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

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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).

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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. As she labors up the hill, away from him, Andrei complains, “I am tired of seeing these sickeningly beau- tiful sights. I want nothing more just for myself. That’s enough.” Beauty—whether of the Italian landscape, tourist sites, or of Eugenia—cannot anchor Andrei in the

8 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984): 53–92; François Lyotard, “What Is the Postmodern?” in The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982– 1985, ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas, trans. Don Barry, Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate, and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 1–16; and DeKoven, Utopia Limited. 9 Tony Mitchell identifi es Bergman’s infl uence in Nostalghia briefl y by pointing to Tarkovsky’s use of Erland Joseph- son, one of Bergman’s favorite actors. Mitchell, “Andrei Tarkovsky and Nostalghia,” Film Criticism 8, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 2–11, 18. See especially Tarkovsky’s last fi lm, The Sacrifi ce (1986), which uses the trope of silence and stage in ways reminiscent of Persona (Bergman, 1966). Johnson and Petrie discuss the friendship and collaboration of Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, Antonioni’s regular scriptwriter. They collaborated on the making of Nostalghia. Johnson and Petrie, 32. 10 James MacGillivray describes Tarkovsky’s virtual relocation of the Madonna del Parto from a museum in the Mon- terchi. Tarkovsky places a reproduction in the San Pietro church. See “Andrei Tarkovsky’s Madonna del Parto,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 11, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 82–89.

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present or remove his attachment to the past. He longs for home, a rain-soaked da- cha in Russia, where, in his dreams, his wife and son await his return. He later tells Domenico (Erland Josephson) that his wife resembles Francesca’s painting, only she is dark. For Andrei, personal memories are more real than any artifi cial resemblance or displacement; why should he go up to the church to view the Madonna of Childbirth when he can see his wife’s face in his dreams?11 In this way, the present weighs heavily, slowed down by depression mixed with a backward glance toward home. Memory and dream stimulate desire, over and against the call of reality. Susan Stewart, in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, describes the early conception of nostalgia as an illness brought on by longing for home. The term’s earliest defi nition, in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), was biased against exilic longing, favoring the forgetfulness that precedes assimilation. For Stewart, though, nostalgia matters most in its relation to art. An art form can lend a lyrical structure to the reader’s or viewer’s experience, insofar as it carries its own stylistic lens.12 Such recasting of emotion may help the melancholic engage his own grief, aiding his struggle with the defamiliarizing trauma of rupture and loss. In Tarkovsky’s work, nostalgia functions as a rift in consciousness, revealed in the lyrical effect of the visual and aural style of his fi lms. The desolate beauty of his screen composition—the balanced geometry framed within shots, the rustic and paint- erly sets, the subtle shadings, the mists and fog that haunt Nostalghia—makes the sense of loss and longing lyrical and so may hold an audience’s attention where other lacks (lack of plot and signifi cant dialogue) might otherwise have left this fi lm unseen or criti- cally dismissed. The screen’s projection of Andrei’s inner emotional crisis provides an aesthetic experience of pleasure and pain, cast without a curative or conclusive ending, creating a kind of sublime nostalgia—an admixture of dreams of home and a melan- cholic dissolution of agency. While this effect reaches its peak in Nostalghia, the lyrical use of sound, visuals, and slow pacing appears in all of Tarkovsky’s fi lms, most notably in those haunted by loss: My Name Is Ivan (Ivanovo detstvo; 1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mirror (Zerkalo; 1974), Stalker (1979), and The Sacrifi ce (Offret; 1986). Conceptualized in 1979 and completed in 1983, Nostalghia’s disposition of exilic longing reconfi gures the beautiful as exteriorization of inner experience, and so func- tions in decided contrast to Hollywood nostalgia, which focuses on glossy reproduc- tions of the past. As Benjamin Halligan notes, Tarkovsky is engaged in a love- hate relationship with the West, and his artistic emphasis is on the fi lming of “psychol- ogy, mind- states, remembrances, ambiences, other- worldliness.”13 In a reference to Hollywood and mainstream fi lm, Tarkovsky has objected that “if art can stimulate emotions and ideas, mass-appeal cinema, because of its easy, irresistible effect, ex- tinguishes all traces of thought and feeling irrevocably. People cease to feel any need

11 In the original screenplay, Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra explain Andrei’s refusal to phone his wife as an avoidance of their repeated confl icts. In the fi lm version, Andrei is more detached from explanation, seeming to prefer inner thoughts to outer exchanges. See Andrei Tarkovsky, Collected Screenplays, trans. William Powell and Natasha Syn- essios (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), 463–503. 12 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 21. 13 Benjamin Halligan, “The Long Take That Kills: Tarkovsky’s Rejection of Montage,” CER, November 13, 2000, http://www.ce- review.org/00/39/kinoeye39_halligan.html (accessed March 17, 2009).

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for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume fi lms like bottles of Coca-Cola.” 14 Here, Tarkovsky’s criticism echoes concerns raised in social commentaries that have bemoaned the eradication of deeper and subtler emotion in mainstream fi lm.15 In Tarkovsky’s fi lms, the visual is a means of providing a depth model that resists post- modern culture’s inclination to seek artifi cial “cures” for loss and depression by means of exchanging clichés, purchasing consumer objects, or, especially in fi lm, opting for entertainment as distraction.16 Nostalghia appeared as cultural theorists were beginning to launch the now estab- lished critique of the Hollywood nostalgia fi lm.17 While Tarkovsky does not offer the fi lm as a critique in itself, his work in Nostalghia can, I argue, shift debates away from a more limited understanding of nostalgia. The concept’s resurgence, as Fredric Jameson has noted, often signals a degradation of memory through capitalist recycling of an artifi cial past.18 Its fi lms approach history not for knowledge but to convey and market a sense of “pastness” given off by the “glossy qualities of the image, and ‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ by the attributes of fashion.”19 History becomes a shallow stereotype, a set of stock attributes of a place never personally experienced or known—the op- posite of exilic nostalgia. In contradistinction to such versions of the Hollywood nos- talgia fi lm, Nostalghia focuses on personal memory and fractured consciousness, while Tarkovsky’s visuals avoid slick photographic effects. All of Tarkovsky’s fi lms have a distinctly non-Hollywood style, eschewing its classic modes of action and character formation, refl ecting a Soviet texture and colors so subtle that they are like tones of the monochromatic rather than color. Tarkovsky’s emphasis on nostalgia not only denies modernity’s forward narrative thrust and teleology; it also implicitly critiques postmo- dernity’s erosion of rooted memory and its inability to articulate ideals.20 His insis- tence that art “affects a person’s emotions, not his reason” sets Tarkovsky beyond the rationalist emphasis and at the same time articulates his resistance to postmodernity’s hyperconsciousness and frenetic movement.21 While mainstream fi lm traffi cs in emo- tions, speed and movement are more often the chosen expressions of fear or need. The dwelling within emotion is what distinguishes Tarkovsky’s work, and that of other art- house fi lmmakers like Bergman. Starting with his second fi lm, Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky confounds narrative expectations and creates visually haunting fi lms that explore the psyche’s divergence from logic and action.

14 Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Refl ections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter- Blair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 179. 15 For example, Jameson, “Postmodernism.” Tarkovsky’s critique of mainstream cinema is undeniably reductive, but it gives him his point of difference, in his investment in deep emotional states. 16 Lyotard is especially critical of communal norms and the call for art to “heal” us, in “What Is the Postmodern?” 17 Jameson fi rst broached this topic in 1984; he has developed it extensively in later writings. Lyotard has critiqued nostalgia, as well, in contrast to avant- garde experimentalism, in “What Is the Postmodern?” 18 Jameson, “Postmodernism.” 19 Ibid., 67. 20 For a discussion of the differences (and overlapping elements) of modernity and postmodernity, see Marianne DeKoven’s Utopia Limited. 21 Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 165.

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Thus, in Nostalghia, the title concept is confi gured as both an internal crisis—a long- ing for home—and a refusal of modernity’s pursuit of progress, its pull away from the countryside and tradition. As the fi lm slows down, its emphasis tips back into the mind, a place of obsessive remembrance. This insistent interiority may counter postmoder- nity’s habitual haste, but it also provokes questions about the dangers of nostalgia as a refusal to work through mourning. This in turn engages, implicitly, the question of the proper role of fi lm and the arts—whether art should be slanted more toward real- ism or more fantastically imagined, and whether art ought to be curative, as Jürgen Habermas has suggested, or revelatory and paradigm shattering, as Lyotard argues in defense of the avant-garde. 22 One version holds that art soothes the assimilative pull, the other that it rebuffs the crush of normative society. Not surprisingly, Tarkovsky aims for the latter, a critical politics more than a curative effect. When a reporter asked Tarkovsky where he would go, when he announced his intention not to return to Russia, he likened the question to “asking me in which cemetery I wish to bury my children.”23 For Andrei, as for Tarkovsky, there will be no working through nostalgia’s melancholic effect; it is an emotion too deep and confl icted for a curative resolution.

Women and Tradition. Nostalghia begins not only with a refusal and stasis; it also delivers a critique of tourism and its shallow, consuming gaze. Once inside the church, Eugenia tells the sacristan that she is “just looking,” as she watches a ceremony of women walking in procession with a statue of the Virgin. The man scolds her, telling her that no miracle can occur if there are curious onlookers; he urges her to take a more serious role, to kneel at least. Eugenia tries but fi nds she cannot. She asks the man why women are more devout, more present in religion, and he answers that this is because they must bear children and raise them with patience and self-sacri fi ce. She, with indignation, replies, “That’s all they’re meant for?” While Eugenia reveals her modern consciousness in her resistance to traditional forms of family and religion, Tarkovsky’s nostalgia—in this and other fi lms—marks the family space as sacred and relegates women to maternal or wifely functions. Here he reinforces rather than resists convention. As J. Hoberman observes, “Tarkovsky’s politics are as resistant to easy cold war interpretation as his movies are to genre classifi cation. Like Brakhage and Hans- Jürgen Syberberg, he seems as conservative as he is avant- garde.”24 Women with desires that move them beyond the confi nes of home are often cast as hysterics and ir- rationals in his work.25 Thus, if his fi lms elide the demands of glamour that can entrap women, Tarkovsky’s traditionalist slant often re-encases them in stereotypes by way of

22 See also Lyotard, “What Is the Postmodern?” for a discussion of Habermas’s call for curative art. 23 Voyage in Time (Crespi, 1995). See also MacGillivray, “Andrei Tarkovsky’s Madonna del Parto,” 1. 24 J. Hoberman, cited in Mitchell, “Andrei Tarkovsky and Nostalghia,” Film Criticism 8, no. 3 (Spring 1984), 9. Julian Graffy comments on the mutual admiration between Bergman and Tarkovsky in “Tarkovsky: The Weight of the World,” Sight and Sound 7, no. 1 (1997): 4. 25 In Stalker and The Sacrifi ce wives experience emotional breakdowns that resemble classic forms of hysteria. They thus function as the outlet of violent fears and rage at the menace of destruction. While men in these fi lms show fear and rage as well, women are given to excessive displays of emotion. Tarkovsky may refuse the call to rational repression of emotions, but as he allows him men more expression he also casts his women as more emotional and out of control. Women are marginalized as a result, while men with kindred qualities are held up as artists and visionaries.

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the sacred. Slavoj Žižek argues that in Tarkovsky’s fi lms woman is trapped within the frame of being only ever a mere shadow of man. He suggests that Tarkovsky’s earlier fi lm, Solaris, reenacts “as the material fact, the notion that woman merely materializes a male fantasy.”26 Yet Western representations of women align them most often with earthiness and materiality, as men align with reason. Here, the distinction between earthy woman and cerebral man is constructed along lines that are muddied, most liter- ally, in Tarkovsky’s work. Žižek describes the earthiness in Solaris as “heavy humid stuff . . . which, far from functioning as the opposite of spirituality, serves as its medium.”27 In Nostalghia, when Andrei falls into moments of fi ltered awareness and dreaming, he disengages his intellect and turns to material, sensuous reality, as the trauma of long- ing leaves the portals of his memory thrown wide open. And so, while one might take exception to Žižek’s call for a feminist embrace of woman’s limited fi gure, one might still agree with his summation of Tarkovsky’s materialist theology as “a deep spiritual stance which draws its strength from its very abandonment of intellect and from an immersion in material reality.”28 The sacred, in Tarkovsky’s work, is often adjoined to the earth, so that his “materialist theology” is not inclined toward consumer acquisi- tion of objects but toward sensate memories of sounds and images associated with his own homeland, memories both personal and culturally specifi c. As in Stalker, belief and vision in Nostalghia come not from intellectual discussion or rational apprehension; they are compelled by a resonant experience of place and time. Tarkovsky’s distinct approach to beauty and the sacred is therefore aligned with his own exilic understanding of nostalgia and his subsequent refusal of postmodern cul- ture. In its postmodern form, nostalgia is the siren’s trap. Its lure is at once commercial and conservative, often signaling the resurgence of a social agenda that promises to drive women back into the domestic space and to erase all signs of racial and cultural diversity.29 While nostalgia has been attached to tradition in other eras, Jameson and Lyotard are more suspicious of its postmodern manifestation as it is used to sell prod- ucts—cars, clothing, and fi lms as well. Tarkovsky imports some of the conservative aspects of nostalgia with respect to women, but, nevertheless, the distinction between the Hollywood nostalgia fi lm and his avant- garde exploration of the exilic experience is pronounced and informative. Focusing on the deep and sensuous memories of per- sons and places now geographically distant and often irretrievably lost, Tarkovsky’s in- sistent dwelling in this fractured emotional state is what makes his work most valuable to the fi eld of contemporary fi lm. In place of glossy images, Nostalghia renders visuals that cannot be assimilated to a previously understood notion of what one “must see” in Italy or what mainstream fi lmgoers might expect to consume as seductive beauty.

26 Slavoj Žižek, “The Thing from Inner Space,” ARTMargins (April 1, 1999): 3, http://www.artmargins.com/content/ feature/zizeki1.html. 27 Ibid., 12–13. 28 Ibid., 13. While Žižek is indebted to Luce Irigaray’s philosophical stance of recognizing feminism’s inability to step outside of patriarchal paradigms, he dwells within them while she would subvert and undermine them more radi- cally from within. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Carolyn Burke and Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 29 On the delusional representation of the American past, see Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

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In response to the culture of easily digested clichés—of the past, of emotions, and of scenic views that conform to tourist demand—Tarkovsky develops an image- driven critique of the willful and unifi ed mind, the tourist consciousness on the one hand and the happy conformist on the other. For him, “meaning” within a world shaped by rational, linear narrative is elusive. Instead, he locates meaning in materiality and sen- sate experience, using a lyrical form of the visual in his fi lms, which enables a complex response in the viewer’s encounter with the unconscious experiences that rise up when normative structure and conventional modes of meaning rupture and fail.

The Artist in the Mirror. What little plot there is in Nostalghia follows Andrei’s in- creasing estrangement from contact with the world. The viewer enters this process as Eugenia struggles to pull Andrei into intellectual discussions and, one gathers, an af- fair. She brings into the fi lm the temptations of surface beauty, temporary erotic thrill, and tourist distractions. Eventually, Eugenia will be replaced in her role as potential connective contact for Andrei by Domenico, a madman who has been ostracized by the town locals. Domenico’s visionary, dreamlike state attracts Andrei’s empathy; he will eventually tell Andrei the story of how he lost his family after locking them away in their home for seven years, fearing that the end of the world was at hand.30 Andrei appears to be drawn to troubled artists, Sosnovsky being his point of research and Domenico the focus of his curiosity and friendship. The former suffers from longing for his country; the latter grieves for the loss of his family. The two mirror images of Andrei constitute, at once, his doubled loss and longing for Russia, family, and home. Tarkovsky thus teases out the many strands of nostalgia as exilic and familial long- ing, which extend not only to humans but also to particular countrysides and cultural memories that evade the containment and commercial portability of images. In Nostalghia, identity and consciousness are decidedly unconventional. As James MacGillivray notes, the fi lm enacts an unusual form of mise en abyme, as Andrei identi- fi es not only with Sosnovsky but also with Domenico, fi nding the madman-seer’s face in the mirror as he walks through his dreams. Tarkovsky takes this complex series of identifi cations one step further, allowing this regress of mirrors to turn outward, point- ing toward his own experience mirrored as it is reworked within his fi lm.31 However, Tarkovsky’s treatment of exilic longing in Nostalghia makes visible the nostalgic state as that which one is unable to work through; in the process, he transforms representational modes and reshapes cinematic aesthetics. The fi lm, as it references the poetry of his fa- ther, Arsenii Tarkovsky, connects to the director’s inward emotions while also extending to other associated fi gures like Sosnovsky and Domenico. Arsenii Tarkovsky’s work is read in translation by Eugenia and is recited by Andrei as he wades through water to- ward the fi lm’s end. The poetry offers images of childhood, nostalgia, a sense of being out of place and disconsolate. Its poetic words are transformed into visual images of de- cayed architecture and fl owing water that seems to rise as Andrei’s depression deepens.

30 Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra drafted a screenplay for a fi lm called The End of the World, never made (Johnson and Petrie, “Tarkovsky,” 32). Here, we get an encapsulated version. 31 MacGillivray, 82. MacGillivray smartly sees that this is a mise en abyme that does not simply shift inward to ever- receding likenesses; it turns outward to attach the author as well to the character’s recesses of emotional resonance with troubled visionary fi gures.

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Not only does Tarkovsky use his father’s poetry—as he also does in The Mirror—but his fi lms are often called “poetic.” Stephanie Sandler notes that “[t]he judgment that a fi lm is poetic usually means that the storyline has been displaced by an emphasis on mood or atmosphere.” But even as Tarkovsky brings his father’s poetry to audi- ences who were previously unaware of it, the son also challenges the father’s medium. As Sandler writes, “it is striking how insistently the fi lm [The Mirror] will work both with and against the expressive powers of words.”32 Indeed, Tarkovsky even resists the likening of cinema to language. Gilles Deleuze questions the reasoning behind this denial, given the long-standing treatment of shots as akin to words, and Christian Metz’s discussion of the syntactic functioning of the medium. Tarkovsky can only elude such formulations or “get his wish,” as Deleuze wryly puts it, when the temporal itself provides the “signaletic material” in the shot. It becomes distinct from its motor associations and so can make time “perceptible by the senses.”33 He does this most expressly in Nostalghia, with unusually long, slow takes. Tarkovsky does arguably work within a “cinema of poetics,” as described by Pier Paolo Pasolini in the 1960s.34 In one regard, Tarkovsky’s subjective slant functions as a form of “free indirect discourse” translated into the visual; he describes the meaning of an artwork as “a record of how one individual has seen the world in light of his own idiosyncrasies.”35 This is one reason his fi lms met with resistance from Goskino, which criticized their artistic, expressionist style, interpreting it as a sign of bourgeois decadence at a time when social realism was favored in Russia. The modernist style of subjective slant allows Tarkovsky to use visual images (“im-signs” in Pasolini’s lan- guage) that defi ne the style of an emotion. Pasolini sets this up in contrast to the usual “cinema of prose” that predominates in mainstream fi lm, where narrative action and development control the viewer’s relation to the medium. With more silence than dialogue and more stasis than action, Tarkovsky’s cinematic style often employs the free indirect point-of- view shot to align the directorial gaze with the lead character’s inner consciousness. Tarkovsky’s slow takes create the rupture, as his formal shots of decaying landscapes also deliver a poetic treatment of the visual. The fi lm’s startling temporal and visual techniques culminate in its fi nal image, one that is metaphoric and poetic. Nostalghia’s closing shot fuses the sacred space of cathedral walls with a shot of Andrei sitting in front of the family dacha set in the Russian countryside. Breaking with narrative form, this particular image associates “home” and “sacred” while strik- ing a contrast between the humble country home and the walls of a grand architec- tural construction of a sacred space. From this combination, a sublime image arises, exceeding the limitation of beauty and its balance of conventionally pleasing features. Tarkovsky’s work, in his penultimate fi lm, moves toward the creation of this emotional effect, rather than any resolution or assuaging of grief.

32 Stephanie Sandler, “On Grief and Reason, on Poetry and Film: Elena Shvarts, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Tarkovsky,” Russian Review 66 (October 2007): 3. 33 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time- Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 42, 43. 34 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry,” in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 542–558. 35 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 169.

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Visual Correlatives for Loss. In describing his work on Nostalghia, Tarkovsky writes, “I was not interested in the development of plot, in the chain of events—with each fi lm I feel less and less need for them. I have always been interested in a person’s inner world, and for me it was far more natural to make a journey into the psychology that informed the hero’s attitude to life.”36 Even as a journey, in contrast to Solaris and Stalker, Nostalghia traces a movement that slows to stasis, so that feeling displaces development, fulfi lling Tarkovsky’s claim that “[a] fi lm is an emotional reality.”37 One effect of this differing emphasis is that his cinematic style forces the viewer to pause and see beyond the conventions of the gaze. While the director presents painterly sets, the manipula- tion of time and space (left open to the unexpected) urges viewers to see differently, without shot–reverse shot sequences and jump cuts. For Tarkovsky, the screen’s visual correlative is that which lies beyond the body’s surface, that which is conventionally un- seen on the screen: the mind’s interior portrait, the pooling of thought, the porous walls and half-open rooms that sketch the unstable boundaries between past memory and the present experience. In this manner, Andrei’s fi ssured mental state reveals itself in Tarkovsky’s sets. Ceilings are unreliable, roofs are full of gaping holes, and the insides of buildings are mixed with the natural manifestations (grass and water) of the outside. In the scene in which Andrei has lunch with Domenico, the grass around the house is extraordinarily overgrown and the element of static entrapment predominates—yet it is aestheticized. Rain comes in through the ceiling, catching light while also giving a sense that protection fails and shelter is only ever partial. Tarkovsky has arranged green and brown bottles, various fruits and books and elements around Domenico’s walls, using shelves that are roughly shoulder-height, so that as Andrei walks around and the camera follows, pausing at times, the image resembles a still-life painting (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Artful still life in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (Grange Communications, 1983).

36 Ibid., 204. 37 Ibid., 176.

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Tarkovsky’s use of water here is startling and poetic, inclining the visual toward an evocative reach into the unconscious. In his other fi lms, landscapes are frequently fi lled with rain. The use of rain in Stalker and Solaris especially suggests not only the Russian landscape but also a perforation between interior and exterior spaces. In Solaris, water and natural environments refl ect Kris Kelvin’s (Donatas Banionis) lingering depres- sion ten years after his wife’s suicide. In Nostalghia, broken walls and pooling water suggest a state of depression and detachment from the present that is so pervasive that almost every landscape is covered in mist or rain. The fi lm is startlingly beautiful, but not in a generic, categorical sense. Avoiding mainstream cinema’s preference for the glossy image and vibrant palate, Tarkovsky uses fi lm stock that alternates between black and white and etiolated (blanched, lightened) color, selecting a palette of greens and browns, silver and grays touched by sienna and reds that accents the fi lm’s various painterly sets and striking exterior shots. These near-static segments also produce Tarkovsky’s most striking scenes. In an early scene in Nostalghia, Tarkovsky shoots a four- minute take of Andrei’s rest in his ho- tel room. The spectator has a full long shot of the room, which centers on a large bed, with its square, wrought- iron frame (Figure 2). A small backlit bathroom of modern design, only partially visible through the doorway, is echoed on the bed’s opposite side by a higher, parallel rectangle of light, which is the window, left open to reveal steady rain and the opaque image of a tree. Spare circles and lines defi ne the simple furnish- ings of the room; geometric forms of black, white, and gray compose Tarkovsky’s carefully shaped interiors here, as they do in The Sacrifi ce. Sounds are enhanced. We hear not only rain, but also the crunch of Andrei’s footsteps and the loud sounds of the heavy shutters as he opens them. Soon, he lies face down, clothed, on the bed. Just when one might expect a fade to black, indicating sleep, a German shepherd enters from the right and moves around the bed, settling where Andrei’s hand can reach him.

Figure 2. Geometric frames in the hotel room in Nostalghia (Grange Communications, 1983).

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The dog knocks over a glass and eventually, after several minutes, rises and leaves. At the end of the take—four minutes of relative stillness—the visual fi eld shifts. We see Andrei’s wife holding and consoling Eugenia, followed by a brief segment in which Eugenia bends over Andrei on the bed, her expressive hands gripping the mattress to the sound of a sudden breath. Then he wakes, or he seems to awake—but only within his dream. As he rises, we see his wife, pregnant, in the bed. How can she be present in this Italian hotel room? In another anomaly, the dog, pictured at home in Russia, is here in Italy, and also appears to be exactly replicated in Domenico’s dog. Tarkovsky’s overlaps reveal an interior state of associative blending of temporalities, locations, and individuals. When Andrei fi nally awakes to the fi lm’s present time, Eugenia is calling to him from behind his hotel door, pulling him out of his mix of reverie and dream. Prior to this, boundaries between present and past, reality and desire have been indis- tinct. Between his Italian hotel room and his Russian home, space has momentarily collapsed.

Passivity and Mourning. Tarkovsky’s version of nostalgia is consonant with many of the main problems of postmodernity, as he endeavors to produce “the portrayal of someone in a state of profound alienation from the world and himself.”38 In con- temporary psychological terms, this form of nostalgia can be linked to the problem of mourning. This, as Alessi Ricciardi suggests in The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film, is part of the troubled inheritance of cultures that strive to overcome and suppress the experience of mourning.39 The drive to translate, to complete a mis- sion, or to pursue a love affair—all such goals are thwarted by Andrei’s suspended agency, alienated from the present and turned toward the past. Thus, Andrei’s re- membrance of home is not a source of crystallization and agency; it locks him into a static and starkly split experience of his own subjectivity. And here nostalgia’s trig- ger is sensate, made more intense by the loss of daily habits. In Andrei’s relation to memory, he suffers from what Svetlana Boym would call “refl ective nostalgia,” which thrives on its own longing and delays the homecoming, “wistfully, ironically, desper- ately,” as he dwells on the ambivalences and contradictions of the mind.40 This leads to a stagnation that prevents him from pursuing the usual plot-worthy trajectories. Andrei does not act, and does not even appear to acknowledge expectations. Eugenia, in her mounting indignation at Andre’s uncommunicative nature and unpredictable interests, provides a focal point for potential audience frustration, as she releases her pent- up energy in furious games in the hotel hallway. Eventually, she erupts into a climactic rage, pointing out that she has found herself in “a most embarrassing posi- tion.” As she berates him, Andrei remains impassive. He does, however, comment after she leaves that the greatest romances are those that involve no kisses, only great emotion. Inaction seems integral to meaning, defi ned as signifi cant, internalized emo- tion. Tarkovsky here locates meaningful experience in gestures of refusal, as opposed

38 Ibid., 204–205. 39 Alessi Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 40 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii.

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to acquisition and consumption. What does this refusal of movement bring to cinema, itself the art celebrated as pictures in motion? Noticeably Tarkovsky moves the image away from Sergei Eisenstein’s montage of quick cuts, his fractioning of time, most famous in the Odessa Steps segment of Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin; 1925). As Jon Beasley- Murray observes, in a discussion of Gilles Deleuze’s and André Bazin’s approaches to fi lm as they bear upon Tarkovsky’s preference for the long take, “the cinema is before it means or signifi es,” and “the specifi city of the cinema remains its unfolding of the image in the real time that becomes the lived time of thought and the body.”41 And yet in Nostalghia, real time becomes almost completely still. It is as if the camera, in its slowest movements, is at- tempting to replicate a static nature. Domenico himself is action in stasis; as Eugenia and Andrei approach him to request an interview, he is cycling on a stationary bike set up among the grasses outside his house. What we get, then, from Tarkovsky is not the tracing of a movement so much as the unfolding of an image, resonant with emo- tion. While he is fascinated by the possibilities of real time in cinema, he attaches this temporal and visual strategy to the fantastic dreams and imaginings of his principal characters. The slowing tempo of the moment couples with striking visuals, connect- ing time and space in this almost mystical rift with the contemporary world of speed, fl ight, and change.

In the Room of Dreams: Solaris. For Tarkovsky, fi lm is not a fi ction but a dream; his visual sequences seem to be drawn from the unconscious and are sorted more by emotions than by the plot’s rise and fall. In Nostalghia, the dream stems from an artist’s intuitive expression of longing and loss. Ingmar Bergman, both an admirer of and infl uence on Tarkovsky, has commented, “When fi lm is not a document, it is a dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media.”42 In part, this explains Tarkovsky’s more radical reduction of plot, in Nostalghia, as does the nature of that emotional state, which tends toward lethargy and a turn back to the past. Tarkovsky thus refutes claims of one-to- one correlative interpretations of his symbolism, emphasizing instead the “feeling of the scene” or the “state of mind” it brings out.43 Yet if he inclines his fi lm toward dreams, how does one assess its probable impact, in terms of politics and revisions of the notion of beauty? Tarkovsky’s focus on dreams, subjective perception, and imagination has often opened within his fi lms’ transformative portals between past and present, reality and dream. His earliest fi lms refl ect an interest in both art and fantasy. The Steamroller and the Violin (Katop i skripka; 1961) and Andrei Rublev invest plot and thematic development

41 Jon Beasley- Murray, “Whatever Happened to Neorealism? Bazin, Deleuze, and Tarkovsky’s Long Take,” Iris 23 (Spring 1997): 39. 42 Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, trans. Joan Tate (New York: Penguin, 1988), 73. 43 See Ludmila Koehler, “Andrei Tarkovsky: A Russian Film-Maker with a Difference,” in Holding the Vision: Essays on Film, ed. Douglas Radcliff- Umstead (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983), 129; and Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 110.

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in the imaginative life of the artist. His work sometimes refl ects a fascination with sci- ence fi ction coupled with nostalgia (Stalker, Solaris), working the distinction between the fi lm genre and the affective state; while nostalgia reveals longing for the past, science fi ction propels imagination toward the future. Both, however, spring from a discontent with the present and a preference for dream consciousness. In the interest of assess- ing Tarkovsky’s treatment of dream consciousness in fi lm more generally, I will turn briefl y to Solaris (1972), which most radically troubles the distinction between reality and fantasy. The fi lm poses the problem of whether a man’s longing for his lost wife might not be resurrected into a fantasy so real as to be taken for—or even to become—reality. Later, in The Mirror (1974), scenes move almost seamlessly from waking to dream- ing and imaginative remembering. Made while Tarkovsky awaited approval to pursue The Mirror, Solaris refl ects the question of how fantasy functions for the psyche. In Solaris, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) struggles between his initial repulsion at the alien Hari (Natalia Bondarchuk), a replicant of his dead wife, and his returning desire for her mixed with remorse over her suicide. The men on the space station believe that Solaris’s ocean creates these replicants, drawing on astronauts’ dreams, desires, and memories. The complicity of Kris’s and Hari’s emotions undermines his more objec- tive viewpoint; Kris’s complicated feelings for Hari challenge his scientifi c nature and become the central concern of Tarkovsky’s fi lm. In Stanislaw Lem’s original novel, the willful relationship between humankind and the unknown (here, the planet Solaris) was the chief fascination and issue.44 Lem protested Tarkovsky’s revision of his work, and yet it furthers the fi lmmaker’s investigation of an emotional state in which the sub- ject is torn between the present, with all of its practical demands, and the emotional weight of the past.45 Kris Kelvin is a psychologist and a “Solarist” who initially occupies a stern, ratio- nal position, objecting to others that the investigation of that planet has reached an impasse due to “irresponsible fantasizing.” The question of how one draws the line between imaginary projections and reality is raised early in the fi lm. On Earth, before Kris leaves, a former pilot from the Solaris station shows Kris’s family a video of a panel of inquiry into a strange event that occurred at the station. The pilot testifi es that he has seen something fantastically disturbing, but the plane’s video camera failed to record the phenomenon. The fi lm thus starts with two questions: Can there be reality behind the (in)visible? And, if so, how do we assess it? As Tarkovsky’s slant on Lem’s novel suggests, fantasy might be more psychologically important than reality itself. Yet one problem for Kris is that Hari’s replicant is modeled not on her past self but on his memories of her, so he cannot untangle the historical past from his own projection. The fi lm closes with an image similar to the ending shot of Nostalghia, with a fantasy construct of Kris’s home placed in a menagerie that is the Solaris ocean, signifying his longing for a lost past. Fantasy may be psychologically signifi cant and comforting, but its lure comes freighted with signifi cant risk and other forms of loss—of reality

44 Stanislaw Lem, Solaris [1961], trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (New York: Walker, 1970). 45 Johnson and Petrie, “Tarkovsky,” 101–102.

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and the opportunity to return. One possibility left open at Solaris’s end is that Kris has returned home. Another suggests that he has declined a chance to return, and does so only in his dreams, preferring the fantasy projection of home held out by Solaris. By comparison, in Nostalghia Andrei refuses actual contact with the wife he misses, and he noticeably here never shares stories about his loved ones. He dwells instead in silent fl ashback fantasies and dreams.

The Long, Slow Take. Even when not creating a dreamlike fi lm, Tarkovsky folds in forms of remembrance and vision. In Ivan’s Childhood (1962), the danger of the Russian resistance under German invasion is relieved, occasionally, by memory fl ashes from Ivan’s past: strange images of a girl and apples, his mother, and a mentally disturbed elderly man. These appear to be real memories, and yet the scenes are shot in a dream- like manner. In The Sacrifi ce, arguably Tarkovsky’s most visually stunning fi lm, sets are contrasting by design, with dark interior space, light windows, and white, light-catching fabrics. The country house Alexander’s (Erland Josephson) family lives in is equally the scene of pleasurable living and of a nightmare of war. At dusk and during the night, fears of the unseen expand. By the story’s end, it is as if the war never occurred, a wish apparently granted to Alexander at the cost of his sacrifi ce—of his beloved home and his freedom. In this fi lm, Tarkovsky’s screen images are balanced, aesthetic images ac- companied by striking dramatic moments, such as the wife’s struggle and collapse into hysteria, and the slow fall of a pitcher of milk as catastrophe shakes the house. Most majestically, toward the fi lm’s end, we witness Alexander’s seemingly mad act of set- ting the house on fi re and running across an open fi eld, until he is captured and taken away. The mixture of fear and desire, freedom and entrapment, is wrought through the visual sweep set up by an extended long shot. Famously, the camera malfunctioned during the fi rst take and Tarkovsky had to rebuild the house’s façade and burn it once again (Figure 3). In arguing for the reshoot, Tarkovsky insisted that the scene, with

Figure 3. The burning home in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifi ce (Orion Classics, 1986).

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its near six- minute take, represented the climax of emotion in the fi lm and could not be re- created by segments spliced together.46 Indeed, it is one of his most memorable scenes, allowing the grandeur of the fi re, the distant fi gures of the family running on screen and off in their distress. In extreme long shot, we cannot see the expressive faces of the actors, but we understand their emotional confusion from their erratic movements and gestures. As the scene ends, Marie (the witch) lifts her bike and pedals away, the actress having been told by a crew member to “pedal slowly.” To produce an intense experience of emotional states, Tarkovsky slows down his actors’ movements and allows the camera to linger. Tarkovsky’s longest uncut shot in Nostalghia occurs as the fi lm ends. Andrei, poised to return to Russia, is detained by a phone call from Eugenia. She is in Rome, and tells him that Domenico is there and that he has asked whether Andrei has remembered his promise. The madman believes the act of carrying a lit candle across the baths will save the world. Both men engage in a form of “sacrifi ce,” although Andrei seems to be unwillingly compelled to move out of his lethargic malaise. Although hesitant, Andrei has agreed and so fulfi lls his promise, as a taxi waits for him. But the baths are drained and the area is windy. The candle is extinguished twice before Andrei suc- ceeds. For nine minutes, we watch his attempt to carry the lit candle across the baths of St. Catherine’s. As he fi nally sets it on the baths’ edge, we hear a rough gasp as he drops from view. A stranger runs toward him; in retrospect, the nosebleeds and the pills Andrei has swallowed throughout the fi lm have been an indication of illness that has climaxed at this moment. He dies of what appears to be a heart attack. As the fi lm ends, viewers are presented with the closing image of Andrei and his dog seated near a pool of water in front of his Russian dacha, framed by great walls of an ancient Italian cathedral, open to the sky (Figure 4). Home is sacred and also inextricably

Figure 4. Andrei and the dacha framed by a cathedral (Columbia Pictures, 1973).

46 Interview with Larisa Tarkovsky in Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (Michal Leszczylowksi, 1988), available on the DVD of The Sacrifi ce (Kino International, 2000).

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woven into human consciousness. Nature grows porous through the cathedral’s fl oors and openings, as the perforated boundary between past and present bring forward the sacred memory of home. This imaginary bridge over the incommensurable gap, both temporal and spatial, provides the culminative meaning of Tarkovsky’s exilic nostal- gia. Hamid Nafi cy identifi es this fi nal shot as a chronotope, taking the term Mikhail Bakhtin uses to describe units of analysis in textual studies “in terms of their represen- tation of spatial and temporal confi gurations and as an ‘optic’ for analyzing the forces in culture that produce these confi gurations.”47 Nafi cy reads this lingering end shot as “suturing home and exile,” noticing that rain falls in the foreground and snow in the background.48 Collapsing a difference between two distinct times and places, this chronotope fuses Andrei’s feeling of being outside his present, carrying the past with him in a way that weighs on his attention throughout Nostalghia.

Suture: Transforming the Visual. Tarkovsky’s engagement with nostalgia and memory leads him toward a transformation of fi lm itself, creating a beauty that rup- tures categorical expectations, even as his geometric and painterly sets balance and please the eye within the “frame” of such rupture. In his emphasis on the sensory nature of fi lm, Tarkovsky characteristically takes the medium backward, rather than moving it “forward” as modernity would demand. As Tarkovsky replaces Hollywood’s snappy dialogue and linear suspense with stunning cinematography and refl ective, dream-shaped visuals, he turns away from modernity, and likewise refuses to move for- ward into the fragmentation of desires presented by postmodernity’s consuming drive. Tarkovsky’s critique of postmodern culture is implicit in his work and only oc- casionally arises in his personal comments. The main force of his refusal of postmo- dernity resides in his fi lms, in the ways in which he disrupts the rhythms of time, in his refusal of narrative form, and in his emphasis on dwelling within emotions. In these fi lmic gestures, he can be claimed as avant-garde, most especially because of his works’ implication for suture theory, which assesses fi lm’s inculcation of its viewers with its hidden ideological fi eld. In defense of experimental writing, Lyotard contrasts the avant- garde to postmodern nostalgia’s easy erasure of differences, its reach to- ward simplifi ed narrative forms.49 Resonant with Lyotard’s critique is Jacques Lacan’s criticism of the psychological establishment’s too-easy cures of psychic trauma and neurosis.50 According to Lacan, the American psychologist patches over trauma with “necessary” fi ctions that constitute a narrative with which the patient can live. Yet these patches—like sutures—only help the patient evade the deeper encounter with her defi ning traumas. In fi lm theory, Lacan’s discussion of the gap within the subject and the dangers of its occlusion is transformed into “suture” or “apparatus theory.”

47 Mikhail Bakhtin, quoted in Hamid Nafi cy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 173. 48 Nafi cy, An Accented Cinema, 177. 49 Lyotard, “What Is the Postmodern?” 14–15. 50 For a discussion of Lacan’s break with American versions of psychology, see Anthony Wilden’s Introduction, espe- cially 6–7, and the long essay by Lacan that follows in Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Wilden (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).

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Initially, this fi eld of theory was focused on narrative construction of the subject. In 1966, Jacques-Alain Miller described the process by which the subject attains self- consciousness, as she “sutures” herself into a particular discourse.51 In the process of identifying herself through a discourse, she must suppress any dissonance between her own psychological makeup and that necessitated by the social narrative. Her differ- ence is thus sutured over as she assimilates into the discourse or, in narrative theory, the dominant social narrative. While suture allows the subject to “be spoken” by a particu- lar discourse, critics argue that she suffers potential trauma with this suppression of a portion of her psyche.52 Freud, in “Neurosis and Psychosis,” discusses the harmful fantasy or patch that one uses to cover over a repressed desire. “In regard to the genesis of delusions,” he writes, “a fair number of analyses have taught us that the delusion is found applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world.”53 In terms of fi lm reception, suture describes the process by which the fi lm viewer is brought to accept, without noticing, the fi lm’s ideological fi eld. Jean-Pierre Oudart translated Miller’s concept of “suture” into fi lmic analysis, using it to describe the ways in which fi lm must use certain techniques to set the viewer at ease, to allow him to su- ture over the unquiet sense that some “Absent One” manipulates how he views images on screen. As Oudart notes, “[e]very fi lmic fi eld is echoed by an absent fi eld, the place of a character who is put there by the viewer’s imaginary, and which we shall call the Absent One.” The Absent One “abolishes itself so that someone representing the next link in the chain (and anticipating the next fi lmic segment) can come forth.” Oudart suggests that when suture slows enough to reveal the gap, it allows us to analyze the process of fi lmic ideology. True to the avant-garde notion of a self-revealing discourse, Oudart would have fi lms provide the opening for the subject’s suture into narration, while revealing that same process as it occurs, allowing fi ssures and cracks through which the subject might see the machine at work.54 Following Oudart, Stephen Heath has argued that a shot–reverse shot editing technique is often used to suture the viewer in.55 Without the avant- garde disruption of suture, the work of fi lm is concealed, so that its consumption will be accompanied by “ideological surplus value,” of which the viewer will be unaware. However, if a director can make the unconscious or hidden aspects of fi lm produc- tion visible, the problem of blind suture can be relieved. Tarkovsky’s work opens up, and arguably enhances, the visual medium’s effect on the viewer’s unconscious. He

51 Jacques- Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifi er),” trans. Jacqueline Rose, Screen 18, no. 4 (1977–1978): 21–34. As Paula Murphy notes, Lacan found Miller’s formulation of the term useful, but he preferred to leave the term more open and ambivalent. “Psychoanalysis and Film Theory Part 1: ‘A New Kind of Mirror,’” Kritikos 1 (February 2005): 17. 52 Kaja Silverman notes that the subject does not speak, but is spoken by discourse. See The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 196. 53 Freud, “Neurosis and Psychosis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), 51, 147–155. 54 “The Absent One” is a term used by Jean- Pierre Oudart in “Cinema and Suture,” trans. Kari Hanet, Screen 18, no. 4 (1977–1978): 36, 38–39. 55 Stephen Heath, “Notes on Suture,” Screen 18, no. 4 (1977–1978): 48–76.

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avoids the use of shot–reverse shot, focusing instead on the correlative of interior trauma in the visual fi eld. The lyrical style of his sets and cinematography provides a powerful image of decaying beauty, with visuals refl ecting a break or rift between tem- poralities and worlds. In Nostalghia, that complex emotion is this temporal and spatial rupture for the viewer. Moreover, Tarkovsky’s use of the extended, uninterrupted take opens the suture into a cinematic state, revealing implicitly the viewer’s static, passive relation to the fi lm. The viewer’s actual stillness is not denied by Nostalghia’s action; it is affi rmed and echoed. In some cases, the viewer may be hypnotically drawn in. And yet in others, Tarkovsky’s particularly slow tempo disrupts the ease of viewing. Rather than fi nding himself collected into the fi lm and drawn toward cohesion, the viewer may feel exposed to the unstable infl uence of inner consciousness, continuing to feel aware of the ideological fi eld that the fi lm both hides and suggests. Even if he is drawn in and mesmerized, the visuals themselves “speak” of dissonance between two ideological fi elds (Russia/Italy; home/hotel; familiarity/estrangement) in a way that leaves them disjoined. The unusual arrangement of nature within enclosed spaces, in many of Tarkovsky’s sets, allows us to see rain dripping inside, displaying near- monochromatic palettes that enhance the play of light and texture—all holding the viewer’s gaze, even as the undermined agency of the nostalgic dreamer slows down the pacing, asking audiences to contemplate deeper emotional states and nonlinear forms of consciousness. Tarkovsky’s nostalgia is shaped by his inclusion of avant- garde gestures and the aesthetics of interiority and rupture; his characters dwell in memory and nostalgia, in the grieving awareness of their inability to reclaim the past. This creates a gap in the subject, arising from a sense of being always partially absent from the present. Rather than propelling the viewer past this gap with conventional cinematic sutures, Tarkovsky encourages his audience to dwell in the image. Tarkovsky chooses neither the cultural reclamation nor the assimilationist’s suture. Instead, his conception of nostalgia shifts the visual’s treatment of temporality and space so as to open up the nature of viewing consciousness by denying plot and easy consumption of precatego- rized beauty. Tarkovsky’s version of nostalgia is a representation of that melancholic despair writ large in fi lm’s most sensory mode. Nothing resolves, coheres, or closes. If the camera cannot literally fi lm the interior of Andrei’s mind, it can echo the effects of his suffering and stasis, his inability to travel effi ciently through the present and his repeated backward glances toward his Russian home. Exilic nostalgia in this instance is highly sensitive to sounds and to the bleak and beautiful palette of a shadowy, rain- drenched landscape, fi lled with mist and nature overgrown. The visual image becomes the meaning that language cannot communicate, a kind of lyrical lens that conveys the weight of exile, the longing for home in a dreamlike state that suspends the divisions between past and present, fantasy and reality. Home was, for Tarkovsky, what his fi lms became: a dreamlike projection of emotion shimmering on the surface of memory. ✽

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