Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky co-authored with Tonino Guerra a film called Nostalghia, which was in Italy in 1983. Fortuitously, the word is recognizable in English and Italian as well as Russian, making transparent its Greek root -- nostos -- meaning return. Nostalgia usually suggests a powerfully experienced absence, a lack, the loss of something that seems irretrievable – either in time (the past), in space (one’s distant home), or metaphysically (a departed loved one.)
In North American culture (maybe due to our somewhat tenuous grasp of history ?) ‘nostalgia’ indicates a yearning for the past, the apocryphal “good old days”. In Tarkovsky’s usage and in his artistic process the past merge with the present, as does longing with its object. His work was dedicated to the struggle to make this merger tangible if not totally accessible through the art of cinema, which he conceived, as have a few other filmmakers (Ozu, Cocteau), as a practice much like poetics. In his autobiography I Had Nowhere to Go, filmmaker Jonas Mekas is explicit about his self-identity as a poet.
Tarkovsky produced only seven feature films, of which Nostalghia is the penultimate. His entire small body of work might be read as one long conversation with himself and with the viewer, whom he believed was essential to completing a work of art, as a collaborator. It is practically impossible to discuss one of Tarkovsky’s films without reference to his others. One reason for this is the pronounced degree of intertextuality among his films and the fact that they are highly autobiographical. More importantly, this intertextuality embodies the working out through a professional artistic lifetime of a profound moral enquiry. He viewed art as a search for truth, an ideal. Mapping an inner landscape, his oeuvre describes a trajectory wherein questions of moral responsibility are placed insistently at the center of life and form the crux of its significance. As such it follows the shape of the river of Judeo-Christian western thought ...from the Fall, as represented with Ivan’s departure from childhood (Ivan’s Childhood, 1962) to collective Redemption based on an individual’s choice. (The Sacrifice, 1986.)
Tarkovsky’s world was divided: temporally by the watershed of World War Two, spatially by a political iron curtain, and ideologically by the soviet ideal both in partnership and conflict with a semi-archaic form of Christianity that has all but disappeared in the west. The byzantine Christian practices adopted and retained in Russia and eastern parts of Europe, was characterized by a devotional use of ikons as conduits for the divine into the individual life. I was struck in 1985 while traveling around the Soviet Union, to find that ikon paintings, whether in the Kremlin itself or at an obscure monastery were still in a sense being revered even if presented as “cultural treasures produced by the heroic soviet people.”
The long-standing role of the ikon in Russian culture holds a key to the way that Tarkovsky, born in 1932 and educated and trained in the soviet film system, evoked deep moral issues in his films by setting up windows, doorways, as passages to “other” sacred, vanished, or psychological realities. One of Tarkovsky’s widely known films was Andrei Rublev, about the 15th century Russian ikon painter. The poet’s search for the fresco painting of the Madonna del Parto that opens the film Nostalghia embodies yet another yearning for the transcendent reality sought in religious ikons.
The kind of necessary boundary states which ikons are meant to enable are generally induced or attained by means of intermediaries. These may be human figures -- the child spying behind enemy lines in Ivan’s Childhood, the ikon painter Roublev providing access to the divine, or the Stalker who guides his clients to a paradoxical space where they may confront their deepest needs and fears; or the medium may be primordial inner forces disguised as familiar objects, such as a mirror, or the sentient ocean of Solaris. Even a dog, which appears and is unremarked upon in almost every film, can be a link to the transcendent. In Nostalghia the dog is an explicit visual and auditory link to the world of the madman, Domenico who tries to tell the poet how to save the world. At the beginning of Nostalghia, the protagonist is being driven along a foggy road by his interpreter as they the search for a mountain village where La Madonna del Parto, a famous Piero della Francesca painting, may be seen. We hear the voices of women in prayer. As in The Mirror, a woman is the seeker’s link to connecting with the transcendent.
Contacts with the “elsewhere” of the inner human universe unfold as they do in fairy tales as a trial and or a quest –whether in a flooded forest occupied by faceless invading soldiers (Ivan’s Childhood), through a post-apocalyptic landscape called the Zone (Stalker), or a ritual walk with a lit candle across a half-drained thermal pool in an obscure Italian village (the closing scene of Nostalghia.) In each case, the goal is revealed as a kind of aesthetic and spiritual Redemption which, though it is without fanfare or recognition, perhaps even misunderstood or despised by the rest of the world, it is not done simply for the individual who carries it out; it is intended for the benefit of all. That is the supreme theme of The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky’s last film.
The dynamic that animates Tarkovsky’s films moves via a circle of associations within which a relatively limited set of elements are allowed to interact seemingly spontaneously, allowing multiple meanings to co-exist, thus placing a much greater burden on the viewer. He was committed to this demand and opportunity for the viewer to “complete” the work and provided visual and syntactical protocols for signification throughout his oeuvre. It is water especially that pervades the imagery in all of his works – as rivers, lakes, oceans, puddles, rain, a mirror. A static tableau glides into a different space that co-habits the one a specific room which also contains all the memories of the man sitting there as the room begins inexplicably to flood around him. This is achieved partly through the dynamic of ambient sound which is increasingly foregrounded, again on the boundary between ambient sound and part of the texture of meaning that is being woven.
Tarkovsky wanted to transcend the opposition or division between space and time. The past is present in every moment and things come together — one drop plus one drop is not two drops, but a bigger drop. The past, real or imagined, is always just a sideways slide of the vision away.
Nostalgia as Maya Turovskaya puts it in her book Cinema as Poetry, is both "a longing for home and the burden of the sorrows of the world." (p.131) At various times it has been defined as a "Russian disease" Tarkovsky’s work exemplifies the dictum, coined by that matriarch of modern expatriates, Gertrude Stein, that “… everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they really live. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there." The longing often takes the form of memories of a childhood world fundamentally vanished. It is the “transcendental” element that Paul Shrader sought to describe in Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. [Berkeley: U.C. Press, 1972 Reprint: New York: Da Capo Press, n.d.]
In his own book, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes that Nostalghia portrays someone who, while profoundly alienated, still seeks for harmony in the reality of the world, and intensely experiences that global yearning for the wholeness of existence.
Ellen Zweig’s unpublished novel about Paris talks about how "the city remembers and causes her to remember"; this echoes Tarkovsky's relation to Italy, which remembers and causes him to remember what is important or necessary.
The 19th century had begun to strike out in the direction of “total” works (Wagner, the operatic mode.) But the material world is dense, often intractable to our whims and imaginings. Cinema is a medium that has a direct impact on people’s experience that no other artistic medium since perhaps ancient theatre had ever been able to achieve.
Few have achieved a form wherein the concrete, functional, physical properties and the symbolic, abstract, and subliminal were in such dynamic equilibrium as they are in Tarkovsky’s films. Ivans childhood is destroyed but, having lost it, he preserves it in center of his will where it can never be taken from him.
please go to the site to see this post with images from some of the films: https://marinadebellagentelapalma.substack.com/archive