Nostalghia: Refusing Modernity, Re- Envisioning Beauty
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Access Provided by University of Florida Libraries at 06/09/11 3:47PM GMT Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia: Refusing Modernity, Re- Envisioning Beauty by CHRISTY L. BURNS Abstract: In Nostalghia, Andrei Tarkovsky’s refusal of narrative and use of long, slow takes distinguish him from Soviet realism and postmodern culture. His striking visuals provide a fresh treatment of the beautiful and create spatial- temporal correlatives to nostalgia and loss. The fi lm contributes to suture theory, as well, and models a complex politics. ndrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) opens with a misty black- and- white shot of the Russian countryside, where a boy and three women move down to- ward water. As the credits roll, the fi lm cuts to another foggy landscape in A Italy, where a Volkswagen travels across a hilly countryside. Viewers will be- come accustomed to this movement between Andrei Gorchakov’s (Oleg Yankovsky) memories of his Russian home and his present sojourn in Italy, where he suf- fers from nostalgic malaise. Accompanied by his translator Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), Andrei has come to Italy to research the life of the Russian serf com- poser, Pavel Sosnovsky. Despondent in his Italian exile and more so upon his return, Sosnovsky committed suicide. The trauma of being pinned between nostalgic exile and oppressive return was also a central concern for Tarkovsky as he contemplated his own plans to leave the Soviet Union.1 In this, his penultimate fi lm, Tarkovsky’s resistance to Soviet social realism and Hollywood’s glamorized styles inclines him toward an unusual, alternative cinematic treatment of “the beautiful.” Here, beauty is often neither proportional nor conventionally pleasing, nor is it sexualized as a locus of desire.2 Instead, Tarkovsky’s mise- en- scène and Giuseppe Lanci’s cinematography create a haunt- ing visual effect, a desolate beauty refl ecting rupture, crisis, and melancholic 1 Tarkovsky defected in 1984, citing not political differences but artistic constraints. See Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, “Tarkovsky,” in Five Filmmakers: Tarkovsky, Forman, Polanski, Szabó, Makavejev, ed. Daniel J. Goulding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 2. He announced his decision at a press conference in Milan in the same year. Voyage in Time: Interview with Tonino Guerra. 2 In his Third Critique (1790), Immanuel Kant distinguishes between the sublime and the beautiful, the latter be- ing more conventional, determined by a pleasing balance of features and frames. See The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (London: Oxford University Press, 1952). Christy L. Burns is Director of Women’s Studies and Associate Professor of English at the College of William & Mary. Her fi rst book, Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce (State University of New York Press), appeared in 2000. In Media and Film Studies, she has published on The X- Files, the fi lm Suture, and Irish fi lm and globalization. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713 P.O. Press, © 2011 by the University of Texas 104 Winter 2011 | 50 | No. 2 www.cmstudies.org 06_Burns_104-122_CJ_50-2.indd 104 1/27/11 9:19 AM Cinema Journal 50 | No. 2 | Winter 2011 stasis.3 These are not glamorized spaces and bodies. Not even Giordano’s sugges- tively draped fi gure, smooth open face, and cascade of golden hair can steal the scene from Yankovsky’s internal brooding and the spaces of damp decay and growth that mirror his emotion.4 As a potential fi gure of desire, Eugenia is usurped by the Russian landscape, by family, and by the dacha—home, for Andrei, as it is embed- ded in the fecundity of soil, forests, grass, and rain. As Chris Marker notes, “There is nothing more earthy, more carnal than the work of this reputed mystical fi lmmaker,” attributing this earthy carnality to Russian Orthodox respect for nature, as a place where “the creator is revered through his creation.”5 Indeed, as Tarkovsky’s pursuit of meaning as more emotional than rational tilts his visual style toward longing and sadness, his fi lms often integrate the earthy damp growth of nature into scenes of sa- cred spaces and memories. In Nostalghia, the rift in Andrei’s psyche is represented by architectural decay, so that interior spaces are porous and open to natural elements. Rejecting Postmodernity. Tarkovsky uses long, slow takes in which little or no ac- tion occurs, suggesting the incremental movement and backward turn of his protago- nist’s thoughts. Andrei is not swept up in the goal- driven haste of modernity’s subjects; his is a mournful glance toward home. The fi lm’s unusual tempo and visuals eschew cinematic conventions as well as long- standing notions of beauty. Tarkovsky can thus be regarded as an avant- garde fi lmmaker in his challenge to conventional approaches to beauty, to cinematic temporalities and narrative demands, and also, most signifi - cantly, in his focus on the rifts in consciousness that emerge in his characters as the loss of unifi ed and traditional forms of home and community fall away.6 These rifts accompany the collapse of resilient emotion—the belief in change and dynamic politi- cal or individual agency—that postmodern theorists identify in both the modern and the post- 1968 eras.7 When invoking the “postmodern,” I will be referring to the “structure of feeling” of a period (circa 1969–1992) refl ected predominantly in the cultures of Europe and the United States and in the analyses of theorists Fredric Jameson, François Lyotard, and Marianne DeKoven, who explore the nuances and traits of that period’s culture, 3 Nostalghia won fi rst prize for cinematography at Cannes; Tarkovsky worked closely with Guiseppi Lanci to create an effect that is at once bleak and beautiful. Johnson and Petrie, “Tarkovsky,” 33. 4 Previously, Giordano had worked as a model; Tarkovsky gives her a signifi cant role here in her fi rst appearance in a feature fi lm. 5 One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (Chris Marker, 1988; Arte TV, 2000). 6 While some Russian avant- garde fi lmmakers continued their work after the shift to social realism in the 1920s and 1930s, Tarkovsky’s avant- garde is partly European, even if much of his practice is refi ned within the Russian context. For recent work on the avant- garde, see Krzysztof Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant- Garde, and the Event (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). Ziarek identifi es the avant- garde as “a radical redefi nition of experience and temporality as an event,” defi ning it through the work of Martin Heidegger. Ziarek also works with Walter Benjamin’s commentary on the loss of the lyric, and he is clearly infl uenced by Lyotard’s defi nition of postmodernism and the avant- garde as that which refuses norms and conventions that demand homogeneous assent. 7 The most recent and thorough critic holding this position is Marianne DeKoven, who argues that the postmodern emerged in “the long sixties,” turning away from utopian reform movements after the youth movement was shattered by authoritarian backlash in the United States and Europe. See Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 105 06_Burns_104-122_CJ_50-2.indd 105 1/27/11 9:19 AM Cinema Journal 50 | No. 2 | Winter 2011 art, and fi lm.8 Linked with the rise of consumerism and crowded, sometimes alienat- ing urban spaces, postmodernism is primarily characterized as a Western, not a Rus- sian, phenomenon. And while the term is often used to defi ne cultural practices across a variety of locations, it does not include in its purview all of the heterogeneous strands of culture in the period. Many of these differ from the postmodern. The concept is nonetheless important to my analysis here, in that it represents one of the cultural dominants that Tarkovsky resists in his work and explicitly castigates in his comments. Moreover, Tarkovsky’s treatment of nostalgia implicitly challenges reductive postmod- ern uses of this form of memory and emotion and offers a fresh way of conceiving of that sad and estranged state of consciousness. In Nostalghia, Tarkovsky’s reconfi guration of the beautiful is aligned with his focus on exilic nostalgia and longing for nature reminiscent of the Russian countryside. In his later works, home becomes a sacred locus of dreams, an imaginative lens that re- shapes reality. While Nostalghia could not be construed as feminist or progressive, it may still be of interest to feminist scholars in its reworking of the beautiful. The fi lm unfolds as an exteriorization of inner experience, creating a desolate beauty that transgresses more formal and contained theories of representational aesthetics. In Tarkovsky’s ex- ploration of rifts in thought, and in his use of unexpected visuals and subtle colors and textures, he arguably creates a new way of seeing not only beauty but also a visual cor- relative of complex emotion. So, although their sexual politics may be easily criticized, his fi lms introduce alternatives to the problematic acceleration of visual images in contemporary mainstream fi lm that is driven by postmodern culture and Hollywood standards. His infl uences from European art cinema (Bergman and Antonioni) lead him toward a poetics of the visible as well as an emphasis on subjective mental states, so that his fi lms are often both radical—in their resistance to cinematic norms—and traditional, in their treatment of women and sacralization of home.9 Nostalgia. As Nostalghia begins, Andrei and Eugenia have driven halfway across It- aly to visit the church of San Pietro, which, in Tarkovsky’s fi lm, houses Piero della Francesca’s painting Madonna of Childbirth.10 When they arrive, however, Andrei an- nounces that he will not walk up to see it; Eugenia must go alone.