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Home , Andrei Tarkovsky, Domiziana Giordano, Nostalghia, Pavel Lungin, Tonino Guerra, Tran Anh Hung

October 17, 2017 (XXXV:8) (1983), 125 min.

(The online version of this handout has color images.)

Cannes Festival 1983 Won Best Director, Andrei Tarkovsky tied with for L’Argent (1983). Won FIPRESCI Prize, Andrei Tarkovsky Won Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, Andrei Tarkovsky Nominated Palme d'Or, Andrei Tarkovsky

DIRECTED BY Andrei Tarkovsky WRITTEN BY Andrei Tarkovsky & PRODUCED BY Manolo Bolognini, Renzo Rossellini, Daniel Toscan du Plantier (uncredited) CINEMATOGRAPHY Giuseppe Lanci FILM EDITING Erminia Marani, Amedeo Salfa

CAST Oleg Yankovskiy…Andrei Gorchakov (as Oleg Jankovsky) …Domenico …Eugenia completely reshot on a dramatically reduced budget after an Patrizia Terreno…Andrei's Wife accident in the laboratory destroyed the first version, and after Laura De Marchi…Chambermaid Nostalghia (1983), Tarkovsky defected to the West. His last film, Delia Boccardo…Domenico's Wife Offret (1986) was shot in Sweden with many of Ingmar …Civil Servant Bergman's regular collaborators, and won almost an unprecedented four prizes at the . He died ANDREI TARKOVSKY (b. April 4, 1932, Zavrazhe, Ivono, of cancer at the end of the year. —d. December 28, 1986, ) my be the most famous Soviet filmmaker since Sergei M. Eisenstein. Tarkovsky, the son TONINO GUERRA (b. March 16, 1920 in Santarcangelo di of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky. studied music and Arabic in Romagna, Emilia-Romagna, —d. March 21, 2012, age 92, in before enrolling in the Soviet film school VGIK. He Santarcangelo di Romagna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy) is the son of shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivanovo a fisherman/fishmonger father and an illiterate mother whom he detstvo (1962), which won the top prize at the Venice Film later taught to read and write. Guerra began to orally compose Festival. This resulted in high expectations for his second feature dialect poems while imprisoned in a German concentration camp Andrei Rublyov (1969), which was banned by the Soviet during World War II, and he published his first collection, I authorities until 1971. It was shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Scarabocc (Scribblings), in 1946. His longtime collaboration Festival at 4 o’clock in the morning on the last day, in order to with famed Italian director began with prevent it winning a prize—but it won one nonetheless, and was L'Avventura, the breakthrough 1960 film that brought eventually distributed abroad partly to enable the authorities to international renown to the director, who co-wrote the script with save face. Solyaris (1972), had an easier ride, being acclaimed by Guerra and Elio Bartolini. In the preface to his published many in the West as the Soviet answer to Kubrick’s 2001 screenplays, Antonioni said that he and Guerra “have long and (though Tarkovsky himself was never too fond of it). The violent arguments ... and that makes him all the more helpful.” director ran into official trouble again with Zerkalo (1975), a Guerra, who worked with American, Greek and Russian dense, personal web of autobiographical memories with a directors, said in a 1993 NPR interview that each filmmaker had radically innovative plot structure. Stalker (1979) had to be made him aware of different aspects of himself. “Fellini is Tarkhovsky—NOSTALGHIA—2 always immersed in his childhood, in his background, in his son and his grandson, and have him see my son,” De Niro told memories,” he said. “Coming from Rimini, which is near my reporters at the time. “It was a good reunion.” During this time, own hometown, he obliged me to look here locally, to look into Yankovsky was being highly praised for his dignified and my own memory, my own childhood.” On tonight’s director, the spiritual performance of the Metropolitan Philip, the only writer said: “His preoccupation with his spirituality raised all my adversary of , in the film Tsar (2009), directed own spiritual doubts.” He shared three Academy Award by , showing at the Cannes Film Festival. It was nominations for writing for director ’s Casanova Yankovsky’s last role before dying of cancer at 65. 70 (1966), Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1967) and Fellini’s (1976). “I think he's one of the greatest writers of our time whose ERLAND JOSEPHSON (b. June 15, 1923 in Stockholm, medium happens to be the screenplay,” said Howard A. Rodman, Stockholms län, Sweden—d.February 25, 2012, age 88, in vice president of the Writers Guild of America, West and a Stockholm, Stockholms län, Sweden) is the only actor to appear professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. In 2011, the in movies in every decade from the 1940s frequently honored Guerra received the Writers Guild of through to the new millennium. Josephson appeared in 14 America, West's Jean Renoir Award for Screenwriting Bergman : It Rains on Our Love (1946), To Joy (1950), The Achievement. At the time of his death, he’d written for over 111 Magician (1958), Brink of Life (1958), Hour of the Wolf (1968), films. The Passion of Anna (1969), Cries & Whispers (1972), Scenes from a Marriage (1973), The Magic Flute (1975), Face to Face GIUSEPPE LANCI (b. May 1, 1942 in , , Italy) (1976), (1978), Fanny and Alexander (1982), began acting as director of photography in 1977, after an After the Rehearsal (1984), In the Presence of a Clown (1997), internship as assistant operator and car operator in Bertolucci's and Saraband (2003).In addition to acting in Bergman's films, Strategy of Spider (1970). In addition to Tarkovsky, Lanci has Josephson also co-wrote Bergman’s All These Women (1964), worked with Roberto Benigni, Daniele Luchetti, Liliana Cavani, one of Bergman's rare comedies and his first film shot in color. Pasquale Pozzessere. Speaking to an Italian reporter about his Apart from Bergman, Josephson’s most fruitful collaboration working relationship with Tarkovsky, Lanci relayed, “Andrei was with Tarkovsky starring in his last two films, Nostalghia told me that cinema used time as a narrative element, while (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). He also wrote several plays, photography is usually constant throughout the sequence of a novels and memoirs and directed the film Marmalade Revolution sequence. Dynamic photography takes time to give a different (1980). As a fellow writer and director, and a lifelong friend, he consistency to the film. An example is in nature with weather often spoke perceptively about Bergman’s work. “A man conditions: if on a cloudy day at a certain time the sun goes out obsessed with failure has succeeded better than others in the light conditions change, or in an interior if someone enters a portraying it,” Mr. Josephson once wrote. “This could be referred dark room and lights up the light there is a change of conditions to as the Bergman vaccination method.” The actor was offered of lighting. All this however is always linked to precise actions. Richard Dreyfuss’s role in Jaws 2 (1978). But turned it down Nostalghia has expanded this discourse, and variations of with the words: “I rather have intellectual battles with Liv ‘natural’ light have been added to variations that no longer Ullmann [Bergman’s actress/muse], than fighting with some correspond to any logic but to emotional motives.” shark.”

OLEG YANKOVSKIY (b. February 23, 1944 in Dzhezkazgan, DOMIZIANA GIORDANO (b. September 4, 1959 in Rome, Karaganda Oblast, Kazakh SSR, USSR [now Jezkazgan, Lazio, Italy) is known for her roles in Interview with the Kazakhstan]—d. May 20, 2009, age 65, in Moscow, Russia) was Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), Nostalghia (1983) and born to an aristocratic family exiled to Kazakhstan under Josef Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990). She is famous for Stalin in the 1930s. Those in the West who knew Yankovsky her long, flowing locks which were rumored to be the reason the only from a handful of films, principally two of Andrei actress was hand-picked by for the role of Madeline Tarkovsky’s most haunting and poetic works, The Mirror (1975) in Interview with the Vampire. (Plus the director cited tonight’s and Nostalghia (1983), could have little idea how much he was film as inspiration.) Giordano is also a published poet and revered in his own country, in both Soviet and post-Soviet times, photographer. equally on stage and in films. According to the Guardian¸ the actor was masterful at “humanizing political figures, by PATRIZIA TERRENO (b. date and place unknown) has acted expressing certain deep emotions, lifting his portrayals of in only seven projects: Corsa in discesa (1989), Nostalgia Communist Party leaders in The Bonus (1974), and in Wrong (1983), Adua (1981, TV Mini-Series), Bel Ami (1979, TV Mini- Connection (1977) above the popular film stereotypes.” He is Series), Il prato (1979) and The Green Tree (1966 perhaps most famous in Russia for the title role in The Very Same Munchhausen, the 1979 television movie of the tales of an 18th ANDREI TARKOVSKY, from World Film Directors, V. II. century aristocrat who travels to the moon and dances with Ed. John Wakeman. The H.W. Wilson Co., Inc NY, 1988 Venus. An English-language film of the stories was made in 1988 starring Uma Thurman and Sting. Among the few films he Russian director, born in Laovrazhe, Ivanova district, Soviet made abroad was Sally Potter’s The Man Who Cried (2000), in Union. He is the son of the distinguished poet Arseniy Tarkovsky which he played Christina Ricci’s Jewish father, who emigrates and the former Maria Ivanova Vishnyakova. Tarkovsky studied to the US from Russia. Right before he died, friend and fellow under at VGIK, the All-Union State Institute of actor visited Yankovsky while in Moscow for the Cinematography in Moscow. In the course of his studies he made opening of the Nobu restaurant. “I was happy to see him and his two short films, There Will Be No Leave Today (1959), and his Tarkhovsky—NOSTALGHIA—3 diploma piece, Katok i skripka (The Steamroller and the Violin, detstvo won fifteen awards at international film festivals, 1960). The latter, which won a prize at the New York Film including the at Venice and the Grand Prize in San Festival, is about the friendship that develops between the tough Francisco. driver of a steamroller and a frail boy violinist who as a It was followed by , a film about the consequence is drawn out of his comfortable but claustrophobic medieval monk who became the greatest of all icon painters. little world into one that is wider and more challenging. The Tarkovsky wrote the film in collaboration with Mikhalkov- story is told very delicately and imaginatively through the eyes of Konchalovsky and shot it in black and white, except for the coda the child, with a “masterly use of soft lighting and ...subtle in which Rublev’s icons are displayed in all their richness. gradations of atmosphere.” The photography is , a Completed in 1966 and shown at Cannes in 1969, it was not fellow-student who has been Tarkovsky’s cameraman on all his released in Russia until 1971, by which time it had acquired an films, and the script is the work of Andrei Mikhalkov- enormous underground reputation. It is not clear why the film Konchalovsky, another of Tarkovsky’s contemporaries at VGIK was shelved for so long—the religious-philosophical issues that and himself among the most promising of the young Soviet may have worried the Soviet censors remain intact at the center directors. of the picture, while the criticism that it “does not correspond to Tarkovsky graduated historical truth” (the excuse for in 1960 and has been a its withdrawal from the 1971 director ever since. Belgrade Festival) is The harsh poetry of his unique unconvincing, since almost vision emerged fully in his first nothing is known of the life of the feature film,Ivanovo detstvo real Andrei Rublev. Although (Ivan’s Childhood, 1962). Ivan, Walter Goodman has pointed out played by Kolya Burlayev, is that “Komsomolskaya Pravda, the an orphan working with a newspaper of the Communist group of partisans during the youth organization, criticized Second World War, We first Tarkovsky, a devout Christian, see this twelve-year-old waif for depicting Rublev, a much- returning from a scouting revered fifteenth-century monk, expedition, crossing no-man’s- as a suffering, self-questioning land, peering through mist and artist rather than a native genius barbed wire, studying the who helped bring about a Russian swiftly flowing river that he renaissance in the final decades has to cross to get back to his of Mongolian-Tatar rule.” own side. His parents have The film consists of ten been killed, his village has loosely connected episodes been destroyed, he has escaped covering the most prolific years from a Nazi concentration of the painter’s life, 1400-1425. camp, and he lives only for Russia had not still been freed revenge. He does not live long; from the yoke of the Tartars, and years later in Berlin after the the world Rublev knew was a victory, his comrades find a brutal one of feudal violence and folder recording his capture casual cruelty. The church itself and fate. was engaged in a ruthless A sense of almost unendurable tension is built up by the campaign against the vestiges of paganism. The film dramatizes camerawork and editing, in which the grim reality of the present the conflict in the artist between revulsion and compassion is intercut with flashbacks, so that war and childhood, war and toward the suffering around him. In one episode Rublev is nature, are constantly contrasted. The same sort of story has been invited by the venerable icon painter Theophanes the Greek to told hundreds of times before, but Ivor Montague, pointing out assist him in painting a new church, and we see that their that this is generally true of Tarkovsky’s plots, goes on : “It is professional rivalries are colored by religious differences. how they are presented that becomes a commentary on man, his Against the traditional icon-painter’s emphasis on original sin, experience and the universe….The tragedy here, however, is Rublev assets his belief in the human being as the dwelling- much worse because more inescapable. Ivan’s fate is sealed house of God—a belief increasingly threatened by his own before ever the film begins….From the moment we see the wide- disgust at the horrors he sees around him. eyed creature in the mist, the contrast between the skinny, Later, as he paints new murals for the cathedral, the hungry, sometimes blubbering boy and the expert spy, Tatars and their Russian allies raid the town. They batter in the professional, authoritative, competent, indispensable, the two doors of the cathedral and slaughter everyone who has taken bound into a single being—a soldier who had known torture and refuge there. Rublev, with his murals wrecked, at last takes triumph alike, a child on whom grown men depend—we know violent action to protect a deaf-mute girl. He saves her life but he cannot survive….The film is not disfigured by the unnaturally cannot save her sanity, and she is born away by the Tatars. cheery or the conventionally hysterical. With one blow it annuls Taking a vow of silence, Rublev resolves to paint no more. His a whole cinémathèque of the war films of all lands.” Ivanovo wanderings take him to a devastated village. The prince’s guard Tarkhovsky—NOSTALGHIA—4 arrives, seeking a craftsman capable of casting for their master’s first tries to exorcise her. But since she is alive in his mind, from glory one of those gigantic bells that were considered the whence has conjured her, he can no more destroy her than mystical voices of Russia. The village bell-founder has died of he can help her. Tarkovsky himself has explained that “the point plague, but his son Boriska boasts that he knows the secret of is the value of each piece of our behavior, the significance of casting.In fact, his only secret is a half-crazy belief that the task each of our acts,even the least noticed. Nothing once completed can be accomplished, but he drives everyone relentlessly until the can be changed….The irreversibility of human experience is new bell is triumphantly rung. This achievement restores what gives our life, our deeds, their meaning and individuality.” Rublev’s faith in humanity and art, and he goes on to affirm that It might be argued that this is also the theme of Zerkalo faith in the paintings that form the dazzling color montage at the (The Mirror/A White, White Day, 1975). This controversial film end of the film. is presented as a work of autobiography, showing Tarkovsky Tarkovsky has said: “I do not understand historical himself at different ages up to and including the present, but films which have no relevance for the present. For me the most concentrating on his boyhood during the Stalinist terror in important thing is to use historical material to express Man’s Peredelkino, the artists’ village near Moscow. Tarkovsky’s ideas and to create contemporary characters.” And in fact, though mother is portrayed by several actresses as she was at various Andrei Rublev was beautifully shot on locations in which Rublev ages, and his father’s poems play an important role in tying worked, and period details are meticulously observed, the film’s together a film of great complexity. It is, as Herbert Marshall significance far transcends its localized historical setting. It is a wrote, “many-layered, jumping back and forth in space and time, universal political parable, in which the major human responses from objective to subjective visualisations.” The material it to war, disorder, and oppression are richly dramatized. It is also a draws upon ranges from the director’s memories and dreams to meditation on the responsibility of the artist, and one of obvious newsreels of the spanish Civil War and the Soviet-Chinese relevance to Tarkovsky’s own situation in the . confrontations on the Ussuri river. It cuts without warning from David Thomson praised the film for black and white to color, its portrayal of a world that is “as from passages with teeming a hell on earth as a background music to others Breughel—and quite as vivid and with none. authentic,” but dismissed Herbert Marshall Tarkovsky’ thesis as “threadbare.” sees the film as “a kind of This was not the view of most inverted mirror reflection of critics, many of whom shared Nigel Ivan’s Childhood, that being Andrew’s conviction that Andrei an objective biography of a Rublev was “the one indisputable boy in the Stalin days.” Russian masterpiece of the last Marshall finds it often decade.” puzzling and enigmatic— Tarkovsky’s screenplay for “several films intertwined.” Solaris (1971) was adapted from a In Russia, where its science fiction novel by the Polish indictment of Stalinism writer Stanislaw Lem—one that caused great anxiety, it was concentrates not on gadgetry but on harshly attacked by party psychology. Scientists in a space station circling a remote planet critics as an elitist film. Even the veteran director Sergei find themselves subjected to an agonizing process of self- Gerasimov, who recognized it as “an attempt to analyze the exploration, for the planet’s strange ocean has the capacity to human spirit” by “a man of very serious talent,” complained that punish intruders by materializing people and episodes out of their “it starts from a subjective evaluation of the surrounding world, past lives, forcing them to relive their most painful mistakes and and this inevitably limits the circle of its viewers.” It was sins. Penelope Houston called this film “Russia’s answer to released in Russia in 1975 but relegated to the “third category,” 2001, not in its display of space hardware but in the speculative which means that only a few prints were made for showing in quality of its ideas,” and Gavin Millar praised it as “an absorbing third-class cinemas and workers’ clubs, thus denying the inquiry into the cause of love and the links between time, filmmakers any financial reward. memory, and identity.” This “very beautiful and mysterious film” Ivor Montague writes: “I do not think that anyone can received the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. ‘enjoy’ Tarkovsky’s films. They are too tense, too agonizing, at The film (unlike the book) opens in a Russian country their best too spellbinding….Remember, he comes of a estate with lakes and gardens like a Turgenev setting, where the generation that, in the years he was the age of the boy in his first astronaut-psychologist Kris Kelvin () is visiting feature, was losing its homeland twenty million dead. But when his parents. From there we follow this rather stolid hero on his one has seen any one of his films once, one wants to see it again journey to the space station hovering above Solaris. The arrival and yet again; thoughts chase after one another like hares in has been widely described as masterly—the space station, March. David Thomson is one of a minority who think seemingly derelict, is in fact inhabited by two scientists, each of Tarkovsky is overrated—”the grandeur of Tarkovsky’s films whom is insanely absorbed in his own resurrected tragedy. should not conceal the gulf between his eye for poetic Kelvin is himself soon confronted by his wife Hari (Natalya compositions and any really searching study of people or Bondarchuk), long dead by suicide, but now apparently alive society.” But for the young Ukrainian director Sergei Paradjanov again. Faced with the woman he has already failed, Kelvin at “Tarkovsky is a phenomenon...amazing, unrepeatable, inimitable Tarkhovsky—NOSTALGHIA—5 and beautiful….First of all, I did not know how to do anything Exhausted, Alexander has fallen asleep when an unspecified and I would not have done anything at all if there had not been catastrophe—possibly a nuclear accident—occurs. The air grows Ivan’s Childhood….I consider Tarkovsky the Number One film very cold, and an eerie glow illuminates a landscape transformed director of the USSR….He is a genius.” to hoarfrost, ooze, and rot. A visiting neighbor, the local Turning once again to science fiction with social and postman, tells Alexander that if he spends the night with an psychological underpinnings, Tarkovsky made Stalker (1979), island woman, a reputed witch, the world can be saved. which was loosely adapted from a 1973 novel by Arkady and Alexander does, and awakens the next morning to find the Boris Strugatsky. The setting of the novel had been North landscape restored to its summery beauty. What seems to have Americas, but Tarkovsky transferred the story to a gulag-like been an old man’s nightmare may in fact have been a perilous industrial wasteland that, although the actual locale is never journey of the spirit, but Alexander cannot tell us—he has lost specified, is clearly meant to be in the Soviet Union (the film was his reason. shot on location in Estonia). The story unfolds in a mysterious In a 1986 interview, Tarkovsky said of The Sacrifice, realm known only as the “Zone,” where there is a “Room” in “The issue I raise in the film is one that to my mind is most which one’s wishes or fantasies are fulfilled. However, the crucial: the absence in our culture of room for a spiritual hazardous zone can be traversed only with the aid of a “stalker,” existence. We have extended the scope of our material assets and who illegally guides travelers through the forbidden area. conducted materialistic experiments without taking into account Tarkovsky’s first film to be made largely outside of the the threat posed by depriving man of his spiritual dimension. Soviet Union was Nostalghia (Nostalghia, 1983). Filmed near Man is suffering, but he doesn’t know why. I wanted to show the Vignoni thermal baths in the Tuscan hills, Nostalghia is that a man can renew his ties to life by renewing his covenant about exile, in part, and chronicles the life of a Russian who has with himself and with the source of his soul. And one way to gone to Italy to study the life of a Russian who lived there in the recapture moral integrity...is by having the capacity to offer seventeenth century.”Gortchakov (Oleg Yanovsky),” wrote oneself in sacrifice.” Vincent Canby in his New York Times review, “does very little Sacrifice was produced by Svensk Filminstituet with research and a lot of musing, which often takes the form of additional funds from Swedish and American television and from lovely flashbacks [and] fantasies ….Loveliness, I’m afraid, is a French company. A visually beautiful, slow, and intensely really what this movie is all about….Tarkovsky may well be a personal work, it is also extraordinarily resistant to any purposes film poet but he’s a film poet with a tiny vocabulary. The same but its own: it could not possibly be exploited for either images, eventually boring, keep recurring in film after film— commercial or propagandistic ends. shots of damp landscapes, marshes, hills in fog and abandoned A few months after Sacrifice opened at the New York buildings with roofs that leak.” Film Festival, Tarkovsky died in Paris of lung cancer. He had Although critical of Tarkovsky, Yvette Biro in the been married twice. He had a son by his first marriage to Trina Village Voice was more open to the film’s beauty. “Nostalghia,” Rausch, and one by his 1970 marriage to Larissa Tegorkina. she wrote, “is sumptuously—sickeningly, as mentioned in the film itself—beautiful, but partly for that very reason, suffers from disproportion and embarrassingly loses its way in the desperate hunt for beauty.” John Coleman asked in the New Statesman “whether the difficulty of [Tarkovsky’s] work is justified by its rewards, whether all the enigmatic angst on display here is much more than the exteriorisation of a private depression...those mists, those pools, above all that obsessive driving rain….? The film won a special prize at Cannes. Later in 1983 Tarkovsky directed a production of Boris Gudonov at Covent Garden in London. Then in July 1984, he defected to the west, saying that his application to Moscow for permission to extend his stay abroad had gone unanswered, and that he would not be allowed to make films upon his return to Russia. Discussing his past difficulties with the regime, Tarkovsky said: “I have worked for twenty-four years in the Soviet Union, for the state organization on which all movie activity depends, and have produced only six films. I can say that in those twenty-four years I have been unemployed for eighteen.” : Reflections on the Cinema. Andrey He remained in Western Europe. Tarkovsky. University of Texas Press Austin, 1986, 2000 His last film, Offret/Sacrificatio (The Sacrifice, 1987), I wanted to make a film about Russian nostalgia—about the state was filmed on location on Gotland, in the Baltic, with of mind peculiar to our nation which affects who are far cinematography by . Sacrifice tells of an aging from their native land. I saw this almost as a patriotic duty in my intellectual and the act of faith by which he apparently saves the understanding of the concept. I wanted the film to be about the world. Alexander (Erland Josephson), his family, and their fatal attachment of Russians to their national roots, their past, friends have gathered at his summer house on a primitive their culture, their native places, their families and friends; an Swedish island to celebrate his birthday. The dinner is a attachment which they carry with them all their lives, regardless revelation of domestic treachery and spiritual malaise. of where destiny may fling them. Russians are seldom able to Tarkhovsky—NOSTALGHIA—6 adapt easily, to come to terms with a new way of life. The entire never held any interest for me. The last thing I want to do is history of Russian emigration bears out the Western view that devise attractions. From Ivan’s Childhood to Stalker, I have ‘Russians are bad emigrants’; everyone knows their tragic always tried to avoid outward movement, and have tried to incapacity to become assimilated, the clumsy ineptitude of their concentrate the action within the classical unities. In this respect efforts to adopt an alien life-style. How could I have imagined as even the structure of Andrey Rublyov strikes me today as I was making Nostalghia that the stifling sense of longing that disjointed and incoherent…. fills the screen space of that film was to become my lot for the Ultimately, I wanted Nostalghia to be free of anything rest of my life; that from now until the end of my days I would irrelevant or incidental that would stand in the way of my bear the painful malady within myself? principal objective: the portrayal of someone in a state of Working all the time in Italy I made a film that was profound alienation from the world and himself, unable to find a profoundly Russian in every way: morally, politically, balance between reality and the harmony for which he longs, in a emotionally…. state of nostalghia provoked not only by his remoteness from his I have to say that when I first saw all the material shot country but also by a global yearning for the wholeness of for the film I was startled to find existence. I was not satisfied with it was a spectacle of unrelieved the scenario until it came together gloom. The material was at last into a kind of metaphysical completely homogeneous, both whole. in its mood and in the state of Italy comes into mind imprinted in it. This was Gorchakov’s consciousness at the not something I had set out to moment of his tragic break with achieve; what was symptomatic reality (not merely with the and unique about the conditions of life, but with life phenomenon before me was the itself, which never satisfied the fact that, irrespective of my own claims made on it by the individual) specific theoretical intentions, and stretches above him in the camera was obeying first magnificent ruins which seem to and foremost my inner state rise up out of nothing. These during filming: I had been worn fragments of a civilisation at once down by my separation from my universal and alien, are like an family and from the way of life epitaph to the futility of human I was used to, by working under quite unfamiliar conditions, endeavor, a sign that mankind has taken a path that can only lead even by using a foreign language. to destruction. Gorchakov dies unable to survive his own I was at once astounded and delighted, because what had been spiritual crisis, to ‘put right’ this time which—evidently for him imprinted on the film, and was now revealed to me for the first too—is ‘out of joint’. time in the darkness of the cinema, proved that my reflections The character of Domenico, at first sight somewhat about how the art of the screen is able, and even called, to puzzling, has a particular bearing on the hero’s state of mind. become a matrix of the individual soul, to convey unique human This frightened man to whom society offers no protection, finds experience, were not just the fruit of idle speculation but a in himself the strength and nobility of spirit to oppose a reality he reality, which here was unrolling incontrovertibly before my sees as degrading to man. Once a mathematics teacher and now eyes. an ‘outsider’, he flouts his own ‘littleness’ and decides to speak But to return to when Nostalghia was first conceived about the catastrophic state of today’s world, appealing to people and started…. to make a stand. In the eyes of ‘normal’ people he appears mad, I was not interested in the development of the plot, in but Gorchakov responds to his idea—born of deep suffering— the chain of events—with each film I feel less and less need for that people must be rescued not separately and individually but them. I have always been interested in a person’s inner world, all together from the pitiless insanity of modern civilisation… and for me it was far more natural to make a journey into the In one form or another all my films have made the point psychology that informed the hero’s attitude to life, into the that people are not alone and abandoned in an empty universe, literary and cultural traditions that are the foundation of his but are linked by countless threads with the past and the future; spiritual world. I am well aware that from a commercial point of that as each person lives his life he forges a bond with the whole view it would be far more advantageous to move from place to world, indeed with the whole history of mankind….But the hope place, to introduce shots from one ingenious angle after another, that each separate life and every hunan action has intrinsic to use exotic landscapes and impressive interiors. But for what I meaning makes the responsibility of the individual for the overall am essentially trying to do, outward effects simply distance and course of human life incalculably greater. blur the goal which I am pursuing. I am interested in man, for he In a world where there is a real threat of war capable of contains a universe within himself; and in order to find annihilating mankind; where social ills exist on a staggering expression for the idea, for the meaning of human life, there is no scale; where human suffering cries out to heaven—the way must need to spread behind it, as it were, a canvas crowded with be found to reach another. Such is the sacred duty of each happenings. individual. Gorchakov becomes attached to Domenico because It would perhaps be superfluous to mention that from he feels a deep need to protect him from the ‘public’ opinion of the very start cinema as American-style adventure movie has the well-fed, contented, blind majority for whom he is simply a Tarkhovsky—NOSTALGHIA—7 grotesque lunatic. Even so, Gorchaokov is not able to save always been people whose strength lies in their spiritual Domenico from the role he has implacably assigned himself— conviction and who take upon themselves a responsibility for without asking life to let the cup pass him by… others (and this of course includes Ivan). Such people are often Gorchakov is taken aback by Domenico’s childlike rather like children, only with the motivation of adults; from a maximalism, for he himself, like all adults, is guilty of a measure common-sense point of view their position is unrealistic as well of compromise—that is how life is. But Domenico makes up his as selfless. … mind to burn himself alive in the crazy hope that this final, Like Stalker, Domenico works out his own answer, monstrous publicity act will bring home to people that his chooses his own way of martyrdom, rather than give in to the concern is for them, and make them listen to his last cry of accepted, cynical pursuit of personal material privilege, in an warning. Gorchakov is affected by the total integrity, almost attempt to block, by his own exertions, by the example of his holiness of the man and his action. While Gorchakov merely own sacrifice, the path down which mankind is rushing insanely reflects on how much he minds about the world’s imperfections. towards its own destruction. Nothing is more important than Domenico takes it upon himself to do something about it, and his conscience, which keeps watch and forbids man to grab what he commitment is total: his final act makes it clear that there was wants from life and then lie back, fat and contented. never any act of abstraction in Domenico’s sense of Traditionally, the best of the Russian intelligentsia were guided responsibility. By comparison, Gorchakov’s agonising over his by conscience, incapable of self-complacence, moved by own lack of constancy can only compassion for the deprived of this appear banal. It is of course arguable world, and dedicated in their search that he is vindicated by his death, for faith, for the ideal, for good; and since it reveals how deeply he has all these things I want to emphasize in been tortured. the personality of Gorchakov. I said that I was startled to I am drawn to the man who find how accurately my own mood is ready to serve a higher cause, while making the film was unwilling—or even unable—to transferred onto the screen.: a subscribe to the generally accepted profound and increasingly wearing tenets of a worldly ‘morality’; the sense of bereavement, away from man who recognises that the meaning home and loved ones, filling every of existence lies above all in the fight moment of existence. To this against the evil within ourselves, so inexorable, insidious awareness of that in the course of a lifetime he may your own dependence on your past, take at least one step towards spiritual like an illness that grows ever harder perfection. For the only alternative to to bear, I gave the name that way is, alas, the one that leads to ‘Nostalghia’….All the same I should spiritual degeneration; and our advise the reader that it would be everyday existence and the general simplistic to identify the author with his lyric hero. We naturally pressure to conform makes it all too easy to take the latter use our immediate impressions of life in our work, since these, path…. alas, are the only ones at our disposal. But even when we borrow As to my next film, I shall aim at even greater sincerity moods and plots directly from our own lives, it still hardly ever and conviction in each shot, using the immediate impressions means that the author could be said to be the same as his subject. made upon me by nature, in which time will have left its own It may be a disappointment to some to realise that an author’s trace. Nature exists in cinema in the naturalistic fidelity with lyrical experience seldom coincides with what he actually does in which it is recorded; the greater the fidelity, the more we trust real life… nature as we see it in the frame, and at the same time, the finer is An author’s poetic principle emerges from the effect the created image; in its authentically natural likeness, the made upon him by the surrounding reality, and it can rise above inspiration of nature itself is brought into cinema. that reality, question it, engage in bitter conflict; and, moreover, Of late I have found myself addressing audiences, and I not only with the reality that lies outside him, but also with the have noticed that whenever I declare that there are no symbols or one that is within him. Many critics consider, for instance, that metaphors in my films, those present express incredulity. They Dostoievsky discovered yawning abysses abysses within himself persist in asking again and again, for instance, what rain signifies and that his saintly characters and villains are equally projections in my films; why does it figure in film after film, and why the of him. But not one of them is completely him. Each of his repeated images of wind, fire, water? I really don’t know how to characters epitomises what he sees and thinks of life, but not one deal with such questions. could be said to embody the full diapaison of his personality. Rain is after all typical of the landscape in which I grew In Nostalghia I wanted to pursue the theme of the up; in Russia you have those long, dreary. persistent rains. And I ‘weak’ man who is no fighter in terms of his outward attributes can say that I love nature—I don’t like big cities and feel but whom I nonetheless see as a victor in this life. Stalker perfectly happy when I’m away from the paraphernalia of delivers a monologue in defense of that weakness that is the true modern civilisation, just as I felt wonderful in Russia when I was price and hope of life. I have always liked people who can’t in my country house, with three hundred kilometres between adapt themselves to life pragmatically. There have never been Moscow and myself. Rain, fire, water, snow, dew, the driving any heroes in my films (apart perhaps from Ivan) but there have ground wind—all are part of the material setting in which we Tarkhovsky—NOSTALGHIA—8 dwell; I would even say of the truth of our lives. I am therefore there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, puzzled when I am told that people cannot simply enjoy enhances and concentrate’s a person’s experience—and not only watching nature, when it is lovingly reproduced on the screen, enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the but have to look for some hidden meaning they feel it must power of cinema: ‘stars’, story-lines and entertainment have contain. Of course rain can just be seen as bad weather, whereas I nothing to do with it. use it to crate a particular aesthetic setting in which From Andrei Tarkovsky to steep the action of the Interviews. Edited by John film. … Gianvito. University of I would concede Mississippi, Jackson, 2006. that the final shot of Nostalghia has an element “Andrei Tarkovsky: I Am for a of metaphor, when I bring Poetic Cinema” Patrick Bureau the Russian house inside / 1962 the Italian cathedral. It is a constructed image which He’s thirty years old. He smacks of literariness: a was born on the shores of the model of the hero’s state, Volga, but his family is from of the division within him Moscow. A family of poets, of which prevents him from intellectuals, preoccupied with living as he has up till painting and music. Tarkovsky now. Or perhaps, on the contrary, it is his new wholeness in can be classified within the ranks of what we call “the Soviet which the Tuscan hills and the Russian countryside come New Wave.” But how is it that he came to cinema? together indissolubly; he is conscious of them as inherently his “After having studied for a time the problems of Eastern own, merged into his being and his blood, but at the same time civilization, I spent two years as a worker in Siberia in the field reality is enjoining him to separate these things by returning to of geological research and then returned to Moscow. There I Russia. And so Gorchakov dies in this new world where things enrolled in the Moscow Cinematographic Institute where I was come together naturally and of themselves which in our strange the student of Mikhail Romm. I received my diploma in 1961. I and relative earthly existence have for some reason, or by had directed two shorts, one of them was The Steamroller and someone, been divided once and for all. All the same, even if the the Violin. In summary it was an exercise in eclecticism before scene lacks cinematic purity, I trust that it is free of vulgar going to work at Mosfilm and directing Ivan’s Childhood. ; the conclusion seems to me fairly complex in form ˆ and meaning, and to be a figurative expression of what is PB: What did you want to express in your first film? happening to the hero, not a symbol of something outside him AT: I wanted to convey all my hatred of war. I chose which has to be deciphered…. childhood because it is what contrasts most with war. The film Clearly I could be accused of being inconsistent. isn’t built upon plot, but rests on the opposition between war and However, it is for the artist both to devise principles and to break the feelings of the child. This child’s entire family has been them. It’s unlikely that there are any works of art that embody killed. When the film begins, he’s in the midst of the war. precisely the aesthetic doctrine preached by the artist. As a rule a work of art develops in complex interaction with the artist’s PB: Have you put into the film some part of your own theoretical ideas, which cannot encompass it completely; artistic personal experience? texture is always richer than anything that can be fitted into a AT: Truly no, since I was very young during the last war. I theoretical schema. therefore translated the feelings that I had experienced because And now that I have written this book I begin to wonder this is a war we are unable to forget. if my own rules are not becoming a constraint. Nostalghia is now behind me. It could never have PB: What were your shooting conditions? occurred to me when I started shooting that my own, all too AT: I shot four months during the summer of 1961 and specific, nostalgia was soon to take possession of my soul for devoted nearly two months to editing. The film cost 2.5 million ever. rubles which is a medium-sized budget. Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them into a darkened room where, for two hours, they watch the play of PB: Can it be said that you are part of the new wave of shadows on a sheet? The search for entertainment? The need for Soviet filmmakers? a kind of drug? All over the world there are, indeed, AT: It’s possible but I hate these schematic definitions. entertainment firms and organizations which exploit cinema and television and spectacles of many other kinds. Our starting-point, PB: I dislike then as much as you but I am trying to situate however, should not be there, but in the essential principles of you in the stream of Soviet production. If you prefer, can you tell cinema, which have to do with the human need to master and me what Russian cinema represents for you? And in what ways know the world. I think that what a person normally goes to the do you feel most connected to it? cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes Tarkhovsky—NOSTALGHIA—9

AT: There are nowadays in the USSR diverse tendencies Filmmaking, more than any other art, is best suited for capturing which pursue parallel paths without upsetting one another too physical movement (action, violence, sports, sex), but it’s not much, and in terms of this I am able to position myself. For particularly adept at capturing the movements of the soul. At his example, there is the “Gerasimov” tendency that looks, above all, best, Tarkovsky was able to depict soul-searching better than for truth in life. This tendency has had a great deal of influence perhaps any other director. In Nostalghia, Gorchakov’s and a large following. Two other tendencies are beginning to feelings—his sense of nostalgia for Russia, his search for define themselves and appear to be meaning in his life, his aversion more modern. One can trace their to the modern world—aren’t origins to the period of the 1930s. only conveyed through But it was only after the Twentieth Tarkovsky’s signature, typically Congress that they were able to black-and-white/sepia-toned free themselves and to develop, and slowed-down memory that their locked up energies were sequences that feature women able to be released. What then are or a country home shrouded in these two tendencies? On one side, fog, but through Gorchakov’s it is “poetic cinema,” illustrated by prominent inaction, which is Chukrai’s Ballad of a Soldier and established in the opening scene The Man who Followed the Sun by when he turns down an offer by Mikhail Kalik, which one could his comely translator, Eugenia compare to The Red Balloon by (Domiziana Giordano), to look Lamorisse but which in my opinion is far superior. I believe I at Piero della Francesca’s painting Madonna del Parto by saying could be situated within this tendency of poetic cinema, because “I want nothing more just for myself.” In fact, Gorchakov’s I don’t follow a strict narrative development and logical relationship with Eugenia, besides a way for Tarkovsky to connections. I don’t like looking for justifications for the ambiguously castigate the modern woman, it would seem, serves protagonist’s actions. One of the reasons why I became involved only to show how detached Gorchakov is from both socializing in cinema is because I saw too many films that didn’t correspond and his animal instincts, as he shows little, if any, interest in her to what I expected from cinematic language. as a person or a bare-breasted woman; she appears in one scene On the other hand, there is what we in the USSR call the in which she delivers a bizarre monologue that would suggest a “intellectual cinema”of Mikhail Romm. In spite of the fact that I relationship between her and the off-camera Gorchakov and to was his student, I can’t say anything about it because I don’t which he has no response except to say that she’s “insane.” understand that kind of cinema. Indicative of his psychological state, the only person who does All art, of course, is intellectual, but for me, all the arts, spark an interest in the torpid Gorchakov is Domenico (Erland and cinema even more so, must above all be emotional and act Josephson), a local madman who reportedly locked his family up upon the heart. for seven years because he thought the apocalypse was coming. Tarkovsky’s films remain so important today because of their Kalvin Henely, “Nostalghia,,” (Slant, May 30, 2013) ineffable spirituality, which has all but vanished in today’s technological world marked by information, science, and an Unlike , a poet of contemporary cinema whose increasing detachment from nature. Tarkovsky believed that for films stopped being about Iran when he stopped making films cinema to reach its full potential as an art form, it has to bypass there, Andrei Tarkovsky, arguably Russia’s preeminent poet of the financial interests that shape it. His films certainly testify to the spirit, proved that while a Russian director could leave his that: Their slow pacing has often challenged audiences homeland in the name of artistic freedom, he could still be (especially throughout the first half of Solaris), causing some imprisoned by the memories he took with him. In his critics to accuse Tarkovsky of entirely disregarding the viewer book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky wrote that he when making his films. With Nostalghia, the filmmaker said he wanted Nostalghia, his first film after leaving Russia to escape wasn’t interested in “development of the plot, in the chain of censorship, to be “about the particular state of mind which assails events,” and the film could, likewise, be accused of shunning the Russians who are far from their native land.” Shot in Italy and audience, but that would only be if you couldn’t tune into written by Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, the film explores this Tarkovsky’s expressive, transcendental wavelength. acute form of nostalgia through a spiritually wearied poet, Andrei If you’re in the right frame of mind, you’ll appreciate the Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovskiy), who’s traveled to Italy to raindrops that can be heard and seen falling on multi-colored research the life of a composer who studied in Bologna during bottles as Gorchakov silently and ponderously strolls through a the late 1700s before returning to Russia to hang himself. And so remarkably detailed set piece; the psychologically suggestive while Tarkovsky, at this point a wearied poet himself, literally saws that can be heard buzzing through both his dreams and had a whole new country’s worth of material to be inspired by reality; and slow zooms that, combined with some lighting and work from, he created instead a moody, deeply inward- effects, unexpectedly, gradually reveal new details in a couple of facing film that, save for an anti-commercialism line about the atmospheric scenes. It’s within these “difficult” durational overabundance of Italian shoes, hardly addresses the scenarios that Tarkovsky manages to elucidate something characteristics of its setting and instead, as Tarkovsky wrote, resembling spirituality. The penultimate scene in the film attempts to peer into the “universe within [man].” exemplifies this the most: Gorchakov, after learning from Domenic about the supposedly spiritually fulfilling task of Tarkhovsky—NOSTALGHIA—10 walking a lit candle across a hot mineral pool, attempts it on his drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two.” What own—and in real time over nearly 10 minutes. Tarkovsky and Guerra, who has used a similar message in his Perhaps Tarkovsky’s most opaque film, Nostalghia is script for Red Desert, are saying is that Gorchakov and nonetheless one of his most personal. Not only are Tarkovsky’s Domenico are two sides of the same coin: The artist and the own feelings about leaving Russia and his family reflected in madman understand each other because they are part of the same Gorchakov, but another side of him is reflected in Domenico. person. Because of how abstract Nostalghia is, this is merely one When Gorchakov visits Domenico in his home, a bombed-out of many allegorical aspects of a film that leaves itself open for looking space with a ceiling that lets rain in and the illogical interpretation. equation “1 + 1 = 1” scrawled on the wall, Domenico takes a bottle of olive oil, pours two drops in his hand, and says, “One

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2017 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXXV

October 24: 1987 October 31: Mike Nichols Postcards from the Edge 1990 November 7: The Scent of Green Papayas 1993 November 14: Hayeo Miyazaki The Wind Rises 2013 November 21: Andrey Zvyagintsev Leviathan 2014 November 28: Pedro Almodóvar Julieta 2016 December 5: Some Like it Hot 1959

CONTACTS:...email Diane Christian: [email protected]…email Bruce Jackson [email protected] the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto [email protected] cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/ The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.