VISUAL ANTINOMY OF SACRED PERFECTION. GINEVRA DE’ BENCI’S MYSTERY IN TARKOVSKY’S MIRROR

Paper sustained at the international conference "THE ART OF CINEMA: ANTHROPOLOGY, PEDAGOGICS, CULTURE" / "ИСКУССТВО КИНО: АНТРОПОЛОГИЯ, ПЕДАГОГИКА, КУЛЬТУРА", Tomsk State Pedagogic University & Novgorod State University "Yaroslavl the Wise". Published in the Journal of Visual Theology / Визуальная теология, no. 1/ 2021, pp. 119-130. 

Abstract

The article examines the significance of Renaissance aesthetics for Andrei Tarkovsky and explores the functioning and semiotic effects of the Renaissance figurative model in the film Mirror. The study focuses on one of the least commented stills with a great symbolic significance – the “Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci” (or “Portrait of a Young Woman with a Juniper”) by Leonardo da Vinci. The author emphasizes the visual and semantic connection between Leonardo’s canvas and the image of the main character of the film , showing how the director creatively develops the mysterious connection between the two women from different times and cultures. 

On one hand, the inner world of the main heroine is reflected in Leonardo’s canvas. On the other hand, a certain view of the camera on Ginevra's portrait and the lighting technique reveal the secret world of the spiritual evolution of the main character. Tarkovsky visually connects the biographical plot with the sacred themes of eternity, immortality, the antinomic perfection of man, and the salvation of the soul, using the symbolically rich Renaissance imagery created by Leonardo da Vinci.

Резюме

В данной статье исследуется значение эстетики Возрождения для творчества Андрея Тарковского. На примере фильма «Зеркало» анализируются способы функционирования и семиотические эффекты ренессансной изобразительной модели. В центре внимания этого исследования находится один из кадров, который имеет большое символическое значение, но до сих пор мало комментируется , – «Портрет Джиневры де Бенчи» («Портрет молодой женщины с можжевельником») Леонардо да Винчи. В статье установлена визуальная и смысловая связь между картиной Леонардо и образом главной героини фильма «Зеркало». Режиссёр творчески развивает идею таинственной связи женщин из разных эпох и разных культур: с одной стороны, внутренний мир главной героини фильма отражается и выражается в холсте Леонардо; с другой стороны, определённый взгляд кинокамеры на портрет Джиневры, приёмы освещения открывают внимательному зрителю тайный мир духовного становления главной героини. Тарковский визуально связывает биографический сюжет с сакральными темами вечности, бессмертия, антиномического совершенства человека, спасения души, пользуясь для этого символически богатым ренессансным образом, созданным Леонардо да Винчи.

Andrei Tarkovsky was creating his films, as he said himself, according to the compositional models of paintings. The compositional principles of Renaissance painting are especially noticeable in his work, notably in the films he made in his homeland. This is how the film Mirror was created: you have to look at this film like to a painting, the filmmaker said, emphasizing the secondary importance of the time axis of the film and the primacy of the compositional structure of the images-symbols. Nevertheless, the musical compositional model is also present in Mirror: this is how the rhythm of narration, and the sequence of figurative and sound symbols were conceived, for Tarkovsky always followed the principles of symphonicity in his films.

One of the principles of symphonicity is the use of the motif of doublets, that is, of double symbolic elements (objects, heroes, significant gestures, camera movements, editing techniques, musical themes). Their alternation in the narrative of the film creates the internal rhythm and the axis of spiritual evolution of the heroes, as well as the complex dialogue between symbols, which enter into subtle correspondences. These correspondences, especially in Mirror, create a unique symbolic organicity and refinement of the film, its spiritual and philosophical depth and beauty and an inexhaustible semantic richness.

The figurative painting model, mainly used in Mirror, was established by Andrei Tarkovsky together with his cinematographer Georgy Rerberg: the painting of the Renaissance and especially that of Leonardo da Vinci. Why exactly this way?

Andrei Tarkovsky does not explain this aesthetic principle, he simply postulates it. But we can suppose his choice was caused by the director’s adherence, since his youth, to the art of Renaissance as to the peak of world culture, expressing in the best way his own philosophical, anthropological and aesthetic ideals, which are to inscribe the human being into eternity and eternity into the human being. Specifically, the aesthetics of Renaissance offered Tarkovsky the elements of cinematic language suitable to express the so-called “goal” of the film (as the director himself used to say). The role of the film Mirror, said the director on the film premiere’s eve, was to prove the immortality of his mother, to inscribe the main character of the film and thus to some extent people close to her into eternity: “I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that my mother will ever die. I will protest and shout that she is immortal. I want to convince others of her individuality and uniqueness. The internal premise from which I started was my desire to analyse her character in such a way as to prove her immortality” [Turovskaya 1989, 61].

Renaissance painting and Baroque music contribute in the best way to this goal. But how do exactly they work in Mirror? The film speaks about ordinary people of 20th century, who do not ask themselves too many questions about faith and do not have a clear idea about ​​eternity. How can one inscribe their biographical story, set out like a mosaic, into eternity using the cinematic language? Narratively, Tarkovsky accomplishes this task by inscribing his heroes into the great history, which is read according to such keywords, like: collective suffering and self-sacrifice for homeland and humanistic ideals, patient enduring of the sufferings of the war and of the Stalinist regime, hope and heroism. These ideals are reflected by the selection of documentary newsreels of the Soviet and world history of the 20th century, combined with moments of Tarkovsky’s family chronicle, expressing, on their level, almost the same main themes.

On the level of the soundtrack, the inscribing of personal, family and world history into eternity is facilitated by the baroque music, evokinghighest ideals, and by the off-screen commentary with Arseny Tarkovsky’s poems, almost all speaking about eternity, life of the soul and higher humanistic values (like purity of love, courage, self-sacrifice). However, all these incarnations of highest ideals are subtle and are semantically sustained by the visual and audio registers of the film. Therefore, the visual palette of Mirror predominantly adopts motives, compositional and lighting techniques, and even concrete specific paintings of the Renaissance, especially from Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo da Vinci is the Russian filmmaker’s favorite artist. Tarkovsky constantly uses da Vinci’s works also in his other films (starting with Solaris and especially in the films produced outside USSR). One of the reasons of this artistic reverence is the specificity of Leonardo da Vinci’s manner of painting, which is ideal for the audio-visual expression of the idea of infinity and of other metaphysical topics, like inscribing the human being into eternity and eternity into the human being. Therefore, all Tarkovsky’s work, that is his so-called meta-film (in the Russian interpretation of this term), is based on the anthropologic and artistic model of Renaissance.

The Renaissance visual model is used by Tarkovsky in Mirror in the following ways:

    • by constructing frame compositions according to some famous Renaissance canvases,

    • by adopting compositional techniques of the Renaissance, especially mise en abîme – the most ancient artistic technique built on recursion, that is, the repetitive principle of reproducing or mirroring an object within oneself: “an image within the same image”, “a film within a similar film”, “a story within a similar story” (in Russian traditional culture this technique is simply called “the matryoshka principle” – referring the famous Russian folk wooden painted dolls, placed one inside another, expressing the continuity of generations and infinity of life),

    • by adopting visual techniques of lighting (chiaroscuro, sfumato) to the landscape compositions and portrait shots, techniques which are also associated with the concept of infinity (of the macro- and microcosmos) and with the idea of the mystery of the self (of the person) — principles belonging to the Renaissance philosophy,

    • by quoting concrete referential canvases: classic landscapes (like the famous Bruegel’s winter), but especially portraits hinting at certain female characters of the film and suggesting their iconic alter ego, their image in eternity.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer, 1665

The girl with a cracked lip. Mirror

The main Renaissance portrait, around which the heroines of the film are

secretly gravitating (although it is not directly quoted in Mirror), is Johannes

Vermeer’s “The Girl with a Pearl Earring” (the so-called “Dutch Mona Lisa”).

This portrait is visually referenced by well-remembered frames and scenes of the

film: rich doctor’s wife trying on turquoise earrings and the girl with a cracked

lip in the so-called “Bruegel Winter Landscape” scene. The glance and elusive

(simultaneously sensual and distracted) expression of this girl’s mouth remind us

of the named Vermeer’s canvas (fig. 1).

But while the images and gestures reminding Vermeer’s “The Girl with a

Pearl Earring” express the sublime hypostasis of the film’s heroines, that is the

heavenly archetype of their spiritual evolution, Leonardo’s canvas “Ginevra de’

Benci” (fig. 2) is a disturbing and even shocking appearance through its direct

non-diegetic quotation.

Ginevra de’ Benci, Leonardo da Vinci, 1474–1476

The shocking effect is emphasized by the sudden change of the sound track. The opera music is a short excerpt from the Oratorio St. John Passion, started in the flash-back with father's return from the war and ended on Ginevra's face. The fragment in which J.S. Bach puts in the mouth of St. John the Theologian St. Matthew's apocalyptic verses (Matt. 27, 51-52) raises even more the threshold of the mystery. The tenor's loud, paroxysmal voice — from which the common Soviet spectator of the seventies doesn't understand a single word — initially evokes the emotion of war-sick children meeting their long-awaited father (their tears and troubled faces confirm it), but the same voice changes its function in the next insert, where it deconstructs Ginevra's apparent serenity and makes us scrutinize her thoroughly. We should notice that in the original version of the film the text of the opera recitative, despite its obvious loudness — therefore emotional importance — did not have translated subtitles, which looked like a provocation for the usual Soviet spectator, who felt unfamiliar and even unfriendly with German language. One could think that the avoiding of translating the Bible verse could have been motivated by censorship considerations, but the real reason seems to be deeper: it seems to be not an ideological compromise for the approval of the film, but a strictly aesthetical choice. 

In this light the portrait of the Florentine poetess expresses the mystery in its impenetrability and its deep ontological property: the ambiguity. Here is what Tarkovsky himself was saying about it: “The Portrait of a Young Woman with a Juniper by Leonardo da Vinci <...>. There is something in it that lies on the other side of good and evil<...> In Mirror we will need this portrait in order to confront it with the heroine and to emphasize both in her and in the actress M. Terekhova, who plays the main role, the same ability to be charming and repulsive at the same time” [Terekhova 2002, 136] (fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Margarita Terekhova in Tarkovsky’s Mirror

One important role of Renaissance painting in Tarkovsky’s Mirror and perhaps the most important is the materialization of ambiguity. But how does this ambiguity work in the film? Structurally, ambiguity consists of an organic combination of opposites belonging to the same world or person and having the same right to exist. Internal contradictions characterize the real world on all its ontological levels. At the level of perfection, the internal so-called contradictions consist of unspoken antinomies that silently speak about the apophatism of the Perfect Being.

Tarkovsky proves his undeniable genius, as a master of ambiguity, as he is able to observe and conceive, maneuver and recombine opposite attributes, easily and with subtle details, so that he is able to raise ambiguity from the status of formal mechanicism of opposite dualisms (such as Yin and Yang), opening to ambiguity the upper sphere of the antinomies of perfection. The director manages to do this with the same inspired skill with which Leonardo da Vinci distinguishes and recombines light and darkness, layers of transparency and color, shadows and partial shade in the sfumato technique, directing all this sophisticated combination not towards speculative illusion1, but towards Heaven.

Among the performers of the film, the best one who expresses the state of ambiguity is Margarita Terekhova. In Mirror, the actress plays two roles: the role of Maria / Marusya (the Author’s mother) and that of Natalia (the Author’s wife). This becomes a reason for subtlest separations and recombinations of the two poles (positive and negative) of feminine ambiguity, according to fluid artistic criteria. At a first glance, this may serve as a pretext for Freudian interpretations (as happened in a considerable number of Western commentaries on the film), but this psychoanalytic approach leads to a dead end, because the film is not subject to the materialistic Freudian paradigm, but to deeper spiritual and anthropological principles. And, most importantly, by these combinations of symbols and archetypal polarities, the filmmaker aims to project his heroes and their lives into eternity, that is to iconize people and history.

Tarkovsky immortalizes the character of the Mother (Maria) through a mirror game with the image of the living heroine and an almost naïve allegorical painting, layering them one upon another in a complex alternation of time axis. This takes place in the scene after the flood in the old village kitchen. At the end of the mute semi-onyric scene, the main character – wet through Marusya (young Maria, played by Margarita Terekhova), wrapped in a white wooden shawl, looks at herself in an old mirror on the wardrobe door, and in the mirror image she sees not herself, but Maria Vishnyakova, that is her (Marusya’s) elderly hypostasis. How does this visually happen?

Maria Vishnyakova – Andrei Tarkovsky’s mother, and in the film the mother of the Author, approaches the mirror, in which one can see the reflection of an allegorical landscape with a tree (let’s call it the “Tree of Life”), with a sky and clouds (fig. 4). A small fire is flaming in front of the tree, but the fire is not painted on the canvas: it’s just a reflection of the flaming kitchen stove, which burned strongly and dangerously in the previous scene (of the hair washing), as if the flame of the kitchen stove and its mirror reflection burned Marusya alive. But now the fire calmed down. Initially a feral fire, devouring the heroine through family quarrels and the sufferings of the war, now calmes down and quietly warms the “tree” of Marusya’s life, like a vigil lamp or the flame of a prayer. And indeed, in the next scene of the warming of hands at an ignited splinter in the night, the close palms resemble the gesture of a prayer, as if the children’s palms were embracing the sacred fire of supplication.

One important role of Renaissance painting in Tarkovsky’s Mirror and perhaps the most important is the materialization of ambiguity. But how does this ambiguity work in the film? Structurally, ambiguity consists of an organic combination of opposites belonging to the same world or person and having the same right to exist. Internal contradictions characterize the real world on all its ontological levels. At the level of perfection, the internal so-called contradictions consist of unspoken antinomies that silently speak about the apophatism of the Perfect Being.

Tarkovsky proves his undeniable genius, as a master of ambiguity, as he is able to observe and conceive, maneuver and recombine opposite attributes, easily and with subtle details, so that he is able to raise ambiguity from the status of formal mechanicism of opposite dualisms (such as Yin and Yang), opening to ambiguity the upper sphere of the antinomies of perfection. The director manages to do this with the same inspired skill with which Leonardo da Vinci distinguishes and recombines light and darkness, layers of transparency and color, shadows and partial shade in the sfumato technique, directing all this sophisticated combination not towards speculative illusion¹, but towards Heaven.

Among the performers of the film, the best one who expresses the state of ambiguity is Margarita Terekhova. In Mirror, the actress plays two roles: the role of Maria / Marusya (the Author’s mother) and that of Natalia (the Author’s wife). This becomes a reason for subtlest separations and recombinations of the two poles (positive and negative) of feminine ambiguity, according to fluid artistic criteria. At a first glance, this may serve as a pretext for Freudian interpretations (as happened in a considerable number of Western commentaries on the film), but this psychoanalytic approach leads to a dead end, because the film is not subject to the materialistic Freudian paradigm, but to deeper spiritual and anthropological principles. And, most importantly, by these combinations of symbols and archetypal polarities, the filmmaker aims to project his heroes and their lives into eternity, that is to iconize people and history.

Tarkovsky immortalizes the character of the Mother (Maria) through a mirror game with the image of the living heroine and an almost naïve allegorical painting, layering them one upon another in a complex alternation of time axis. This takes place in the scene after the flood in the old village kitchen. At the end of the mute semi-onyric scene, the main character – wet through Marusya (young Maria, played by Margarita Terekhova), wrapped in a white wooden shawl, looks at herself in an old mirror on the wardrobe door, and in the mirror image she sees not herself, but Maria Vishnyakova, that is her (Marusya’s) elderly hypostasis. How does this visually happen?

Maria Vishnyakova – Andrei Tarkovsky’s mother, and in the film the mother of the Author, approaches the mirror, in which one can see the reflection of an allegorical landscape with a tree (let’s call it the “Tree of Life”), with a sky and clouds (fig. 4). A small fire is flaming in front of the tree, but the fire is not painted on the canvas: it’s just a reflection of the flaming kitchen stove, which burned strongly and dangerously in the previous scene (of the hair washing), as if the flame of the kitchen stove and its mirror reflection burned Marusya alive. But now the fire calmed down. Initially a feral fire, devouring the heroine through family quarrels and the sufferings of the war, now calmes down and quietly warms the “tree” of Marusya’s life, like a vigil lamp or the flame of a prayer. And indeed, in the next scene of the warming of hands at an ignited splinter in the night, the close palms resemble the gesture of a prayer, as if the children’s palms were embracing the sacred fire of supplication.

Fig. 4. Old Maria in the mystical mirror. Still from Mirror

Sending into the future the image of Author’s mother (visually, through her mirror reflection), Tarkovsky overlaps on this image the miniature fire of prayer and the little “tree of life”. In the cinema language it means the immortalization of Mother, her heavenly glorification through the reflected play of the film characters and through Renaissance paintings, everyday life and the sphere of world culture, inscribing through mirroring effects one ontological level into another.

Out of all the Renaissance paintings used in the film, those of Leonardo da Vinci work most effectively. Approximately at the end of the first third of the film, after the newsreel with the rise of the Soviet stratospheric balloon, commented by Pergolesi’s celestial music, we see the scene where teenager Alexey flips through the Renaissance prints album (fig. 5). The gaze of the camera stops especially on the works of Leonardo da Vinci: secular portraits and sketches for religious compositions; the scene is accompanied by the sublime music of J. S. Bach. The flipping scene ends on an engraving with sketches of palms joined in prayer. The longest gaze of the camera stops on them, defining thus the meaning of the scene: the Olympian, supermundane peace of the Spirit, as a response to earthly tragedies and suffering, evoked by the previous historical newsreels (few people know that the rise of the first Soviet stratospheric balloon ended tragically). The flipping through the engravings album, one of the most memorable scenes of the film, symbolically connects, like in a polyphonic dialogue, with many syntactic elements of the film.

Fig. 5. Album with Renaissance gravures. Mirror.

The scene with the album is followed by a family everyday episode, where Ignat pricks his finger and tells his mother that this has happened to him once before – a hint at the mirroring of history or at its repeatability and at the multilayered structure of reality. The scene continues with the mysterious visiting of Ignat by guests from the future, including Ignat’s grandmother (aka Maria Vishnyakova), whom Ignat does not recognize, and only by the end of the scene (known as “the reading of Chaadaev’s letter to Pushkin”) the boy realizes that something supernatural has happened in his house.

All this is symbolically connected with the interweaving of the theme of historical newsreels with the themes from Pergolesi’s and Bach’s music and from the Renaissance engravings: the expansion of individual consciousness to a wider, universal scale of all mankind. However, if all the works of Leonardo from Mirror are evoking eternity and the expansion of human consciousness, Ginevra de’ Benci’s portrait plays a narrower or more punctual role, more precisely, the role of a semantic accent. The Florentine poetess’ portrait is closely associated with the images of the main female characters, Maria and Natalia, especially with the prototype of Natalia. This Leonardo’s canvas is much more difficult to remember in the film because it appears only once (which is not typical for Tarkovsky’s significant frames and scenes, which usually function in doublets) and lasts relatively short (about 15 seconds, which is short enough for the average duration of Tarkovsky’s shots).

Rarely in Tarkovsky’s movies and in any grammatically correctly constructed films significant images appear only once. Most often, the main cinematic motives function in doublets (double appearances), thus strengthening their presence in the symbolic world of the film and firmly inscribing themselves into the drama. This is a general law of film composition, valid not only for Tarkovsky. In his movies, especially in Mirror, the function of the doublet motifs is very carefully and subtly developed. Therefore, the unique appearance of Ginevra’s portrait indicates that its function is closer to a semantic accent, albeit very mysterious and strong, than to a main significant motive, firmly embedded in the dramaturgy of the film. What does this accent consist of?

According to the chronological axis of the narrative, Ginevra’s portrait appears between the touching scene of father’s return from the war, when he embraces his children in the forest, and the scene of Natalia’s second quarrel with her husband, which belongs to the time axis of the seventies, that is the present time of the film. The family quarrel scene, filmed in black and white, begins with Natalia’s close-up sitting against the light in a dim, diagonal lighting from bottom to top, and is preceded by the mysterious portrait of Ginevra. The bottom-up illumination is unnatural; this lighting technique is specific for the horror genre, and it is charged by Tarkovsky with a fairly clear psychological meaning1. In the same way Marusya (also aka Terekhova) was filmed in the scene of the cock's beheading in the village house, also a moment with discrete horror connotations (as Tarkovsky himself declared). This manner of lighting emphasizes Natalia's nervousness, her anxiety and spiritual disharmony, caused by her inner rebellion. And all this disharmony enters into a secret but strong correlation with the Olympian coldness of Ginevra’s lunar-pale portrait. The impenetrable, cold and extremely ambiguous face of the Florentine lady is visually correlated with Natalia’s sour air from the scene of the family quarrel.

Fig. 6. A spot of blue light. Still from Mirror

    The troublous passage from “Saint John Passion”, begun at the end of the scene with father’s return and continued until Ginevra’s close-up, amplifies the shock and the mystery. In the fragment of the oratorio J. S. Bach quotes the words of Evangelist Matthew about the death and Resurrection of Christ: “Und die Erde erbebete, und die Felsen zerrissen, die Gräber taten sich auf, und standen auf viele Leiber der Heiligen“ [And the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose] (Matt. 27, 51–53) [Kononenko 2011, 249]. The tenor’s disturbing syncopal voice seems at first to express the emotion of the children, meeting their long-awaited father (their tears and anxious faces confirm this). But the role of the tenor’s voice changes in the next insert, where it obviously undermines Ginevra’s Olympic serenity, forcing the audience to attentively peer at the famous Leonardo’s canvas.

      But immediately after the “musical aggression” over the painting Tarkovsky the opera recitative“consoles” Ginevra with a spot of blue light. As the camera passes over the details of the canvas, a faint spot of bluish color appears, moving along the same contour with the camera, like a lighting and magnifying device that discovers and highlights a fragile tree trunk in the background of the canvas – an element of nature that also participated in the “glorification” of Maria, as if a gentle moonlight spot conciliates Ginevra’s cold and also moonlike appearance. Reputable analysts (the first of which is, chronologically, Natasha Synessios) also noticed the similarity between Ginevra and Natalia [Synessios 2001]. Thus, the vague circle of blue color, revitalizing Ginevra’s portrait and illuminating her tiny “tree of life” (fig. 6), can symbolize functions like a discreet blessing sent to Natalia, perpetuating and existentially orienting the confused heroine, who has not yet found her terrestrial path and archetypal image.

Fig. 7. Ginevra de’ Benci, Leonardo da Vinci, detail

    Therefore, the portrait of Ginevra expresses the ambiguity inherent to both heroines, interpretated by Margarita Terekhova. In the order of the dichotomies from the film, as we already mentioned, there is a doublet relationship (like Yin–Yang) between Maria and Natalia, concretized in two aspects: the formal similarity between the two women up to their formal identification, and a certain complementarity. Maria, who had accepted the trials of fate with dignity and without grumbling (the sufferings of the war and of the Stalinist regime), wins a moral victory grace to her patience and devotion, and therefore is worthy of “iconic exaltation”. By the other hand, rebellious Natalya is passing through the hardest ordeal of her life (the divorce), which she does not clearly understand; she is still going across her personal hell. And exactly on the bottom of this “hell” (the hell of family quarrels and lack of inner orientation), the light spot on Ginevra’s portrait offers a ray of hope – to whom? – to the heroine with whom Ginevra is symbolically closely associated, that is Natalia.

So we can say – and this analysis is just one of the many proofs for this – that the secret principles of Tarkovsky’s cinematic language are similar to the general laws of symbolic language and particularly to the principles of sympathetic magic. Of course, they are used by the filmmaker according to his genius intuition and artistic intelligence, and not mechanically, according to some hidden artistic handbooks and recipes, or by copying some occult alchemical algorithms.

In the order of the doublet relationship between the two heroines, Maria’s steady “cinematic immortalization” should be put into correspondence with at least a modest “glorification” of Natalia. These cinematic projections of the two heroines into eternity are not identical, for the two women are at different stages of their spiritual formation and have different narrative functions in the film. Maria’s “cinematic immortalization” is almost explicit and firmly semantically grounded, while Natalia’s “exaltation” is discreet and barely tangible. Nevertheless, through his cinematic language, Tarkovsky offers to each of them the chance for “heavenly exaltation”, drawing the narrative frames for the “salvation” of their souls.

This is exactly what means “to sanctify” or “to consecrate” the cinematic image by developing a unique cinematic language, capable to effectively operate in the sphere of the sacred. Tarkovsky gives us this lesson in the highest degree, that is on the level of the perfect organicity between film, life, and transcendence.

REFERENCES

Dulgheru 2021 - Dulgheru E. Film as a Prayer. The Poetics of the Sacred in Tarkovsky's Films, Saint-Petersburg, 2021. In Russian.

Dulgheru 2014 – Dulgheru E. Tarkovsky. Film as a Prayer. Bucharest, 2014.

Kononenko 2011 – Kononenko N. Andrei Tarkovsky. The Sounding World of the Film. Moscow, 2011. In Russian.

Synessios 2001 – Synessios N. Mirror. London, New York, 2001.

Terekhova 2002 – Terekhova М. With Andrei Tarkovsky. About Tarkovsky. Ed. by М. А. Таrkovskaya. Moscow, 2002. P. 135–140. In Russian.

Turovskaya 1989 – Turovskaya M. Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry. Transl. by N. Ward. London, Boston, 1989.

Turovskaya 1991 – Turovskaya М. 7 ½ or The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Moscow, 1991. In Russian.

1^ As are doing the Dutch artist M. C. Escher and other art illusionists, but also some reputed filmmakers (like Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Greenaway, Lars von Trier and others).

Andréi Tarkovski y la cultura universal

Several days ago, at the beginning of December 2020, at Shangrila Publishing, in Spain, issued a new book on Andrei Tarkovsky, to which I have been one of the contributors ("The Organic Architecture of Andrei Tarkovsky"), among recognized specialists in the field.

The book is entitled Andréi Tarkovski y la cultura universal and is coordinated by Tamara Djermanovic and Olena Velykodna from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, ISBN 978-84-122568-1-9). 

The Content of the book:

Prólogo: «¡Solo hacía cine cine y quería ser feliz!». Motivos biográficos en las películas de Andréi Tarkovski - Marina Tarkovskaya

Arte y memoria: a propósito de Solaris - Rafael Argullol

Tarkovski, un poeta en el cine - Donatella Baglivo

Tarkovski como regla - Robert Brid

Referencias literarias y estéticas en Tarkovski - Tamara Djermanovic

La arquitectura orgánica de Tarkovski - Elena Dulgheru

Sacrificio: Andréi Tarkovski como coleccionista de sueños - Layla Alexander-Garret

La crisis de la civilización moderna en el contexto de la visión filosófica de Andréi Tarkovski - Ígor Evlampiev

Polaroids en Tarkovski (1979-1984): un cruce revelado - Neide Jallageas

La voz del poeta: afinidades artísticas entre Arseni Tarkovski y Andréi Tarkovski - Kitty Hunter Blair

«El hogar que nunca tendré». Una biografía de Andréi Tarkovski por sus hogares, perdidos y recordados - Ruxandra Kriazopoulos-Berinde

Del tiempo y la muerte - Carlos Losilla

El pensamiento en su tempestad. Sobre las Lecciones de cine de Andréi Tarkovski - José Manuel Mouriño

Andréi Tarkovski y «Los españoles» - Carlos Muguiro

Hermenéutica cinematográfica de Andréi Tarkovski - Dimitri Salynski

Trabajar con Tarkovski: secretos de la filmación de Stalker - Evgeni Tsímbal

Tarkovski y la estética documental del cine soviético - Olena Velykodna

Andréi Tarkovski: recuerdos a través del espejo - Roger Vilanova i Jou

Esculpir el camino: impresiones paralelas entre Stalker y Esculpir el tiempo, de Tarkovski - Paula López

The word of the coordinaters:

Este libro es fruto de la admiración y el amor por el cine y la figura de Andréi Tarkovski (1932-1986). Solo después emerge la parte profesional o académica. El grupo de autores que firman los capítulos del libro representan un grupo heterogéneo: algunos vivieron o trabajaron con Tarkovski, otros se dedicaron a su obra como críticos, académicos o cinéfilos. También hay aportaciones de dos jóvenes investigadores que añaden al análisis de la obra de Tarkovski una mirada pura y entusiasta, no por ello menos válida a la hora de invitarnos a indagar por el universo tarkovskiano.

La idea de hacer un libro que integra el conjunto de estas diferentes miradas, transversales y complementarias sobre la obra de Tarkovski, nació cuando los autores de los textos se dieron cita en Barcelona para participar en El Simposio Internacional ‘Andréi Tarkovski en el contexto de la cultura universal’ (Universidad Pompeu Fabra, 16-18 de noviembre 2016). Este encuentro fue la inspiración que origina el presente libro, junto con las clases dedicadas cada año al arte, pensamiento y estética del cineasta ruso que sus coordinadoras, Tamara Djermanovic y Olena Velykodna, comparten con sus estudiantes, ávidos de tener las claves que les aproxime más al cine-pensamiento tarkovskiano. El libro invita a descubrir los enigmas de la vida y la obra de Tarkovski sin olvidarse de las referencias a la tradición rusa y a la cultura universal.

https://shangrilaediciones.com/producto/andrei-tarkovski-y-la-cultura-universal/?fbclid=IwAR1e-J1wEBoqY5EKiRJWY4eAzLSuduc5M0ftFKSCfdAVUpBk-afCEP12Gcs

🙏 Unfortunately, one of the contribuitors of the book, the philologist Robert Bird, had passed away this autumn (on September 7) at the age 52. His book on Tarkovsky, translated into Russian by himself (”Andrei Tarkovsky. ELEMENTS OF CINEMA”), is fothcomming in Russia. 

May God rest his soul in peace! 

The depart to Heaven of Aleksandr Gordon

On December 7, in Moscow, depart to God at the age of 88 of the Russian film director and writer Aleksandr Gordon, Andrei Tarkovsky's VGIK colleague. Later he married Marina Tarkovskaia, the filmmaker's beautiful sister, and became his brother-in-law. 

Aleks. Gordon in Bucharest, 2012

Aleksandr Gordon worked as a director at Moldova Film and Mosfilm studios and dubbed Andrei  Tarkovsky's films Nostalgia and Sacrifice. In his youth he co-directed with Andrei Tarkovsky two student films at VGIK (Killers and Today We Don't Have Permission). 

Towards the end of his life Aleksandr Gordon wrote several prose books, among which one was a memoir about his brother-in-law (Eternal Thirsty. Memories about Andrei Tarkovsky / Не утоливший жажды. Воспоминания об Андрее Тарковском, 2006).

His and Marina Tarkovskaia's son, Mikhail Tarkovsky, lives in Siberia, where he studies its unique ethnic heritage, and is an appreciated prose writer in Russia.

I had the joy and honor to invite Aleksandr Gordon twice to Romania - in 2006 and in 2012 - together with Marina Tarkovskaia, his wife, in the frames of two remarcable international Tarkovsky retrospectives, in which the two set the tone of the events.

Aleksandr Gordon was a warm, cheerful man, a reliable friend and a faithful husband, of a rare modesty and nobility. He never had any shadow of envy on his genious, but difficult comrade and brother-in-law, in whose shadow he was given to live his life. 

Even in his last photos, Aleksandr Gordon's gaze shows an endless kindness and gentelness! 

Eternal remembrance!

Razvan Theodorescu, Al. Gordon, Marina Tarkovskaia, Dmitri Salynski, Layla Alexander-Garett (in the background) at The international retrospective "Tarkovski in 2012" in Bucharest. Presents Elena Dulgheru

A Conjunction of Mysteries: Tarkovsky's Sacrifice and da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi

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.}

4 ^{See: Skakov (2012); Martin (2011); Johnson & Petrie (1994).}

5 ^{Salynski (2009).}

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.}

8 ^{Repeating the gesture of Kris's mother from the protagonist's dream (Solaris).}

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