Christianity, Sacrifice and Submission:
The Social and Philosophical Thought of A. Tarkovsky
[Publicado en The Independent, 30 de diciembre de 1986]

The film director Andrei Tarkovsky, who died in 1986 at the age of 54, occupies a somewhat unique place in the development of modern film art. In a post-modernist world, where a majority of film-makers disdain certainty in favour of irony and spectacle, he insisted on the importance of values. Truth, for him existed as a fact; as well as its opposite, lying and falsehood. A proper attention to cinema (his cinema, and the cinema of the great masters) could teach us to live better ― better citizens, and deeper human beings. Are such claims preposterous, or can they be put modestly and sensibly? One notices a certain distrust of the artist who philosophises. An artist, it could be said, needs a minimum of philosophy and a maximum of "negative capability" (Keats’s term, to describe Shakespeare). Some of the greatest film-makers ―Renoir springs to mind― have no ideas at all beyond their governing idea (which may, after all, be sublime: in Renoir’s case, "the heart has its reasons"). Did Tarkovsky have a coherent philosophy? Is there a body of doctrine or social thought that can be extracted from his films and survive unaided? What kind of a thinker was he? What, if anything, do his films teach us?

In general, the matter of what did and did not pass the censor in late Soviet times is still and controversial and complex subject. One can say this: a number of films that were shelved seem, in retrospect, rather less provocative than other films that gained general distribution. Andrei Roublev is an historical epic taking as its point of departure the turbulent life and times of Russia’s most famous icon painter (c.1370-1430). It was planned and begun in the early 1960s, during Khrushchev’s middle years, a period of "high thaw" and increased cultural freedom. Its completion in 1966, however, coincided with ideological retrenchment and the onset of another cold spell. Certainly the film is no friend to Marxism (none of Tarkovsky’s films are, of course). It’s perhaps impossible to recover at this distance the "real" reasons for the authorities’ intransigence. Possibly what they objected to was what film censors object to universally ― the prevalence of nudity and violence: Andrei Roublev, in this sense, was a typical film of the sixties. Yet while it is reasonable to assume that these factors were indeed part of the issue, a greater part still may have lain in the film’s incipient friendliness to Christianity. What may be said with some confidence is that the delay in the film’s distribution (its Russian release was in 1971) permanently soured Tarkovsky’s already fragile relation to the state. Where he may once have been tempted to co-operate, it now became apparent that the practice of his art, if it was to remain free, must involve more than ever risk, daring and self-revelation.

The Mirror (1974) is part of this honest self-reckoning. In this film Tarkovsky marries remembered episodes from his childhood to a wider meditation on the experience of his contemporaries, and of the generation of his parents, brought to adulthood in the terrible years of the 1930s and 40s. The method he employed to do this ―a suave intermingling of reconstructed memories and brilliantly re-discovered real-life newsreel extracts― proved in the event too formalistic for Tarkovsky’s professional contemporaries. They accused the film of obscurity, although once again it is not clear whether this was the real objection, or simply a disguise for its opposite: the reality being that the film was in fact all too transparent ―transparent in its testimony, among other things, that life could be lived and celebrated outside the benevolent guidance of the system: that indeed there could be lives lived― even in the thirties and forties ― where communism was simply not credited.

The milieu Tarkovsky brings to life in The Mirror was a brilliant and fascinating one: it is the world, to speak in shorthand, of the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia, steeped in poetry and music ― lively, sceptical and grandiloquent. Some remnant of that proscribed class of talkers had unaccountably lived on through all the horrors of Stalinism. Tarkovsky’s father Arseniy (who outlived him) was a distinguished poet ―his poems are heard in voice-over in some of the most moving parts of The Mirror― and the family background was given over, with a peculiarly Russian intensity, to the twin ideals of culture and conversation. Tarkovsky himself was at one stage set for a career as a concert pianist: and music, literature and painting remained at all stages of his life his closest passions and enthusiasms.

That the milieu described here is essentially artistic rather than speculative goes without saying. Here we are in line with the "great tradition" of Russian spiritual life which finds its prominent thinkers more in the realm of literature than of academic analytic philosophy. And this in turn, to repeat my opening observations, gives problems to a critic who would propose to draw from a film-maker like Tarkovsky a defined body of social and political thought. To be perfectly explicit: the philosopher aims, or should aim, for a cogent and systematic account of the truth (the truth as he sees it, of course). But with an artist there will always be an element of ambiguity. The film-maker’s craft, like that of a playwright, revolves round the concept of drama; and in drama there are always ―at least― two points of view. A drama is a struggle, and a struggle becomes interesting or compelling when the forces contending within it are well-matched. In the film Stalker (1979), it is clear that the main gist of Tarkovsky’s thinking is carried, or symbolized, by the figure of the eponymous protagonist: the weak patient believer, the humble man, the Holy Fool, whose ethical task, like that of the artist, is, in Tarkovsky’s words "to make people feel the measure of things". The film, it is clear, is in favour of belief and of what goes with belief: piety, watchfulness, self-abnegation. Yet the force of the drama, it could be countered, comes from an opposite contention. The devil, in the shape of Stalker’s worldly opponent Writer (Anatoli Solonitsin), has many if not all the best tunes. For me and I suspect for many other viewers the film lives through the force of the subtle underground sarcasm issuing from Writer’s lips, which for the purposes of our argument are also Tarkovsky’s lips, and thus as much the genuine expression of the film-maker’s philosophy as the patient prayerful submissiveness of the film’s hero. What makes the film vivid, in short, is its self-questioning dialectical ferocity.

And then again, a film, like a painting, exists at a certain level beyond dialogue altogether ― beyond discourse. The image, you could say, is inherently ambiguous: that is what makes it so fascinating ― it is in a way what makes the thing art in the first place. In Tarkovsky’s films in particular, deeply inflected as they are by the Russian symbolist aesthetic, there is always a residue of pure imagery that is ultimately "just there" and beyond interpretation. Take, for example, the famous closing moments of "The Sacrifice" ― the beautiful image that has been used as the film’s poster. A boy of about eight or nine (the protagonist’s son in the movie) is lying stretched out on a grassy shore beneath a tall young tree that has yet to come into leaf. The bucket with which he’s been watering the tree is abandoned beside him. Small detail: there’s a bandage round the boy’s throat to cover a wound that hasn’t been "diegetically" explained by the film’s actions, and yet which seems to bear some kind of significance. What is happening here in this picture ― or not happening? The tree, plainly enough, stands for hope, youth, renewal; there’s something faintly biblical about it ― it’s the tree of Jesse; also (perhaps), in this paradisal setting, the tree of the garden of knowledge (where the serpent lurks). Surely, though, it’s ― also – "only" a tree. That’s its glory. Bare, chaste, uncontaminated by accretions of meaning, it stands, proud and imperturbable, in the limpid Swedish light. The beauty of the image (so pregnant with peace and farewell) derives from the sense we get that there’s at once too little and too much going on in it ― it’s like a mysterious line from a poem we love that obstinately clings onto its strangeness.

The turning of the text "against itself" is these days one of the standard procedures of criticism and can easily become a cliché or a vice. There is no intention, here or elsewhere in this essay, to produce a perverse reading of Tarkovsky’s art and thinking. Quite the contrary. All the same it is as well to insist that matters which seem straightforward are not always as simple as they look. On the surface, then, the matter of belief (I mean religious belief, belief about the truth of Christianity) could not be more cut-and-dried: for either one believes, or one doesn’t. And yet…Tarkovsky’s Diaries (published in English in 1989) provide the reader with a fascinating, detailed and interior record of his spiritual struggles ― struggles which (by one reading) led to conversion and faith. One can almost spot the moment at which this Great Giving happens: the moment, I mean, where Tarkovsky opens himself up and surrenders. 10 February 1979, seven years before his death, we come across his first written prayer: "Lord, I feel You drawing near, I can feel Your hand on the back of my Head… I want to see Your world as You made it, and Your people as you would have them be. I love You, Lord, and want nothing else from You. I accept all that is Yours, and only the weight of my malice and my sins, the darkness of my base soul, prevent me from being Your worthy slave, O Lord!" After this, the references to Christianity multiply. "What a joy it is to feel the presence of the Lord!", he writes in a characteristic entry, and a couple of months later, after reading Tolstoy’s Letters: "I do believe God will not abandon me." His mother’s death becomes an occasion for an affirmation of the immortality of the soul and the comfort of the resurrection: "Goodbye, no, not goodbye, because we shall meet again, I am convinced of that!" In general, the reader is forced to observe that Tarkovsky came to possess the rare gift of belief, as simple, almost, as a child’s trustfulness. A church is a holy place. You kneel there. You light a candle. You say a prayer. It is not difficult. Piety, in Tarkovsky’s case, was genuine and interior.

But it was also hard won, and this is where the commentator needs to tread carefully. Like many Christian artists of the modern period Tarkovsky was fascinated by he spectre of atheism. He saw its temptations; he sensed its intellectual attractiveness. This is what draws him to anti-clerical film-makers like Bunuel, and in his private reading to writers like Thomas Mann, Beckett and Dostoevsky. Above all to Dostoevsky. As a spiritual forbear, the great 19^th century Russian was fascinated by religion but remained, in the upshot, on the far side of it: unwilling or unable to make the great leap of faith. (So at least Tarkovsky believes. He writes in his diary: "Dostoevsky wants to believe in God but cannot ― the relevant organ is atrophied.") His own hesitations are explicable in this context. He has a fascination for states of mind that are complex, undecided, dialectical: the very opposite of doctrinal and ideological. The certitude of the Answer is, in the last resort, less compelling than the torment of the Quest. For, at bottom, is not life always a mystery? "The meaning of existence is a puzzle" (20 September 1978). Modern man, it seems, can only live in faith "by flashes". Faith is no longer, and can never again be, either a metaphysical repose, or a calm ordered body of ethical precepts. Tarkovsky’s Christianity, for all its strengths, was, therefore, eclectic and impure, filtered through the encounter with writers whose spiritual basis was not Christian; who, at any event, refused to privilege Christianity above other rival creeds. In this context, it’s surely impossible to miss in Tarkovsky’s art a distinctive flavour of China and the East: of Lao Tzu, Kenko, the "Indian" cosmic consciousness of theosophists like Gurdjieff. Tarkovsky admired these sages of India, China and Japan, just as he admired modern writers (like Hermann Hesse and Carlos Castaneda) who floated on similarly "non-European" waves of thought. So all these influences flow at different times into his finished films, making it impossible to regard them as a species of Christian apologetics.

Where, then, is the "certitude" that I spoke of at the beginning of this essay, distinguishing Tarkovsky from other modern film-makers? It is not in the content or meaning of his films, which are as tortured, dialectical and existentially probing as the films of the most resolutely "doubting" of modern film explorers ― let us say Bresson, Antonioni or Bergman. It seems to me it exists, rather, as an affirmation of the value of art itself, and the power of art to transform men’s lives for the better. Tarkovsky’s extended thinking on this topic appears in his single published work of aesthetic theory, Sculpting in Time (1986). The book takes the form of a series of freewheeling meditations on his different films up to Nostalghia (1983) ― extremely wide-ranging and provocative. The non-literary nature of the book’s origins (it issued out of a series of taped conversations with a collaborator called Olga Surkova) at times make it seem diffuse; but especially in the last chapters ("The Artist in Search of an Audience" and the following chapter "The Artist’s Responsibility") one finds an admirably concise summary of his credo.

He begins by reaffirming the distinction between Art and Entertainment, a distinction (we could add in passing) that has been flattened by certain trends in modern cultural criticism, but whose maintenance Tarkovsky believed to be vital for any serious thinking about what it means to be human. ("To be human", "to be serious and dignified", "to be intelligent about one’s destiny" ― phrases like these which crop up in Tarkovsky’s writing and interviews define his world view, of course, as being reactionary; that is to say, as being "in reaction against" the anti-ethical, anti-humanist assumptions of much current discourse.) It follows from this that the artist should not concern himself overmuch with the issue of immediate popularity, even if his livliehood depends on it. His responsibility is to himself, and not, in the first instance, to his audience. The audience will come, if the responsibility is sincere. Tarkovsky has interesting things to say about the way an aloof and Olympian artist ―Thomas Mann is a model here― may also in the end be the artist in whose work resides the living traditions of a nation. So art is national and local before it is international or universal.

Further, cinema and literature are not different (if they ever were) in weight and importance. It was one of Tarkovsky’s most deeply-held beliefs that the potentialities of his own craft of film-making were as yet underused and unexplored. Film , in its potential, was as powerful and uplifting a medium as the finest music, poetry or opera. From this emerges the insistence (and once again this position is "reactionary": a reaction against the much-heralded "death of the author") that the personality of the film-maker ―that is, the director’s personality, not the screenwriter’s or producer’s― informs the work at its deepest level, and indeed makes it that specific thing cinema. "In the course of my work I have noticed time and again", he writes, "that if the external emotional structure of a film is based on the author’s memory, when impressions from his personal life have been transmuted into screen images, then the film will have the power to move those who see it. But if a scene has been devised intellectually… then no matter how conscientiously and convincingly it is done, it will leave the audience cold. Even though it may strike some people as interesting and compelling when it first comes out it will have no vital force, and will not stand the test of time."

As with Beauty, so with Love, I think. "My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love, and to give his love…" How simply and untheoretically that is put! Stating it so simply, as a sort of ethical appeal to common sense ("That’s what art is for, isn’t it?") needn’t imply, however, that Tarkovsky fails to see the fugitive and evanescent status of love in the real world. It’s above all this somber dialectic ―that while the ideal exists, it manifests itself only fitfully and disappointingly― which links Tarkovsky’s work, I think,to the handful of already-mentioned masters of modern cinema such as Bunuel, Bergman and Bresson. In fact, we may watch Tarkovsky endorsing the connexion explicitly in an interesting passage in Sculpting in Time which analyses a key scene from Bergman’s Cries and Whispers.

"There is one particularly powerful episode, perhaps the most important in the film," he writes. "The two sisters arrive in their father’s house where the elder sister lies dying. The film develops out of the expectation of her death. Here, finding themselves alone together, they are suddenly and unexpectedly drawn together by the sisterly tie and by longing for human contact. They talk and talk… they cannot say all they want to… they caress each other. The scene creates a searing impression of human closeness, all the more so since in Bergman’s films such moments are elusive and fleeting. For most of the film the sisters cannot be reconciled, cannot forgive each other even in the face of death. They are full of hatred, ready to torture each other and themselves. [Yet] when they are briefly united Bergman dispenses with dialogue and has a Bach cello suite playing on the gramophone; the impact of the scene is dramatically intensified ―it becomes deeper, reaches out further. Of course this uplift, this flight into goodness is patently a chimera― it is a dream of something that does not and cannot exist. It is what the human spirit seeks, and what it yearns for; and yet that one moment allows a glimpse of harmony, of the ideal. Even this illusory flight gives the audience the possibility of catharsis, of the spiritual cleansing and liberation which is supremely attained through art."

The emphasis on the ideal, as a sort of criticism of reality, is an unmissable thread running through all of Tarkovsky’s writings, and as such is inseparable from his sense of the profound wrongness of the regime he was living under. It was thus a social as well as a metaphysical point de repère, and defined his unwavering deepseated conviction of the fraudulence of 20^th century communism. Politically speaking, you could say, he believed in the ideal because the reality was so wretched: that is the conclusion that is inescapable. The groundswell of melancholy that emerges from the Diaries issues from this permanent frustration: the feeling that, in his country, nothing ever works properly. The simplest requests connected with the functioning of his profession – requests to travel, to explore, to carry out basic research ― were time and again met with indifference, evasiveness or downright lies. Tarkovsky’s attitude to all this is the attitude of Chekhov: "Gentleman, must we live like this?" Yet his incredulity was (if possible) even deeper than Chekhov’s, because more sceptical about the chances of reform. The reform, after all, had been tried; that was the adventure of Bolshevism. Only look how much worse was the solution, than the crisis it affected to resolve. Tarkovsky was never blind to the faults of the West; after he came to live here he continued, like Solzhenitsyn, to speak out publicly when the occasion arose against aspects of our society that he found shallow or wanting. But one thing he never changed his mind about was the conviction that daily life in the West, in contrast to Russia, was not designed to be against reason.

Tarkovsky’s long-sustained anti-communism and the political anger he felt against the Soviet state raises a last point about his philosophy. Was he or wasn’t he a dissident? The choices, I suppose, were either to "fight the system" or else to fatalistically put up with one’s lot. In his personal life Tarkovsky was indeed combative. Again and again he demanded to be given the conditions in which he could practice his métier as a film director. When it finally appeared that he would no longer be able to make films in Russia, he upped and left the country (this was in 1984). Everything that has been written about Tarkovsky’s personality shows he was a man who was fiery, peremptory and masterful in his ability to set commands. Yet the clearest ideal we get from his cinema ―what indeed defines his philosophy, and makes it puzzling and provocative to Westerners― is his emphasis on sacrifice and submission. "What is weak is good: hardness is closest to death" runs a twice-repeated line in the film Stalker. "Sacrifice and submission": how, finally, are we to understand these concepts in Tarkovsky’s thought? In Christian terms, submission is of course to God’s will, not Caesar’s (and if to Caesar’s, then only provisionally and ironically). And sacrifice ―to make the opposite point― is not incompatible with decisiveness. It was a "decision" to emigrate, a decision of remarkable toughness. To emigrate was to sacrifice everything that was dearest to him personally (country, wife, child). Could it be, perhaps, that we in the West had forgotten the meaning of this concept? To remind us of its meaning became the object of his last and austerest film, Offert/The Sacrifice (1986), completed only a month before his death ― although it has to be said that the message is refracted and hedged around, as usual, in this film, with characteristic sophisticated obliqueness.

On this specific point: it is easy to imagine a hostile criticism of Tarkovsky’s worldview which points out a division in his thinking that is also, implicitly, a division of personal politics – perhaps even a division of soul. I am thinking of the argument that while Sacrifice, with its strong noble overtones, is for men, Submission (with its inescapable overtones of something weak, cowering, timid) is for the other sex ― for women. In answer to a self-composed questionnaire that included the question "What is a woman’s driving force?" Tarkovsky wrote in his diary in January 1974, "Submission, humiliation in the name of love!" The charge has been leveled against Tarkovsky that he was, to say the least, old-fashioned in his attitudes towards sexual equality. Certainly, his views on women hinged on notions of complementarity rather than sameness. Men and women spiritually weren’t the same creatures, and could never be. That led naturally, in life and art, to misunderstanding and conflict. Tarkovsky’s films from Solaris onwards are as full as Bergman’s and Antonioni’s are of scenes dramatising the "impossibility" of our ever living together in the harmony that we could say we deserve. Still, whichever way one looks at the matter, it’s clear enough that Tarkovsky ―as much as Bergman and Antonioni― was also an "admirer" of women, and that this admiration goes far beyond the artist’s legitimate appreciation of form, line and beauty. The truth surely is that, deep in Tarkovsky’s value system, lies the conviction that women’s eyes look further.

Yes, "look further": onto what, though? The idea is that it is women, in Russia, who keep spiritual life going. While men debate, procrastinate, strike attitudes, it is the "weaker sex" that shoulders the burdens of existence. That is the tragedy, as well as the lyric poem, of Russian history. I don’t know whether ― believing it as deeply as he did ― it perversely makes Tarkovsky some kind of feminist. What can and must be pointed out is that the figure of the mother occupies a place of honour at the centre of the enigma. It’s incontestable that Tarkovsky’s own mother, Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, was a woman of the highest moral caliber: impossible to talk about Tarkovsky’s "philosophy of life" without taking into account the role she plays in his art ― supremely and visibly in The Mirror, where she is the focus and subject of the drama; but subliminally also in all the other films where, far more than is realised, she (and women like her) play a pivotal role in shaping Tarkovsky’s vision, and providing it with its distinctive humane tenderness-

Mark Le Fanu

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