Lucidno
Tarkovsky’s next film, Stalker (1979), continues the caustic territory of Solaris and The Mirror, that of the visual psychological projection and time displacement. The screenplay for Stalker was written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and is loosely based on their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, coincidentally the same time Solaris was released. In the distant future a scientist and a writer are led by a local scout who lives in a rundown industrial landscape on the edge of the world, and together they set out into the mysterious ‘zone’, which is allegedly home to a place where one's most secret wishes come true. The expedition becomes a journey into the protagonists themselves, into a whole world of imagination and silence.
Stalker, like Solaris, is a science-fiction allegory, set in a future world which is a misted mirror of our own. Stalker is notable for using ‘real time’ without editing, following every seemingly inconsequential step, while the acting is naturalistic. However, the themes of Solaris and Stalker are opaque and complex, often lateral to the events of the actual stories, a fact which has inspired opposite reactions of fascination and distancing from Tarkovsky’s work. Ultimately, Solaris is about astronauts forced to come to terms with their own past selves, while Stalker is concerned with metaphysics and the search for inner happiness, both films combining elements of science fiction with dramatic philosophical and psychological themes.
The lineage of displacement, personal memory and yearnings is taken further by Tarkovsky in his next film, Nostalgia (Nostalghia, 1983), which was filmed and financed in Italy as a co-production with Mosfilm in the USSR. Paralleling Tarkovsky’s own displaced and somewhat isolated situation at this time, it is the story a Russian writer who also finds himself far from home after going to the Italian countryside to gather material on an 18th Century Italian composer (who committed suicide), and whose biography he wants to write. He is, however, overcome by an overpowering yearning for his geographical and spiritual home.
Nostalgia utilises the (by this time) familiar Tarkovsky signature of long takes, dream sequences, and minimal narrative and/or dialogue. Regarding the exploration of themes surrounding nostalgia and the untranslatability of art and culture, Tarkovsky said, "I wanted to depict the Russian form of nostalgia, that mental state entirely specific to our nation which grips us when we are far away from home." It can also be considered a poetic exploration of Marcel Proust’s notion of the ‘landscape of memory’: visually ravishing and enigmatic while extremely slow-paced and therefore demanding patience from the viewer.
While filming Nostalgia in 1982, Tarkovsky made a 63-minute documentary, Voyage in Time (Italian: Tempo di Viaggio), which records his travels in Italy with script writer Tonino Guerra in preparation for the making of the film, revealing his filmmaking philosophy and his admiration for directors including Robert Bresson, Jean Vigo, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Ingmar Bergman. Voyage in Time was originally the title for Nostalgia but this was changed when it was realised there was already a film called Journey to Italy (1954) by Roberto Rossellini. It is also the only documentary about himself which he also co-directed, although other documentaries on him have been produced, not least by Chris Marker.
The Sacrifice, made in 1985, was to be Tarkovsky’s final film and in many ways his most poignant and circular one, considering his themes and influences. The backdrop is a solitary, isolated island where 50-year-old Alexander's birthday celebrations are in full swing when news of an atomic strike stops the party guests in their tracks. The Sacrifice is notable for its striking images and dialogue to connect a poetic film language with a philosophical religious discourse, the latter of which was at odds with the prevailing Russian orthodoxy, even atheism.
Filmed on an island in Sweden and set during a nuclear crisis, The Sacrifice draws allusions to the parables of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal that was set during the medieval Black Death but alludes to the nuclear dangers of the 1950s. The Sacrifice also eerily prophesises the nuclear accident that would take place the following year in The Ukraine, then part of the USSR. However, there is also an omnipresent evocation that can be traced back to Chris Marker’s landmark short Sci-Fi film La Jetee from 1962 and this is more conspicuous, considering that Marker was filming a documentary on Tarkovsky at this time, called One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, and released in 1999.
La Jetée is constructed almost entirely from still black and white photos and is considered just as much a photo novel (photo roman) as a film. At just 29 minutes long, it is set in a ruined Paris after World War III where the survivors live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries and scientists research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to the past and the future, in order to rescue the present. While they have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel, the scientists eventually settle on a prisoner who has a vague but obsessive memory from his pre-war childhood of a woman, and this vivid recollection will enable him to travel backward and forward in time. As a grown man, he meets the girl he had glimpsed as a child on the jetty’s end at Orly Airport in Paris and falls in love with her. When he travels to the far future, he meets people who will offer him an escape, but chooses to return to the past again to find the woman, unaware that the scientists of the present are pursuing him.
Using themes that draw on the writings of philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) in its concern with time and memory, the photographs of frozen movement and a detached literary narration make La Jetee the perfect science fiction template. Its photo roman imagery makes us fully compliant that we are watching a film and are therefore commanded to be an active viewer. The film also relies on the unreliability of our own human perception. The hero receives only the same information as the viewer, which makes us more aligned to him in that he is representing all mortals. Only once does an image move, the girl waking in the early morning, looking at the camera, looking at the man, looking at us. La Jetee is also constructed on its intricate combination of three sound levels: its contemporary diegetic sound, its haunting music and its detached and inexorably fatalistic narration.
La Jetee was influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in its obsession and pursuit of the ultimately elusive woman. There is also the scene in which the hero and the woman look at a cut-away trunk of a tree which references a scene from Hitchcock's film, and also in the spiralling edit of La Jetee’s penultimate sequence. In his landmark essay film Sunless (Sans Soleil, 1983), Marker confirms the influence and borrowings from Vertigo, underlining that he was just as much drawn by the present for a film that uses time travel for its otherworldliness.
Where La Jetee is additionally intriguing in this contextualisation is that it was made at the same time as Tarkovsky’s first film Ivan’s Childhood in 1962, while Come and See was made in the same year of his final film, The Sacrifice in 1985. La Jetee is set in the past, present and future while Come and See goes back to the past, the same time in history of World War II that was depicted in Ivan’s Childhood. Add to this that the first height of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis took place in 1962, and that 1985 was another crisis period in the Cold War. Therefore, the circularity of time and coincidence seems to immerse itself on Tarkovsky’s work from the beginning to the end.
However we may consider the theme of Isolation in film and its depiction of the main protagonist as being a visual representation of the infinite numbers of possible strains on the human condition, we can also see it more positively as a refuge, a form of escapism and a psychological safety net. The meditative films of Tarkovsky, a brilliant and visionary director filming slow and difficult stories with their incumbent lyricism, seemingly invites us to do this, to enjoy this refuge. This is why the formal properties of the Cinema medium, co-current with other art forms like Literature, have been successful in creating a comfort in its mass seclusion, its mass isolation, for its ability to transpose us to other worlds and other times.
Steven Yates
