Images of Incarnation:

Time, Experience, and the Infinite in the Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky

By Thomas Brandon

 

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present. --- T.S. Elliot, from “Burnt Norton”

 

What is it about the films of Andrei Tarkovsky that is so haunting, that stays with me long after the closing credits fade, that needles its way into the deepest layers of consciousness?  What has the director tapped into that creates such strong admirers and such fierce detractors?  Tarkovsky, himself, has many answers for the question of what he is trying to do with his films.  Many more elements could be added to his answers, as well.  And herein lies the beauty of Tarkovskian cinema – we are tasked not to look at the individual answers, but at the totality of the response.  This study of his films will attempt to do exactly that: to examine the unity of his work as a whole. 

 

Each of his eight feature-length films is, in essence, a spiritual quest to express transcendence and the infinite.  To this end, Tarkovsky could be considered a religious or spiritual filmmaker, as the central need in his films is an ache for transcendence and a longing for the eternal.  Tarkovsky’s characters are often very simple people who know for certain only what they lack: the touch of otherworldly glory, the face of God.  The director allows his audience to experience this disharmony as function of the contrasting nature of life.  Tarkovsky does not stop there, however; he finds continual evidence in the material world of the presence of the spiritual.  Through nature, time, and memory, mankind finds echoes and suggestions of the supernatural, as well as a synthesis that expresses the experience of life. 

 

It should be noted that, like poetry, Tarkovsky’s films cannot be “interpreted” in any protean, propositional sense of the word.  More than explicated, they are felt, intuited, and above all, experienced.  In that sense, this paper will attempt to communicate incommunicable images and moments through language which is limited at best.  The results will be only an echo, a suggestion of all that is going on in these films, which is a task that seems so Tarkovskian as to be completely in the spirit of his cinema despite its necessary incompleteness.  

Disharmony

 

For all the joy and vivaciousness of Tarkovsky’s films, there is always an undercurrent of darkness, a deep foreboding of danger and loss.  In his first feature, Ivan’s Childhood, the ominous feeling is rooted in the WWII setting.  The suffering of children and innocents during wartime, epitomized by Ivan’s loss of innocence and eventual death, weighs heavily on the film.  In Andrei Rublev, the wandering monk seems to move from one tragedy to another (the ambush of the masons, the sack of Vladimir, etc.), absorbing each blow against humanity.  There is a general sense that the next moment will be one of great suffering.  In Solaris, the foreboding stems from the mysterious, unpredictable planet; in Stalker, it’s the ominous and nondescript “they” who reside in the Zone.  Writing of The Sacrifice, Peter Green touches upon what underscores all of this darkness: “The cause of the catastrophe that lies at the heart of the film is to be found in the state of disharmony in which man lives with himself and with nature” (111).  One of the foundations of this disunity is the separation of the material and spiritual world, a disharmony between man and nature, as well as between man and man/woman (Johnson and Petrie 182).  In every film, there is this kind of dualistic tension, which plays out in opposites.  In fact, the director himself has written of art developing “like any other natural organism, through the conflict of opposing principles.  Opposites reach over into each other within it, and take the idea out to infinity” (47).  I think it will serve our purposes well to examine said opposing principles in each of Tarkovsky’s films.        

 

In the aforementioned Ivan’s Childhood, the conflicting opposites center on the disparity between Ivan’s reality and his dreams of innocence.  The cold, muddy faces of the war contrast strikingly with the smiling, carefree eyes of Ivan in his memories.  The tension is between harsh reality and idyllic desire.  The inversion of this idea is the tension in The Sacrifice between a leisurely reality with the invisible threat of war looming in Alexander’s visions and in off-screen sounds.  The conflict consists of the disparity, again, between the character’s inner state and the outer reality.  Mirror shares this tension, and, although little is shown of the narrator’s present-day life, we feel the ache with which he escapes into memory and dream, searching for something inward to define his outward existence. 

 

In fact, as mentioned above, each film’s conflict could be condensed into the tension between spiritual and material.  Art, for Tarkovsky, “must transcend as well as observe; its role is to bring spiritual vision to bear on reality” (96).  Solaris shows this explicitly by having the planet represent all that is unknowable and beyond man in direct conflict with humankind.  Nostalghia is more covert by setting up the conflict as the protagonist’s competing loyalties to Italy and Russia.  The flashbacks and visions of “home”, however, have a distinctly spiritual, dream-like feel.  Stalker and Andrei Rublev approach this duality most directly.  The opening sequence of Rublev is a man attempting to fly a hot air balloon.  His temporary flight is a rush of fleeting euphoria as he climbs higher and higher.  His eventual crash is endemic of the struggle of mankind, and the artist in particular, to rise above this plane of reality into something spiritual and lasting.  Andrei’s conflict is essentially the question of where his allegiance lies: on earth or in heaven.  Stalker parallels this nicely, by dividing the world of the story into the drab, depressing “reality” and the colorful, enchanted Zone.  The Room inside the Zone is the heart of the three travelers’ quest.  The tension is between faith in the power of the Room/Zone and the unbelief of the “real world.”  In fact, all of Tarkovsky’s films, in a way, reflect this journey towards or away from faith. 

 

Another level of tension is added by how the characters choose to approach their journey, and by what means they try to achieve transcendence.  In their own way, each protagonist is reaching towards the infinite, struggling to come to terms with what is beyond all terminology.  In the face of an apocalyptic world war, Alexander, the hero of Sacrifice, “sees an opportunity of becoming an instrument of human redemption” (Green 111).  In addition to a sacrificial prayer, he takes Otto’s advice and sleeps with a “witch” in order to avert the crises.  But the film does not make clear which, if either, actually serves to establish peace once again.  Once again, there is tension between opposites – in this case, opposing methods, and neither seems to bring relief.  A similar task is given by Domenico to Andrei in Nostlaghia: the Russian expatriate must walk the length of St. Catharine’s Pool with a lit candle if the end of the world is to be averted.  After completing his task, Andrei collapses and, presumably, dies.  As Johnson and Petrie point out, however, “there is no evidence that Andrei’s carrying out of his mission has changed anything in the outside world” (161).  Andrei’s task seems to be tied not so closely with communal salvation, but personal purgation, and, as will be discussed shortly, his salvation comes after his “death.”

 

Each main character goes through this trial of attempting to reach the transcendent and find faith.  Andrei Rublev first tries to ignore the suffering around him and focus on his art; later, when he can no longer bear the weight of the world, he vows not to talk and quits painting.  Chris Kevlin, from Solaris, tries alternately to kill and later to completely understand the strange manifestation of his dead wife.  Always, there are conflicting opposites, disharmony and despair.  The characters “find themselves in a paradoxical state of unstable equilibrium between a longing for happiness and the conviction that happiness, as a feasible reality or state, does not exist” (Tarkovsky 53).  The journey to faith is difficult and fraught with a terror of the holy.  For all the time and energy spent in reaching the Room, the three travelers in Stalker cannot bring themselves to enter that space where their deepest wish is granted.  The cost is too great, and the presence of the infinite too overwhelming.  “This,” the Stalker warns his companions, “is the most important moment of your lives.  You have to know that here your most cherished wish will come true. The most sincere one. The one reached through suffering.” 

 

Through these films, Tarkovsky is endowing the quest for faith and transcendence with such weight as to make it the central question of his oeuvre.  Humankind is presented in such desperate need of something beyond the natural, and yet, no human is depicted as being capable of reaching that luminance.  We can never quite get to it.  The tension remains between the conflicting opposites of the material and spiritual.          

 

Although Tarkovsky does a glorious job of delineating this conflict, he refuses to leave his audience in the despair of this dichotomy.  In the midst of the tension of opposites, the director presents a transcendence that is suggested by reality and infuses the material world.  Through his formalistic choices, Tarkovsky suggests the echoes and shadings of the infinite that can be captured through images, as well as those fleeting moments where, perhaps, the eternal comes to us.

 

A Rumor of Angels
For Tarkovsky, the material world[1] is more than a setting for drama or something to be risen above.  The physical world of particulars and things is not only beautiful and worthy of contemplation, but also a conduit for the spiritual.  Much has been written of the director’s faith and religious concerns, which seem to be most informed by the Eastern Orthodox Church.  This tradition places supreme emphasis on the idea of sacrament and incarnation as the means through which God communes with humanity.  Connection to the divine is “not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world” (Schmemann 27).  Far from being in competition with the material, the spiritual plunges us back into the very stuff of reality.  Several of Tarkovsky’s stylistic choices bring out this idea of the infinite expressed through the finite, specifically through time, memory, and the poetic suggestion.     

 

As noted before, what interested Tarkovsky was enabling his audience to experience the films he made.  The goal was not realism, per se, but a profound deference towards life.  All his films were constructed around an “intensity of feeling that would transform the idea of the story into a truth endorsed by life” (Tarkovsky 16).  Through exploring life in its totality, the director was able to examine not “themes” or “symbols”, but the infinite experience of living.  In keeping with this devotion to manifesting life through the image, Tarkovsky often employs a disconnected structure that has more in common with poetry than it does with traditional narrative.  The images are connected intuitively, sharing emotional resonance as opposed to cause and effect.  The director seems to desire that his audience respond to the films with a dreamlike rather than rational logic (Johnson and Petrie 178). 

 

Film relies on its viewers to connect the images together in order to form a story.  If an audience is shown a man aboard a train, and then a train barreling through the countryside, the human mind fills in the gap and decides that the train just shown is the same that the man is riding.  In this way, a cognitive “suture” is used to hold elements together in discourse; cinematic coherence emerges through the relations and gaps between shots (Silverman 80).  But whereas most films proceed through causality, the suture constructed by the audience is nominal at best.  In Tarkovsky’s films, however, what the audience must place between shots can be voluminous at times[2].  For instance, the film Mirror is a journey through the narrator’s memories and dreams, which function as fragmented reflections of life as a whole.  The images are bound together not by a “story” in any traditional sense of the world.  They are connected not in their content, but in their existence – each shot reflects a manifestation of what it is to live.  It is as if, with each shot of spilled milk or wind rushing through tress, Tarkovsky is sitting right behind us, whispering, “This is what it felt like.”  The response is to approach the film actively, rather than passively, placing the film in a context of lived experience in order to understand it.   

 

All of the director’s films share this narrative discontinuity to a greater or lesser degree, and it is perhaps this element, more than any other, that makes Tarkovsky so inaccessible.  Writing of Mirror when it was first released, critic Michael Dempsy compares the discontinuity to the stuttering boy at the beginning of the film: the director’s work “speaks only dimly” because of the lack of either “an organizing principle or a center of consciousness” (13).  But this is precisely the point.  Tarkovsky does not seem interested in central themes or propositions of truth.  If we are to take the journey of his characters seriously, then we shall see that such cohesion and universals cannot but fail in their attempt to reach the infinite.  The director is, instead, interested in how the particulars, the details, the gaps can suggest the briefest echo of something beyond where reason can take us.  He writes:

Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active.  He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life, unsupported by ready-made deductions from the plot or ineluctable pointers from the author. (20)            

As in poetry, the limited finite pieces lead to a complete totality.  The essence of an image is not “a certain meaning, but an entire world reflected, as in a drop of water” (110).  By structuring his films poetically, the director evokes associations and connections beyond the rational realm and ushers in the profound stillness of the eternal. 

 

Similar to what he is doing with images, Tarkovsky was also a genius at integrating sound into the totality of a piece.  In Nostalghia, there is a recurring sound of something like a table-saw in different locations, always in the background, lurking at the edge of the character’s mind.  But the source of the sound is never shown.  Instead of being motivated by reality, the sound reflects the inner turmoil of the character.  Parallel to this are the voices of the dead in Ivan’s Childhood, which slowly seep from Ivan’s dream into reality.  In The Sacrifice, the gathering storm of war is denoted only by sound: the voice of a broadcaster and the rumblings of jet planes.  Similarly, there is a female voice that is calling to Alexander, both in “reality” and in his dream state.  Later, the source of the voice is revealed to be a shepherdess in the countryside; it remains spatial impossible, however, for her voice to have been the voice the audience has heard in several locations.  Sounds disconnected from sources is another way in which the director is using the broken pieces of the world to suggest something beyond.  Emanating from an unseen, illogical source, sounds can “transcend the material towards otherwise inaccessible realms of experience” (Truppin 248).  An audience is left to believe in an unseen source, emblematic of the unseen spiritual realm. 

 

Tarkovsky is privileging the particulars over the universals, finding a way to let poetic connection convey a sense of the entire world and the totality of life.  Structure and sound, however, are not the only elements employed toward this end.  Perhaps more so than any other, the director uses the tools of time and space for this purpose, leading to a synthesis of all these disconnected parts into an image of the unimaginable. 

Imprinted Time           

 

For Tarkovsky, there is no greater element of cinema than time, and no greater calling for a director than to utilize it well.  About time, he writes:

I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had.  He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances, and concentrates a person’s experience.  (63)

As a part of his desire to enable his audiences to experience the life of the film, Tarkovsky used several methods to ensure that the viewer would feel the weight and passage of time.  In these films, time acts as “a bridge, a physical relation between the image and the audience. Without this connection we become merely spectators, and cannot, as Tarkovsky would have us, identify with and participate in the experience on screen” (D’Sa 1).  Before this discussion progresses further, however, it should be established that neither time nor space can be considered as distinct from one another.  They, together, are an entity, and any discussion of one entails the other (Greene 59).  For our purposes, I will use the terms distinctly, acknowledging, however, that they are essentially indistinguishable.     

 

The most obvious way that time asserts itself in the films is the prodigious length not only of the movies themselves, but in the length of the takes used.  For instance, in Andrei Rublev, the effect of time is seen most clearly through long takes which root the viewer in the world of the story.  One of the crane shots during the sack of Vladimir starts on horses racing outside the gates.  The camera turns, showing the struggle on the city wall and then moves towards the chapel where it meets up again with the horses who have entered the city.  By allowing the shot to hold until the riders reach their goal, the audience feels the amount of time they have ridden.  Whereas a cut gives the impression of an indistinct amount of time skipped, the long shots Tarkovsky employs ensure that we feel the amount of time involved, emphasizing “the temporal nature of reality, by means of which he transcends the commonplace signification of objects in order to reach something that the naked eye . . . is unaccustomed to perceiving” (Petric 28).  Another long take which scans the faces of the peasants huddled in a thatch hut during a storm elegantly builds the atmosphere of the scene as the main characters fall into a deep reverie.  The cinematic image “acts as an intensive threshold through which the force of time, as it exceeds visible representation, allows itself to be felt” (Wright 60).     

 

Time’s handprint is also seen in Andrei’s face as he grows older.  It is also interesting to see the city of Vladimir at two different points in its history, during both the violent invasion and later during a time of peace.  Tarkovsky’s later, more reflective films carry this explication of time even further.  Stalker, in particular, conveys the time of the travelers’ journey in such a way to plunges the audience deeper into the world.  The walk along the hallway dubbed the “meat grinder” is especially rooted in the experience of the time it takes to traverse that space. 

 

In several films, the director also uses almost imperceptibly slow motion shots.  Several whole scenes in Mirror proceed at just under normal frame rate, such as the mother running through the printing press.  The audio, however, remains in real-time.    The result is hypnotic, but also serves as a kind of “close-up” of time, placing a shot’s chronological aspect in the foreground of the viewer’s consciousness (Petric 29).     

 

Another way that Tarkovsky enables his audience to experience time is through the distortion of time and space.  While keeping his individual images rooted in the passing of time, he allows the aforementioned poetic structure to obscure the images’ temporal and spatial context.  Experience is maintained, but interpretation of time and space becomes problematic (Johnson and Petrie 109).  Once Kris Kelvin reaches the space station in Solaris, it is impossible to know how much time has passed between scenes or individual shots.  Being in space, time of day has no meaning, and Tarkovsky allows the depiction of time to mirror his characters inner listlessness.  Similarly, characters often occupy two mutually exclusive points of space in the same shot.  Contextual reference points “maintain an unstable equilibrium, spatial relations suffer severe distortion, and the distinction between temporal dimensions blurs” (Wright 49).  Much of this is due to Tarkovsky’s insistence on letting the films be governed by the dreamlike, as opposed to the rational.  Another instance of this is the way in which space is obscured in Stalker.  Tarkovsky purposefully denies his viewers an establishing shot of the Zone, and as such, we are as confused as Writer and Professor about where we are in the maze of trees and ruins.  And this is an important point – Tarkovsky does not experiment with time and space for its own sake, but for the sake of highlighting the “interior, spiritual quality of the experience”, for which “the logic of time and space is ignored in favor of a higher, transcendent inner reality experienced by the character”  (Johnson and Petrie 168). 

 

In addition to time/space, the films’ elliptical structure shares something in common with the director’s other favorite elements of the cinema: memory and identity.  From Solaris on, it could be argued that the director’s films all share the interplay between “reality” and memory as a primary concern.  Certainly, Mirror stands out as exploring this territory.  Interesting, Tarkovsky tends to conflate memory with dreams, creating a surreal plane where the two bleed into each other until they are indistinguishable.  In said film, it seems impossible to tell where the flashes of the narrator’s mother washing her hair becomes the vision of the room collapsing beneath the weight of falling water.  Similarly, the image of the barn burning is seen from different perspectives at different times, making it difficult to do anything other than simply experience the moment.  Nostalghia plays with this distortion as well – the memories of home eventually merge with the dreams happening in Italy, until the audience sees the vision of the wife and the possible mistress in a tearful embrace.          

 

Beyond just individual memory, however, Tarkovsky seems to tap into something approximating communal memory.  In Ivan’s Childhood, Ivan is haunted by writing on the wall of the bunker left over from soldiers who have long since died in the conflict.  Their memory of their end is passed on to him.  Again, in Nostalghia, this trend is continued, as Andrei finds himself “seeing” the memories of Domenico as the old man emerges from his shelter with his family.  Mirror, however, is the finest example of this, as it includes, along with the narrator’s memories, footage of significant landmarks for the Soviet people.  Old grainy film of the Russian soldiers crossing the icy river during WWII is haunting in its simplicity.  Tangential to this are the scenes of the narrator’s mother, moments which he did not witness, but must have been related to him at some point.  The images are “a mosaic of what the narrator knew firsthand, what he was told, what he dreamed or imagined, and what happened around him as part of a historical process that he shared with millions of other people” (Johnson and Petrie 116). 

 

Communal memory helps to define a communal identity, and by extension, the identity of each member of the community.  Memory, like a mirror, helps us to see ourselves better.  The narrator of Mirror is reinterpreting his past through the filter of dreams, history, and desire.  The result, like many of Tarkovsky’s films, is a redefinition of identity.  It seems that in each journey of faith that the characters must take, there is an element of journeying towards understanding of personal identity.  The titular character Ivan, through dreams of memories, holds to the tether of who he once was, outside of war and suffering.  The Andrei of Nostalghia searches, too, through his memory and dreams for who exactly he is so far from home.  At one point, he opens a wardrobe and in the mirror he sees the image of the old man Domenico instead of his own reflection.  Memory shapes identity.  But just as memory is mercurial and ever changing, so Tarkovskian identity is constantly in flux.  His characters are consistently revealing new sides of themselves, often with little justification or warning.  In her introduction to a collection of essays on film and identity, Wendy Everett supports this view of self:

                        It is no longer possible to understand identity, whether subjective or collective, as either unitary or secure; instead we recognize it to be essentially fragmented and multiple, an unstable mix of contradictions and ambiguities.  Identity thus emerges as an open-ended process of becoming.  (4)

Ever-changing, redefined – these are the characteristics that emerge in the director’s protagonists.  Like Hari slowing coming to realize who she is in Solaris, it is through remembering and dreaming that one touches the essential self and finds those moments that have always and will continue to define identity.   

 

Just as identity is a function of memory, so memory is a function of time.  Not merely another element in the vast world that Tarkovsky is attempting to construct through his films, time and space are those key tools by which the director can build the experience of life, and through the truth of life, suggest something more than the sum of the individual cinematic elements.  The result is a strong emphasis on the natural world as means of communing with the holy.

Incarnation

 

Very little of Tarkovsky needs to be watched before his predilection for nature becomes self-evident.  Few of his films have scenes that take place indoors, and in those few that do, he often distorts the space in such a way that make the room feel almost empty (The Sacrifice) or so cluttered as to be uninviting (Solaris).  Mankind seems to be set as a part of nature, at home when surrounded by trees instead of concrete.  Every film of his, similarly, contains meditative portions whose purpose seems to be for the validation/enjoyment of the natural world.  Even Solaris, which takes place in space, has an extensive opening segment of man alone in creation.  In the later artificial environment of the space station, there is a shot of a young plant growing in a plastic container.  Towards the end of the film, Kevlin walks past, absently running his fingers along the leaves.

 

One of the more striking images in Mirror is the recurring sight of wind bursting through bushes and trees, as if announcing the arrival of God.  Throughout this film (and most others), the director gives nature an even higher ontological priority than anything else.  When humans are framed outside, they are placed in such a way that the audience’s eye is drawn towards the totality of man within nature.  Andrei Rublev often remembers back to the three monks huddled under the large trees during a fierce rainstorm.  The shot is composed in such a way as to communicate the grandeur of the tree and places the three characters in relation to the majesty.  Animals play a prominent role, as well.  In his earlier works, Tarkovsky uses horses as, if not a symbol, then a representation of the glory of life in physicality.  Later, the director will employ the image of a black dog as a harbinger of the dreamworld, as well as of faith. 

 

Another element of nature that figures prominently is water as a kind of purgation.  In every film, characters either move through water or are caught in rainstorms (sometimes rainstorms that happen indoors).  Key locations, like the Room in Stalker and Domenico’s house in Nostalghia, are infused with water.  The omnipresent liquid is not only reminiscent of the quotidian rituals of cleansing, but also Christian rituals of sanctification (Schmemann 72).  It is worth noting, too, that Tarkovsky’s childhood home is now underwater, having been flooded by the building of a dam (Green 108).  Among all these motivations for the use of water, perhaps the greatest reason is a continual reminder and validation of physical reality.  If water is present at the pivotal moments of transcendence, perhaps the natural world is more than an ancillary concern in the quest for the Infinite.                         

 

Continuing with the conflict of opposites, Tarkovsky often combines nature with relics of human civilization.  Stalker and Nostalghia are full of ruins and dilapidated buildings surrounded by flourishing nature.  Stalker also establishes a clear demarcation between city and nature, clearly preferring the latter.  But, as noted above, tension does not appear to be the final goal.  Tarkovsky is interested in the ways in which life experience leads to truth and transcendence.  To this end, synthesis of opposites is the third option that he brings to bear on the conflicts he has explored.  In most of his films, there are moments where the elements of civilization bleed into nature until you cannot tell them apart from each other.  At the end of Mirror, the camera slowly sweeps over the remains of the burned barn.  Vines have intertwined with the shards; the collapsed fence, too, has become part of the landscape.  In Stalker, the camera passes over a river that flows gently over discarded human artifacts like guns, money, and icons.  In the Room, fish swim up to a newly dismantled bomb.  The fusion is incredible: the water accepts them both.  A rejection of civilization in favor of pure nature would have been too prosaic.  Instead, Tarkovsky finds harmony in the balance of man and nature.  His ideal setting is the dacha of his childhood amidst the silent, inclusive trees, swayed slightly by breeze.  More than anything else, this notion explicates the deep “redemptive synthesis” that is happening beneath the surface of the images (Samardzija 300).       

 

Tarkovsky is tying things together, unifying the elements of an experience, the shape of the world.  In several films, the final (or penultimate) shot achieves a unity between the conflict of opposites that define the struggle for transcendence.  In Solaris and Nostalghia, there is a direct synthesis between competing environments.  Kevlin finds himself on an earth-like island that mirror his home – the final shot, however, shows he is still on the surface of the strange planet.  Andrei awakens after “death” to find himself in a composite of his Russian dacha in the midst of the Italian cathedral ruins.  The “multiple worlds that inhabit singular spaces” have become one (300).  As Domenico tells Andrei at one point, one drop of water added to another, produces not two drops, but a bigger single drop.  Mirror, also testifies to a synthesis, although one of memory, dream, and reality, not necessarily physical locations.  By the end, characters from present day are walking hand in hand with childhood versions of the narrator.  The temporal barriers have completely broken down, and the Infinite is visible through the breach.  “Interpretation is no longer a question of A or B, but both A and B.” (Johnson and Petrie 178).

 

The end of Stalker finds the mysterious, spiritual power of the Zone invading the “real world.”  First, we see color when Stalker carries his daughter, then the electronic music of the Zone returns, as does the mysterious dog who comforts Stalker in the Zone.  Towards the end, there are even puffs of dandelions floating in the house, emblematic of the nature found in the Zone.  The final shot, however, is the most striking, as the lame daughter Monkey displays an extraordinary gift that speaks to “the existence of a spiritual presence that profoundly affects the world” (Samardzija 301). 

 

Ivan’s Childhood and The Sacrifice share the image of a tree planted near the sea as an emblem of hope and faith.  What is peculiar about the ending of Tarkvosky’s first film is that the “dream” comes after the protagonist has died.  Who, therefore, is dreaming?  Or is it an image of something beyond life, a synthesis of experience and dream?  The tree in Sacrifice holds slightly different weight, and it may be that beyond just providing hope and a sense of the spiritual, that the boy’s sacrifice and discipline of watering the tree may be the true sacrifice that saves the world.  If this is the case, it should be noted that for all the time and water spent on the tree, it is only through a miracle that it would blossom again.  And here is the subtlest and most intriguing aspect of the Tarkovskian synthesis.  Although we may catch glimpses of the transcendent through memory or time or nature, for the kind of harmony that the director hints at, transcendence must come to us.  But this does not mean that the eternal overrides the temporal.  Even miracles, Stalker says at one point, are still part of nature.  Or, as Domenico has scrawled across his wall, “1+1=1.”         

 

Central to this is the resolution of Andrei Rublev.  The opposites of the old icon painter and the young bell-maker have found each other, and Andrei has returned to his gift, his purpose.  The final sequence is color photography of icons that Rublev may have gone on to paint.  Important to realize here is that in the Orthodox tradition, an icon “represents the true nature of the object it depicts (Christ is literally present in the icon that portrays him)” (Johnson and Petrie 86).  The curator of icons at the Russian Museum in St. Petersberg remarked in an interview that through the paintings, people make a connection – they “feel eternity” (Sheahen 1).  By means of the material world, the immaterial may be glimpsed.     

 

Overall, the films of Tarkovsky portray faith as a struggle that communicates more questions than answers.  The worlds of his films can be cold, isolating places that continually frustrate expectation and deny harmony between opposing principles.  And yet, there is this whispered hope for something more.  The literal meaning of the word “liturgy” is “the work of the people”, a group through worship becoming “something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals – a whole greater than the sum of its parts” (Schmemann 25).  Similarly, the elements of cinema may form something spiritual in their unity.  Through the poetic suggestion of the totality of life, through time and memory, through the finite natural world, there can be glimpses of the Infinite in Tarkovsky’s films.  But, the ineffable is, by definition, beyond our reach.  Our arms have extended as far as they can go.  We cannot achieve true synthesis.  Perhaps at this point, where we have reached the end of our ability, the transcendent comes to us.  Incarnated in the fabric of this world, the Infinite is working a mystery before which we can only stand in awe.  No wonder Tarkovsky uses such great stretches of silence.  There are some things for which words simply will not do, and which images can only suggest.

 

Works Cited

Dempsy, Michael.  “Lost Harmony.”  Film Quarterly 35.1  (1981): 12-17. 

D’Sa, Nigel Savio.  “Andrei Rublev: Religious Epiphany in Art.”  Journal of Religion

and Film.  3.2  (October 1999) <http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/saviodsa.htm>

Everett, Wendy.  “From Frame to Frame: Images in Transition.”  The Seeing Century:

Film, Vision, and Identity.  Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 

Green, Peter. “Andrei Tarkovsky.”  Sight and Sound.  56.2  (Spring 1987): 108-110.

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