Research Paper
11.14
Nostalghia: This Is Not Nostalgia
by: Violetta Marmor
Please Note:
In some instances in this paper, direct Russian quotes will be used without translation; translated English quotations will appear from Russian speakers (as in some, but not all instances, with Tarkovsky); Russian translations of English originals will be presented; and other English language ideas and criticisms will be framed by an essay written and argued in English by a non-native speaker. This is done in response to Tarkovsky’s exploration of language, translation, and theoretical and physical borders in the film. I am interested in examining the effect this fluid combination will have on mono-lingual, multi-lingual, as well as multi-national readers.
“We cannot return to the past, but we can go home again.”
– Jan Morris, travel writer
“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
– Carson McCullers, American novelist
Andrei Tarkovsky titles his first film shot abroad Nostalghia. In his diaries after the completion of the project, he states the underlying intent of his work: “I wanted to make a film about Russian nostalgia—about that state of mind peculiar to our nation which affects Russians who are far from their native land” (Tarkovsky 202).
Tarkovsky in Tempo di Viaggio
The choice of spelling of the title as “Nostalghia” is telling of the uniquely national portrayal of this experience. John Riley, in “Tarkovsky and Brevity” underscores this sentiment: “[Tarkovsky insisted] on a transliteration of what he felt was a word that the Russians had claimed as their own, for a particularly Russian condition…[The] spelling demonstrated a scrupulous distinction between the impossibility of returning and mere fond reminiscences about the past” (Riley 3). It reflects the reluctance on Tarkovsky’s part to commit to the new world he was experiencing in Italy as an artist. Despite the spelling and foreign language, it was essential for Tarkovsky to retain the word’s Russianness in context. This undertaking is crucial because Tarkovsky’s portrayal is necessarily a mediation of the concept of nostalgia. René Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images” comes to mind here: The abstraction of an idea differs from its cinematic depiction. This is a subtle but important distinction, because in the realization of the psychological reality of his characters, their interiorities, and surroundings, Tarkovsky, in effect, inserts himself as an artist, defector, and spiritual seeker into the concept of nostalgia, thus changing and challenging our notion of the term. In this paper, I will investigate the complex Tarkovskian perception of nostalgia, and ultimately, reflect on how it facilitates his artistic vision, message, and views on modern society. I will focus on a number of key scenes in particular that illustrate how nostalgia manifests itself as the protagonist, Andrei Gorchakov, seeks greater, spiritual truth.
Rene Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images”
The opening shot of the film presents a rather unconventional portrait of a family—we later find out in the film, it is Gorchakov’s family shown. As the characters recede from the camera into the landscape, the Russian pastoral imagery figures prominently above all else. The shot itself is heavily reliant on Tarkovsky’s adoration of nature: the fog and the hills add to the idyllic and lush scene. The landscape appears to be as important as the depicted family.
The Russian landscape opening sequence
Throughout the film, the viewer will see wide shots similar to this one, which force the landscape into a character role of its own. On a surface level, these shots represent the protagonist’s traditional yearning for a place in time as embodied by the term nostalgia. Originally, the concept was used to describe “a sad mood, originating from the desire for return to one’s native land” (Boym 3). In this sense, nostalgia is tantamount to homesickness, a longing for a physical space. In Tarkovsky’s opening, however, as Verdi’s Requiem overtakes the traditional Russian folk music, the characters appear to freeze in the landscape. The slowing down of cinematic time is a nod to the history of high art that Tarkovsky himself revered. The sentiment evokes not just the character missing his homeland, but an idealization of home as a classical painting. The stylized manipulation of time is an artistic device employed by Tarkovsky in his examination of nostalgia. This is the first way in which he presents his singular interpretation of nostalgia as a concept.
When the Russian landscape gives way to our protagonist’s journey in Italy, his ambivalence to embrace the foreign culture is immediately established. He forces Eugenia to speak to him in Italian, after she says in Russian, “.” His reproach emphasizes his later suggestion that she’ll never truly empathize with his culture and his tormented Russian plight. And vice versa, this also stresses Gorchakov’s inability to engage with Italian culture. When Eugenia enters the church, he remains outside. A similar misty landscape of the opening credits is so redolent of the Russian temperament and spirit that even Eugenia comments on its similarity to autumns in Moscow. This is the scenery where Gorchakov feels most at home. It is this outside world, devoid of any specific Western references–closer to nature, less cultured–that allows him to remain in a distanced state from Eugenia. Entering the church would be a concession to Italian art, architecture, and tradition. Tarkovsky himself in the documentary “Tiempo Di Viaggio” says that the buildings he’s scouting for the film in Italy are “too beautiful for our character.” Instead, Gorchakov’s interiority is expressed through moody and brooding landscapes, hotel hallways, homes with leaking roofs, and dripping water – a more Russian environment. His psychological connection to the Russian home is tied to nature and the elements: soil, forests, grass, puddles, and rain. Higher spiritual state, as is often echoed by Tarkovsky in his writings and the documentary, as well as in a poem by Akhmatova, can grow out of dirt, mud, and trash. Akhmatova writes: “” This artistic sentiment infuses art and creation with a nostalgic, higher yearning and purpose. Tarkovsky, in his preliminary notes for the script in 1980-1982, writes the following: “” (qtd. in Gillespie). Tarkovsky’s own personal nostalgia—during his self-imposed exile in Italy—is present in these words. Tarkovsky, furthermore, continues with this idea of longing for higher human truth through earthly elements in his diary sections regarding the film: “Rain, fire, water, snow, dew, the driving ground wind—all are part of the material setting in which we dwell; I would even say of the truth of our lives” (Tarkovsky 212). The natural world gets closer to Tarkovsky’s visualization of the spiritual world and existence than society’s material artifacts. This depiction hints at Tarkovsky’s critique of the modern condition. He revels in and values the un-modern, pre-industrial, pre-modern; in many ways, in his films, he’s removed from the inane preoccupations of our era.
Italian countryside
Inside the church, Tarkovskian spirituality is complicated further. The diverging presentations and reactions to faith frame the scene and also the film. When Eugenia witnesses the Madonna of Childbirth miracle, her exposure to faith is different from Gorchakov’s fulfilled task later in the film. In this scene, she sees a procession of women, carrying candelabras with lit candles. The women seem to blend into a unified mass of shared passion and prayer. At one point, Eugenia glances at a row of candles framing the wall. These candles—at different levels and in various stages of burning—melt into each other. The sense that emerges in the church scene is that of unity, support, and connectedness. The transition from the church back to Gorchakov in the Italian countryside takes place with a series of cuts, focusing on the characters’ and painting’s glances. Spirituality pervades through the interconnectedness of gazes, attaining a kind of wholeness: “The fact that the icon of the Lady Madonna serves as the structural pivot between the gazes and the spaces shows how Tarkovsky cinematically constructs his spiritual concerns. That the Lady Madonna both is gazed upon and gazes suggests, for Tarkovsky, the existence of a spiritual presence that profoundly affects the world” (Samardzija 301). When the camera finally shifts perspectives, the viewer is in Gorchakov’s idyllic monochrome world (with images of his family and the house), but this world has been informed by the preceding shots. For Gorchakov, though, the religious import occurs in the context of his Russian daydream, when he sees the angel walking around the family home. His experience with spirituality appears to be more singular, or at least less communal.
When he rejects Eugenia’s attempts at communication with him in Russian, he solidifies the idea that his journey in Italy has to be undertaken alone.
Church scene
There’s a sense of alienation and solitude in his endeavors. In Gorchakov, we see a friction between his soul and the outside world: Gorchakov’s journey is individual, not communal. This is yet another example of how the Tarkovskian notion of nostalgia is not fully encapsulated by the traditional interpretation. Sociologist Jannelle Wilson addresses the more traditional understanding of the term when she writes: “Nostalgia is an interpersonal form of conversation play, serving the purpose of bonding…[It is] collective” (Wilson 19). While it is true that there’s a sense of transferred continuity from Domenico to Gorchakov with the candle and the importance it bears, it’s essential to contrast the scene from the church with its image of many candles with the final moments of the film. Gorchakov’s spiritual journey is more solitary and lonely, and involves a single lit candle on the verge of precipitously being extinguished. His walk across the pool is more fragile, riskier, than the earlier church scene.
Religious motifs abound in the film—with churches, both attended by people or abandoned or in ruins; angels; the little girl named Angela; St. Catherine; references to Him; apocalypse themes; faith—and emphasize the spiritual in the face of a modern, progress-oriented, rational world. In search of the Russian viewer perspective on the film, my journey led me to the discussion forums on tarkovsky.su. A particular reference attributed to a soviet dramaturge focusing on the spiritual journey undertaken by Gorchakov stood out:
Афанасий Дмитриевич Салы́нски
Gorchakov’s walk across the drained pool is the final realization of a supreme state, which is the summation of Tarkovsky’s suggested meaning and purpose of “nostalghia” as spiritual, driven by faith and higher truth. As Gorchakov carries the candle, he, in a sense, carries the flicker of the human spirit. As Verdi’s Requiem is heard in the background, the music serves as a call for spiritual awakening of the viewers watching and experiencing the film. A requiem, after all, is “a mass said or sung for the repose of the soul of a dead person” (oed.com). The focus of the film is not on Christian faith, however, but the act of faith itself.
Gorchakov’s walk
The location of the walk is also significant in aiding our understanding of the spiritual nostalgia and journey experienced by Gorchakov. As Acquarello points out, “The therapeutic hot springs pools of Bagno Vignoni were constructed to alleviate the suffering of the ill. Furthermore, St. Catherine of Siena, after whom the pool was named, was an advocate for the reunification of the Eastern (Orthodox) Church and the Western (Roman Papal) Church during the Great Schism of the Ecumenical Church” (Acquarello). Gorchakov, by crossing from one side of the pool to the other, attempts to unite the Russian and Western worlds that coexist within him. This unity is supported by the final shot in which Gorchakov is on his Russian dacha while surrounded by Italian ruins. However, it is not a unity of community and brotherhood. We can explore this confluence of cultures by once again examining the relationship between Gorchakov and Eugenia. When the two discuss art in the hotel, he tells her to throw away the translation of Arsenii Tarkovsky’s poetry. Gorchakov expresses that art is untranslatable and the only way for cultures to understand each other is by abolishing borders. To heighten the distance and division between Gorchakov and Eugenia (Russia and Italy), Tarkovsky depicts their conversation mostly using the shot reverse shot technique. Even when they do inhabit the same frame, Gorchakov is a dark silhouette shrouded in shadows, and Eugenia is always turned away from him, only her long, blonde hair aglow in soft light. Visually, Tarkovsky creates barriers between the characters to echo the themes of loneliness, disconnect, and nostalgic separation explored in his film.
“Art is untranslatable”
According to David Gillespie, the entire film is full of borders, walls, divisions—whether natural or artificially constructed by individuals, societies, and cultures. He writes, “ Он находит предметы, пейзажи и людей, которые напоминают ему о России” (Gillespie). However, the constructed borders dissolve with the completion of Gorchakov’s candle carrying and the final shot. The dissolved borders become more reflective of a spiritual, internal wholeness, thus potentially resolving the tension between the two (and really, numerous) worlds. Focusing on translation and the bridging of cultures, Skakov reflects: “The opposition between bordered and unbordered space becomes one of the most important translation-related tropes employed in the film, indeed translation is interpreted as a sort of movement in space” (Skakov 312). He views the final shot of the superimposition as a “‘successful failure’ or ‘failed success’ of communication by means of translation” (330). It is only in death that Gorchakov seems to attain a sense of unity and spirituality on his own terms. Rather than viewing the Russian landscape from Gorchakov’s perspective, as in his previous daydream sequences, we are now viewing him as integrated into this landscape. The viewer takes on Gorchakov’s role as a nostalgic purveyor of his fantasies and visions of Russia.
The transference of perspective and responsibility from Gorchakov to the viewer is redolent of the transfer of the candle task from Domenico to Gorchakov. In a later Gorchakov vision of a chaos-ravaged street, when he approaches a mirror on a wardrobe, it is Domenico’s reflection he sees instead of his own. This is one of the many instances of doubling in the film, which serves as a technique that allows characters to see beyond themselves. Doubling also fulfills a deeper psychological purpose by offering a semblance of unity and connection. The connection Gorchakov feels toward Domenico is echoed in a number of different ways—they both have the same dog, child, and are both seen lighting the flame that extinguishes their final moments of life.
Domenico’s home
A spiritual link is established when Gorchakov enters Domenico’s house and sees his Russian home and landscape from up above. Perspective-wise, this is a bird’s eye, or more appropriately, angel’s eye, view. As Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie suggest, “[Domenico’s] existence has had the effect of stirring Andrei out of his state of lethargic self-pity and prompting him at least to act” (Johnson 164). After all, it is Domenico who entrusts Gorchakov with the candle-carrying task in hopes of saving, or fixing, what is wrong with ailing contemporary society. In another parallel, Domenico’s thoughts and feelings are similar to what Gorchakov struggles with throughout the course of the film. Domenico says, “Where am I when I’m not in my reality or imagination?” This is the same question that seems to plague Gorchakov in his in-between spaces inhabited by nostalgia. But even more importantly, perhaps this is the question that pertains to the viewer. Where are we when we’re not in Gorchakov’s reality or imagination, the elements that compose the film?
There’s a danger inherent in Tarkovsky’s films in forcing his viewers to participate in an experience they won’t immediately grasp or receive gratuitous entertainment from. Tarkovsky reflects about Nostalghia: “From the very start cinema as American-style adventure movie has never held any interest for me. The last thing I want to do is devise attractions” (Tarkovsky 204). If Tarkovsky is not devising attractions, what is he then doing? The answer seems to be that he’s interested in making viewers reflect on their own state of existence and lives. There is a suggestion that we must play a role in shaping and affecting our own fate. His films offer a point of interaction and engagement from his viewers. In this sense, we’re all implicated in the outcome, we’re all in this together. Tarkovsky writes, “Gorchakov responds to his idea—born of deep suffering—that people must be rescued not separately and individually but all together from the pitiless insanity of modern civilization” (205). The viewer is involved in Gorchakov’s nostalgic quest. Here, Tarkovsky elicits a spiritual connection, a unity, between viewers and his protagonist. Gorchakov’s final mortal task to cross the pool with a lit candle is anti-logical and irrational. His pursuit of meaning is intuitive, emotion-driven, and impractical. His act seems pointless within the context and expectations of a churning contemporary society. It is perhaps this emphasis on impracticality of actions and behavior that is in direct opposition to the demands of the modern world. Tarkovsky, through nostalgia, critiques modernity. Svetlana Boym uses the analogy of Jekyll and Hyde to talk about nostalgia and modernity. According to her, nostalgia is a reaction to a modern experience of time—a sentiment also echoed by Baudelaire in his prominent use of the term modernity (Boym interview).
Boym goes on to say that modern society stifles critical thinking. Our contemporary culture does not give us time to contemplate. According to her, perhaps nostalgia is a different rhythm of time. She also links nostalgia to its cinematic realization: “A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images–of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface” (qtd. in Riley). This comparison is especially pertinent when looking at the final juxtaposition of the last scene, where the present is transfigured and infused with a new kind of knowledge and acceptance.
Juxtaposition of Russia within Italy
Boym also discusses the antidote to modernity, which she refers to as the “slow thinking” movement (Boym interview). Tarkovsky, with his lingering long takes and moments of uninterrupted movement, would be a strong proponent. As Natalya Bondarchuk reflects in an interview (part of the extras/bonus features on the Solaris DVD) about her experiences shooting Solaris, she especially focuses on Tarkovsky’s love of long takes. She says, “We’re staring at the window. We keep staring. After two minutes, we start picking up on the details in the scene…What else will happen? Your senses and attention are heightened.”
Nostalghia is more relevant today than ever before. We live under the assumption that we are interconnected citizens of a global world. We see national borders, but assume we can transcend them through the advances of our cutting-edge media and technologies. We ridicule the idea of nostalgia as an early medical disorder with physical causes and manifestations. Yet, in truth, we know as little about our spiritual selves as ever. Predominantly, we remain in our own filter bubbles and echo chambers as we engage with technology and social media; we are still myopic. Domenico’s speech in the film might as well be addressed to all of us, as we remain affixed like statues. He insists that we must listen to the “voices that seem senseless and useless…in brains full of long sewage pipes.” In a culture that values production, efficiency, and elimination, it is important to slow down and take in the voices that have been filtered from us in the West. An art project entitled “Gorchakov’s Wish,” based out of the University of London, is a multi-year ongoing endeavor that deconstructs and recreates the final scenes of the film Nostalghia. The artists do so by isolating camera effects, lighting, atmospheric conditions, performative elements of Domenico’s speech, Gorchakov’s Walk. The meticulous breakdown serves as a form of Tarkovskian meditation in a post-modern world. In Nostalghia, a meaningful poetic, artistic, or even human act will emerge in opposition to modern society’s insistence on efficiency. Walking to keep the candle lit as a heroic climax of the film is the utmost solitary and inward act. Gorchakov is not performing a recognizable or conventional heroic action. Instead, he engages in the completely personal expression of his belief in faith. In knowing ourselves, we can rid ourselves of the falseness of efficiency, and truly connect to one another.
Johnson and Petrie reiterate that “Tarkovsky went to considerable pains, in both interviews and written statements, to establish the correct, Russian meaning of the world ‘nostalgia’” (159). This was important for him because he wanted to emphasize that his statement is deeply and uniquely Russian, and above all, his own. As Gorchakov’s action is unique, Tarkovsky aspires to assert the viewer to find his own unique action. He is providing a personalized notion of the abstract concept of nostalgia. For Tarkovsky, it is the image of the Russian countryside and his family that follows him, yet we are all plagued by our personal nostalgias that compel us into idealized lost pasts. In fact, the images that Tarkovsky creates will serve as their own reveries that will add to our own concepts and impressions of nostalgia. As Domenico passes the figurative torch to Gorchakov, Tarkovsky passes the torch, or the candle, to us. This act of doubling continues beyond the film: we witness transference of spiritual responsibility from the so-called Italian madman to the burnt-out Russian poet to the global viewer. It is up to us to impel those around us to do something impractical, perhaps even to watch a movie about a man who crosses a pool without extinguishing a candle’s flame.