is not enough: the
prayer has to be learned, and Alexander is in this sense a profane.
That's why it
is
required the mediation of a chosen person, a close friend to God.
Which means Alexander's relationship to God has to be mediated by a
gift: the gift of prostration and love, which is received by the
Child in the painting as a golden bowl. In the film, the gift is
received by Maria, in order to privately deliver it to God.
Maria
is called a witch, but she looks more like a humble Catholic nun or a
simple church-goer: her behavior, her modest, blackened clothes and
the covering of her head, as well as the decoration of her house with
cheap Catholic icons, old family photos and crucifixes, testify
exactly to this. Arkadi
Strugatki's original script, written at Tarkovsky's request in 1981
for his future film Sacrifice,
was even entitled The
Witch (Vedma).
It should be noted that the Russian word “vedma” (one of the
equivalents for “witch”) has a certain noble connotation
(“clairvoyant”), originated from the ancient, sanskrit root “to
know”, “to see” (“vedat'”), which expands in a certain
degree the semantic field of the word.
It
is
said Maria lives near an abandoned church - a typical dwelling of
witches, but also of hermits. She is rather not a witch (just as
Alexander isn't literally a magi, although it is exactly to a magi
that Tarkovsky relates him), but a man with a special spiritual
power. What kind of power? For the nonce we don't know: this is the
reason for theological and moralist disputes around the film! All
this ambiguity is intentional; however, discrete aesthetic signs help
us decipher it.
The
vicinity of the house with the church explains the presence of the
organ7
- an unusual object in a house of a humble servant.
Maria's
house belonged, most likely, to the church (which we don't see), it
was probably a parish house sharing a wall with the church, so that
the music produced by the organ was heard during divine service. The
church is abandoned, but the organ still works. It means that not all
is lost! For the organ is “the voice of the angels” and “the
voice of the soul, calling to Lord”, which means Maria's inner,
supplicant voice is alive. The organ's functionality is a strong
metaphor for the effectiveness of Maria's prayerful power.
On
this organ, before the night moment of love, Alexander will play a
piece of elevated preclassical music. The lover plays the musical
instrument of his beloved: here's a quite clear erotic sign, a
transparent foreshadowing of the amorous embrace, but the musical
instrument (therefore the love) is a ritual and religious one. This
means the love meeting is spiritual, even religious. The noblesse of
the music indicates the nobility of love and the lovers, even their
election, for music (especially organ, religious music) is “the
song of the angels”, “the voice and the blessing of the
Almighty”. Their embrace is a kind of hierogamy, because both are
“secretly anointed by the powers of heaven”, and the eros moving
them is not carnal, but spiritual, “ritual”, as well as the voice
of the organ. Only the cinematic formula of its expression is
corporeal: the metonymy, a procedure widely used by the filmmaker,
inherent to the audio-visual expression of any spiritual concept.
Even
the lovers’ entering into the upper room, surprised in a mirror
from the perspective of a modest crucifix on the nightstand, is seen
as if the shoulders of both lovers bent down under the arms of the
same Cross.
The
first gesture of the embrace also occurs on the background of the
wall crucifix, as though the two lovers embraced together the Cross,
or received its blessing.
Also
the musical interpretation was “ritualistic”, for Alexander,
before sitting down to play the organ, being soiled after falling off
the bike, washes his hands - an ancestral prelude for approaching
sainthood. When Maria pours water from a white porcelain pitcher8,
its drawing can be clearly seen: it is a green branch - a repetition
of the Tree of Life leitmotif -, indicating the quality of the water
poured by Maria.
The attribute of the myrrh-bearing women, under which the character
of “the witch” (or the deaconess) is directly placed, as well as
her indirect and metonymic, Marial attribute (which hierarchically
subsumes the first), are becoming more clear.
This
type of associations is specific to Tarkovsky's representation of
love. The erotic levitation of the main heroine in Mirror;
the weightlessness experiment scene in Solaris,
when Hari and Kris rise into the air, floating embraced among
candlesticks with burning candles, accompanied by Bach's music;
Alexander and Maria's erotic rotation. Although all these scenes are
voiced differently or are almost not voiced (in Sacrifice,
with
archaic shouts of Scandinavian shepherds, fallen as from the sky of
the departed past into the hermitic silence of the Swedish island),
the inner music they radiate is the same: the unearthly, smoothly
enveloping Bach's “music of the spheres”. It is suggested either
by the rotation rhythm of the lovers, slowly rising into the air (in
Solaris
and Sacrifice),
or just by the “time-pressure within the frame” in the static
levitation, but the most visually refined, in Mirror.
The
same silent music of the spheres, music of divine grace, of “the
meek and quiet Spirit”, which is eminently Marial, is concentrated
in the weak-shiny mandorla of the Virgin with Child from Leonardo's
Adoration
of the Magi9.
For
the music of “the meek and quiet Spirit” is the adornment of “the
hidden man of the heart”, “which is in the sight of God of great
price” - Apostle Peter says, when he wants to give women a model of
perfection (1
Petr. 3, 4). This
brings us to the hidden music of Glycophilusa,
the Panagia icon of “Sweet-kissing”
(or “Loving
Kindness”):
a music of the holy motherhood and virginity, of gracious and devoted
womanhood, tenderness blessing tenderness, selflessness multiplying
self-giving, a music of divine eros by excellence. And it
is
not a sacrilege to say that among the structural and musical
correspondences within the movie, the central mandorla of the
embraced Divine Couple from Leonardo's painting corresponds to the
hidden embrace from Maria's house. Their musicality is the same.
What
else, than compassion and love receives Alexander from Maria in the
night of the secret meeting? Courage!
Since sacrifice requires heroism, but Alexander, an intellectual who
thirsts for spiritual life, but a novice in matters of spirit, is not
ready for sacrifice. His clumsy kneeling in prayer, immediately after
hearing the news about the planetary war, doesn't have enough
spiritual power. Prayer must be followed by deeds, but deeds require
courage, which is far beyond the limitations of a novice. Alexander's
weakness requires strengthening from the Holy Spirit, which he
receives from the so-called witch, the servant Maria. “You
shouldn't be afraid of anything”
- whispers Maria in a “female-like” way during their embrace. But
not only “female-like”, because right after merging with the
so-called witch, Alexander gains courage to act, as though his prayer
for salvation of the world gains strength and is accepted by God only
after the union with Maria10.
“How
much the world would change if we did not fear death!”,
Alexander told his son Tommy, and his teaching transforms into deed.
Since manhood is, in a spiritual sense, a sign of the fulfillment of
the Holy Spirit. The fact that this happens exactly during the
nocturnal meeting with Maria, and that Alexander follows the scenario
of Christ's sacrifice, is suggested by an almost unnoticed detail.
The brief pre-classical prelude interpreted by Alexander is
interrupted by a weak pendulum's ding; Alexander winces and anxiously
asks himself: “It
is
already 3! Will we have time? ... ”
Of course, it
is
about the third hour of the night, and Alexander fears he will not
have time to fulfill the ritual. But his observation also has another
meaning: in the daily cycle of the seven lauds from the
Christian-Orthodox tradition, the third hour is the hour of the
Pentecost, the Holy Spirit's Descend upon the Apostles, and after the
third hour follows the sixth, that is, according to Holy Tradition,
the hour of Christ's Crucifixion!
Man
is not capable of martyrdom as long as he's not filled with the Holy
Spirit. Therefore the
hours spent by Alexander in Maria's house reenact two fundamental
moments of the liturgic time of the Passion and Resurrection of the
Lord:
the love bed becomes the altar of the “conception and birth of the
new world”, but also the germ of Alexander's suffering and
martyrdom. The austere stylistics, devoid of sensuality and almost
hieratic of the love scene confirms this perspective.
Let's
look more closely to Maria's
face
when, sitting on her bedside, she attentively follows Alexander's
speech. Only now she gets out from the field background? of secondary
characters and we understand her essential role in the dialectics of
the film. It
is
the first time the heroine - an extremely discreet presence - appears
in long close-ups and even utters a few phrases, drawing the
spectators' attention. Shot in a vibrant rembrandtian chiaroscuro (a
specific lighting for the cinema of psychological analysis, which is
atypical for Tarkovsky), Maria's portrait is extremely expressive: a
natural shyness, a gentle, sensitive and merciful glance, a total
willingness to help. Nostalgically, Alexander recounts her about the
former garden of his old mother, both now gone - a reminder of the
primordial image of heaven, in all its forms, indicating in a
parabolic key the real reason for his visit: the restoration of lost
paradise! Impressed by the yet unconfessed disturbance of her
visitor, the heroine, until then reserved, reveals her diaconal11
profile, the profile of a watchful myrrh keeper of the divine love,
thus revealing the heavenly pattern sustaining her: that of Mother of
God.
Any
ambiguity, so ably used by the director to embody femininity vanishes
here. It
is
also the first time Tarkovsky proposes another
female model, except that of the woman-mother-and-wife: it
is
the modest hermit-woman, the solitary protectress and prayer for the
whole world.
Maria's diaconal profile makes us wonder: in terms of drama, isn't
she the grown up version of Stalker's daughter, the silent girl who
translated the power of faith by moving three glasses on a table, the
crucified supporter of her father's martyrdom for humankind? “If
ye have faith..., ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to
yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible
unto you”
(Mt. 17, 20). This
faith, desired by Stalker for his fellows and expressed not by moving
mountains, but glasses, fully brings forth its fruits in the
Revelation of the New World, born - how else, than from faith, love
and sacrifice12?
- between Alexander and Maria's arms. Here are two metonymies, as
simple as they are challenging to the rigorists unaccustomed to
symbolic language, which actually do not test the hermeneutical
mastery, but the quality of the spectator's heart.
But
what happens with the other magi? Does the director ignore them? In
the film there are only three men: Alexander, doctor Viktor and
postman Otto, a retired history teacher, passionate about Nietzsche's
philosophy with his theory of “eternal return”, ironically called
“the stupid idle whirling”.
They
are all worried about the inconsistency of this life, and expect
“something true and important”, which, however, as in Beckett's
Waiting
for Godot,
doesn't happen. They all feel the pressure of the existential vacuum,
like the vicious metempsychosis circle, mentioned at the beginning of
the film, out of which they don't know how to get out. All three are
trying, in one way or another, to overcome their horizon (at least
the geographic one, like Viktor). All three are, in a way, “wise
men”, philosophers of this world, sharing somehow (in secular
terms) something of the monastic state. Two of them appear to be
single, but also Alexander seems more attracted to the condition of
celibacy experienced in the family, as a higher loneliness state for
the searchers of the true Bridegroom.
Seeking
a higher worshiping altar, “the magi” don't build their homes on
Earth... And all three are bringing gifts:
Viktor and Otto offer to Alexander on his birthday an album of icons,
a bottle of wine and an old map of Europe (“of Europe, which no
longer exists”). In terms of narrative, Viktor and Otto have the
function of Alexander's helpers. Doctor Viktor provides services to
the “body” of the family, taking care of Tommy and comforting
Adelaide's hysterics and Martha's boredoms (hence the ironic Freudian
vision of nude Martha chasing a cock - a metonym of the disoriented
and snobbish sterility of both women); while Otto takes care of
Alexander's “soul”. A collector of paranormal stories and a
transmitter of news, he is a sort of a contemporary Hermes, competent
in invisible worlds and therefore a close neighbour to Maria, whom he
knows better than anyone.
While
in the text of the Gospel and in the traditional icons illustrating
it, all three magi are bringing their gifts to God, in Tarkovsky's
film the offering algebra is different:
the gifts
are collected by Alexander, the most spiritually advanced of the
“sages”, in order to be submitted, along with his own, to Maria.
But the essence of offering is the same.
Let's
look at more details which shed light on Maria's
identity.
While in the first part of the film, the heroine rarely appears and
is almost missing in collective scenes, from the moment of the
burning of the house till the end she is practically always in the
frame. Her gray and fragile silhouette, filmed in wide shots, most
often from behind, lost in the sloughy landscape of the green island,
is hardly distinguishable. She now is trying to help Alexander, who
strives to run away from the ambulance workers that arrived after
him, then, after he was taken away, thoughtfully pursues Tommy when
the boy restarts watering the thinnish “Tree of Life”. In the
final frames Maria appears in the same landscape with Tommy, watching
him carefully from afar with an almost maternal glance, but never
getting too close to him.
In
fact, the
intimacy between Maria and Tommy
can be observed even earlier. At the end of the first half of the
film, when Maria accidentally meets Alexander in the pine grove, she
shows him the gift the boy has prepared to his father: a miniature of
the parental house; “but
please don't tell him I told you, because he wanted to show it to you
himself!”.
Lonely Tommy trusts Maria and reveals her his little secrets! The two
are close! The same moment in the pine grove, after Maria's entering
into the action, her words are immediately succeeded by the first
wailing-ascetic, otherworldly call of the Japanese flute, which thus
is from the very beginning related to Maria.
But
the nature of the relationship between Maria and Little Man is
revealed only at the end. Tarkovsky knows like no other how to handle
the technique of maieutic suspense.
Like in a detective story, the most important mystery must be hidden
as long as possible and revealed only at the end: that is the
keystone of the entire film, and the spectator must be brought in a
state of maximum receptivity in front of the mystery, to receive it.
At first faded and impersonal, with the development of the story,
Maria goes out of the stigma of ambiguity assigned to her by the
script (the strategy of tightly controlled ambiguity is typical for
Tarkovsky)
and approaches her iconic archetype:
that
of the myrrh bearers, the handmaids of Christ and the Holy Virgin. As
the subject develops, the main heroes clarify their relationship with
Leonardo's painting, drawing closer to their iconic archetypes,
without fully identifying with them - the film is a parable, not a
fable -, but keeping their own status of individuality, as a
terrestrial projection of the archetype.
Like
in a thriller, the director intentionally throws at the spectator
stumbling stones, hindering him from recognizing the
iconic models behind which the main characters are standing,
especially Maria:
seen either walking
or, despite all iconographic models, on bike13,
either a devout woman or a witch.
The
night of Alexander's visit, along Maria's house facade an agitated
flock of goats come and go back and forth. Goats...! Judging
by medieval bestiaries, here's another stumbling block - Tarkovsky
surely was aware of that! What “function” has a goat in a
Tarkovsky's movie? A goat also appeared in Ivan's
Childhood!
To the tiny explorer of the forest, the unexpected appearance of the
white goat with its hypnotic, motionless eyes, in the sunshiny glade,
was almost an epiphany - a “natural epiphany” of wildlife, but
not hostile, unpredictable but innocent, undomesticated but capable
of tenderness, opening its secrets to children and pure hearts. But
these are the attributes of Stalker's
Zone,
a part of the attributes! This means that, like the miraculous
phenomena from the
Zone
protected the Chamber
of Wishes,
in the same way the herd of goats running here and there at the
descent of the evening protects Maria's house, the house in which the
despairing man can find comfort and the most entrenched and selfless
desires come true! Maria's house is a sort of Chamber
(or well) of desire,
a kind of communication tunnel with Divine will! All these are
impressions which the spectator easily overlooks, without giving them
any importance, when he first watches the movie: they are nothing but
signs, clues, outlining the depth layer of the film.
Let's
return to Leonardo's painting, for Tarkovsky also insistently returns
to it through Alexander's eyes, whose face frequently mirrors into
the painting's glass when he obsessively gazes into it. From the same
diagonal, behind the Divine Pair rise the two Trees of heaven - a
compositional detail virtually unencountered in the iconography of
The
Adoration of the Magi (and
almost absent from Christian iconography), introduced, doubtless, by
no accident by the Florentine master, as though he would whisper to
us that the access to spiritual knowledge and eternal life are
conditioned by the right worshiping of mind and self-giving to God.
The two Edenic trees, clearly outlined by the brilliant artist in the
center of the painting, are highlighted by Tarkovsky by a close-up
slowly tilting-up on the trunk and crown of the first tree, ever
since the opening credits. An identical camera movement upwards,
slowly following in close-up the thin trunk of the little Japanese
tree in front of the shimmering sea, appears in the final frame.
Not
only the magi, but also lots of people, gathered around the core
group from Leonardo's canvas, worship the Holy Virgin.
But
the air of mystery of the painting is given by the almost faded and,
therefore, more enigmatic background battle scenes with fiery horses:
somewhere in a citadel outside the circle of worship is waging a war.
Then Florentine master allegorically represented the Mother
of God reigning over the earth, which is split between adoration of
God (the magi group), indifference to God (the semicircle of
characters around the central triangle discussing among each other,
unaware of the Divine Pair) and destructive fratricide battles.
The quiet and elevated musicality, irradiated by the central figure
of Madonna with Child, surrounded by the triangle of the magi,
vanishes towards the margins of the picture and is finally suppressed
by the noise of arms and the horses' hoofbeat in the background. The
painting seems equally divided between the silent, glorifying prayer,
the zone of religious indifference and controversies, and the
deafening noise of armed confrontation.
All
this complicated composition of young da Vinci's painting shapes the
structure of Tarkovsky's last film. Alexander's
expiatory action and his prayer for the salvation of the world have
to take place in the midst of the indolence of his family and the
roar of the planetary war. Now we understand why Tarkovsky chose for
his parable about the end of the world exactly this version of the
acknowledged scene of the Worship of the Magi: only at Leonardo the
divine couple of Madonna with Child reigns so sublime and dramatic at
the same time in the midst of the apocalyptic chaos. For this is the
theme of Tarkovsky's testamentary film.
There
is another secret link between the topic of Sacrifice
and
the celestial world towards which Leonardo's painting opens. This is
music, specifically, the musical arrangement. The soundtrack of the
film where music is almost absent consists of short excerpts from
Bach's Matthew
Passion
at the beginning and the end, hotchiku14
Japanese flute, and traditional shouts of Swedish shepherds. They
are diegetically motivated by the presence of flocks of sheep,
scattered in the desert landscape of the island and apparently don't
play any role in the set design. If
Bach's oratorio leads the viewer into a world of religious
experiences, popular in European Christian culture and therefore
“spiritually trustworthy”, the Japanese flute and the archaic cry
of the shepherds are odd, cries from a world, respectively, calls
towards a world that is far and unknown.
The
first incantation of hotchiku
flute
is related to the character of Maria, but the time global war was
declared, the lower, plaintive-threatening sounds intensify and
multiply. The diffuse and imprecise notes of the bamboo flute,
resorbed into vacuum like a primordial blow, seem to pour from heaven
the prophecy of the imminence of the global catastrophe and
dissolution of this world into nothingness, arguing therefore for the
ritualistic function of burning Alexander's house. The immaterial,
grave, “masculine” sound, as if coming from immemorial depths of
the earth, bears the fundamental, but still amorphous vibration of
the yet undefined word, the call of primordial paradise, the
“alpha-sound”.
But
at the same time there appears another call, as ancestral and
unearthly, but encouraging, “positive”, also related to the image
of Maria. It can be clearly distinguished during Otto and Alexander's
dialogue, when the first is trying to convince his friend about the
need to visit Maria. They are prolonged shepherds' and spherdesses'
shouts calling their flocks from the mountain pastures. Often female
calling voices can be heard. Cries of shepherds, coming as if from
heaven, calling their flocks home. Heavenly, but immaterial, high and
bright voices, centripetal, soothing and warm - the vibration of
post-historical paradise: the
“omega-sound”.
They barely distinguish during Alexander and Maria's love moment,
blend easily with the sounds of the Japanese flute during Alexander's
apocalyptic dream (the second one) and reappear at the end,
accompanying Little Tommy when he waters the Tree of Life. The film's
sound designer, Owe Svensson stated Tarkovsky deliberately chose
women's voices, because they are comforting, opposing the threat of
war15.
Shouts
out of an unknown or forgotten sky, male and female shouts,
forewarning and encouraging, calling the flock home during
apocalyptic threat. Calls that almost nobody hears anymore. The
motifs of the Good Shepherd and the Heavenly Patroness, Theotokos,
outline more clearly.
The
“alpha-sound”, negative and slightly frightening by his gravity,
somehow rebarbative, of the forgotten primordial paradise, constrains
and warns, urging repentance. Despite its formal opposition to the
latter, the vibratory similarity allows it to easily blend with the
“omega-sound” of hope, of the New Heaven, to unite into a single
voice. (Which means between the two vibrations, masculine and
feminine, “alpha” and “omega” of archaic and post-historical
paradise there is an essential consubstantiality). A single call,
Alpha
and Omega, addressed to “those who believe and those who believe
not”, to the witnesses of the great Revelation and to those who
ignore it, to all cultural and spiritual mankind's geographies.
But
why doesn't Tarkovsky remain in the area of Christian culture, if the
message he wants to transmit is Christian? Why does he depart so far
away beyond the borders of Europeanism and Christianity - the
historic and ritual ones, not the dogmatic ones - up to the
ambiguous, uncontrollable, uncertain worlds of archaic heathenism?
Why does he have to mix everything? No, Tarkovsky doesn't mix nor
confound anything. His withdrawal into ancient non-Christian worlds
or into science-fiction aren't errancies, but self-knowing spiral
movements of creative consciousness, movements of enlargement and
deepening around the same axis of the Divine Logos, in order to
achieve the fundamental sound, inscripted together with God's Word in
the genetic heritage of all - humankind and entire creation - and
bestow this calling sound of life-giving Logos on everyone.
Bibliography
1.
Johnson,
Vida T. & Petrie, Graham, The
Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Bloomington
& Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.
2.
Martin, Sean, Andrei
Tarkovsky,
Kamera Books, 2011.
3.
Salynski,
Dmitri, Kinogermenevtika
Tarkovskogo,
Kvadriga,
Moskva, 2009.
4.
Salvestroni, Simonetta, Filmy
Tarkovskogo i russkaja duhovnaja kultura,
Biblejsko-bogoslovskij Inst. Sv. Ap. Andreja, Моsкvа, 2007
5.
Skakov,
Nariman, The
Cinema of Tarkovsky, I.B.
Tauris, 2012.
1
As Layla Alexander-Garett publicly sustained while her
participation to Tarkovsky Days in Bucharest (Romania, December
2012).
2
See prophet Daniel.
3
Cor. 13, 3.
6
“Have mercy, my
God, for the sake of my tears! See here, before you heart and eyes
weep bitterly. Have mercy on me, my God”.
7
It is
an organ or an harmonium? It doesn't matter, to us matters the type
of sound produced by the instrument and its ritual-religious
function.
9
Leonardo's
characters seem to shine because under the unfinished painting
transpires the light background.
10 According
to the laws of ascetics, the prayer of a novice is strengthened by
that of an improved man of prayer, the first merging with the
latter.
11
“Diacon” ment in antiquity the auxiliary personnel
for divine services, or a helping person
for other services related to the primary Church, so etymologically
the term has much in common with that of “angel” (also a
“helper”).
12
Repeating,
therefore, Apostle Paul's commandments from the hymn of love, also
invoked in Andrei
Roublev.
13
The
bike is the only means of transport on the island, which has no
paved roads.
14
Long
and thick bamboo flute used in Zen meditation.
15
Salvestroni (2007,
193-194).
From the book: Andrej
Tarkovskij. Klassiker – Классик – Classic – Classico.
Beiträge zum Ersten Internationalen Tarkovskij-Symposium an der
Universität Potsdam,
Band 1, Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2016, ISBN 978-3-86956-351-0,
pp.
201-214 // Norbert P. Franz (Hrsg.). https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/opus4-ubp/frontdoor/index/index/docId/8384
