THOMAS ODDE
TI M E S I C K N ESS
I N AN D R EY TAR KOVS KY’S TH E SAC R I F I C E
Résumé: Cet essai explore les relations qui se tissent entre la maladie physique et
le désordre temporel dans le dernier film d’Andrey Tarkovsky, Le Sacrifice. Les afflictions, qui incluent les syncopes, les saignements de nez et les crises hystériques sont
nombreuses dans Le Sacrifice et la plupart des recherches sur Tarkovsky traitent ces
épisodes comme les symptômes d’une faiblesse physique, émotionnelle et spirituelle du personnage. L’examen attentif permet toutefois de montrer comment ces
symptômes inhabituels peuvent être lus comme les épisodes d’une profonde et
paradoxale « maladie du temps ». Il est suggéré que la maladie dans Le Sacrifice
indique une disjonction radicale entre le temps séculier et spirituel que le film
cherche à réparer. En s’inspirant des travaux théoriques de Tarkovsky et en étudiant
attentivement les articulations cinématographiques, cet essai montre comment Le
Sacrifice dépeint la maladie du temps tout en nous donnant le remède de sa restauration par le geste du don.
I
n Essays Critical and Clinical, a study that productively probes the close bond
between literature and health, Gilles Deleuze asserts, “the writer as such is not
a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The
world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then
appears as an enterprise of health.”1 At once diagnosticians and healers, writers
attuned to the imbrication of literature and health incisively take note where language and thought enter into clinical states that foreclose creative work and “the
possibility of life.” Such writers, who may lack the conventional hallmarks of
physical and mental good health, remedy the clinical by fashioning a limber and
rigorous image of thought. They plumb the depths of suffering to invent alternative practices that resist forms of domination and oppression.
The writer stimulated by a literary “fitness” exposes the world’s most ugly
symptoms, those that debilitate thought and devastate human agency; by deploying
manifold tropes for health, he or she also crafts novel bodily states and dispositions that reinvigorate our relationship to the world and to ourselves. Although
Deleuze’s compelling work focuses on literature, one can conjecture that film too
may be an “enterprise of health,” replete with filmmakers-cum-physicians.
Through cinematic means, filmmakers would actively engage in diagnosis and
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES
VOLUME 18 NO. 2 • FALL • AUTOMNE 2009 • pp 66-86
remedy of the contemporary condition, asking viewers in turn to reconsider
notions of the body, wellbeing, agency, and visual culture. In other words, the
filmmaker would demonstrate forcefully that cinema, akin to its literary counterpart, is indeed a health and that the medium has much to offer in combining
critical and clinical enterprises.
This essay suggests that Andrey Tarkovsky is one such filmmaker. Throughout
his career, and culminating in The Sacrifice (1986), the director’s final film,
Tarkovsky exhibited a continual concern and care for the human condition. Even
though he endured the ravages of lung cancer while making The Sacrifice,
Tarkovsky can be read as a physician of culture and world, and not simply its
patient. With the thematics of The Sacrifice in mind, one can make an initial
diagnosis: the loss of spiritual values has condemned the world to undergoing
constant technological threats that range from Chernobyl to world war. To the
detriment of spiritual life, humankind has become the victim of its own world
mastery, achieved through a pernicious and volatile concoction of power, technology, reason, and cynical instrumentalism. This dubious disparity between
materialism and spiritualism possesses legible signs manifested on the bodies of
Tarkovsky’s characters. The symptoms, frequently seen across the director’s corpus, include unusual physical maladies such as nosebleeds, syncopes (or fainting
spells), hysterical attacks, stammerings, and bodily levitations. Often placed within
a film form that attenuates narrative causality, eschews classical editing patterns,
and renders an oneiric and spiritually symbolic mise-en-scène, the Tarkovskian
symptom can be situated between the material and spiritual realms.
The narrative of The Sacrifice suggests that unconventional measures must
be taken to remedy the Weltschmertz afflicting humankind. It develops around a
family gathering, celebrating the father’s (Alexander’s) birthday. As the day’s
events unfold inside the isolated country house, we soon learn that nuclear catastrophe is imminent. A loud rush of fighter jets is heard overhead, an occasionally garbled television message crackles a dire announcement, and a sudden
loss of electricity intervenes. Brief cutaways to panic-stricken victims fleeing
through scattered debris give clues that a third world war is happening. To ward
off the terrible event, Alexander performs two redemptive acts. First, after his
friend and soothsayer Otto claims that making love to Maria, a servant and socalled witch, will save “everything,” Alexander heeds his male companion’s suggestion. With trepidation, he pays her a visit and engages in an awkward
coupling. Second, Alexander prays to God and vows to sacrifice everything that
binds him to the world, including his power to speak.
When the disaster has been averted—though it is unclear whether it even
began—Alexander makes good on his promise. He sets the family home ablaze
and renounces speaking, only to be shuttled away by ambulance in front of a
distraught family. The film ends ambiguously as Alexander’s son, Little Man,
returns to the tree the father and son had planted together. Tending to the
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sapling, Little Man, mute throughout the film, finally speaks: “In the beginning
was the Word? Why is that, Papa?” By emphasizing child and tree, the final shot
achieves closure by echoing the opening credit sequence, which showed
Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, in such a way that the blessed infant and blossoming tree are at the center of the image.
Alexander’s actions are spiritually symbolic, unlike those of a conventional
protagonist. As a teacher and essayist wracked with metaphysical doubt and
melancholy, Alexander lacks the clear decisiveness and stable identity of mainstream film heroes. He is a man of many words and few deeds. In his own mind,
weakness muddles his thoughts, because initially he cannot even imagine an
appropriate response to our dreadful condition and instead wallows in selfdoubt. In this regard, Alexander figures as a typical Tarkovskian protagonist, like
the eponymous Stalker (1979) or Andrei in Nostalghia (1983). All three seek otherworldly solutions to the overpowering forces that render them physically and
spiritually frail. In contrast to the conventional hero who clear-headedly drives
the narrative forward, Alexander suffers from suspensions of any and all narrative motion (fig.1).
Much critical work on Tarkovsky has underscored the weakness characterizing his protagonists. Mark Le Fanu sees conventional agency questioned by
Tarkovsky: “But in ‘late’ Tarkovsky we are met with something that can only be
described as an elevation of powerlessness, a hostility to conventional action, a
quietism.”2 Going a step further, Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie propose that
physical maladies can be traced to Tarkovsky’s interest in spiritualism rather than
heroic action: “Characters fall, stumble, and trip a great deal, usually as a prelude
to some form of self-discovery, spiritual enlightenment, or change of circumstances; the fall may also imply that they need to learn the humility that most of them
initially lack.”3 For Johnson and Petrie, like many commentators, the unusual
bodily attitudes point to a spiritual sickness inhabiting the body. Similarly,
although stammering rarely appears in film, it predominates in Tarkovsky’s
work, most notably in Mirror (1975) and The Sacrifice. Akin to physically falling
down, the stammer constitutes a stumbling over words and can be treated as a
spiritual impediment. Maya Turovskaya asserts that in Mirror, “Stuttering [exists]
not only as a physical handicap, but as the expression of a dumbness of the spirit,
a wound to the individual’s inner life” that art can “cure.”4 Indicative of the clinical state, these illnesses find their source not in somatic or mental causes, but
rather in the character’s religious emptiness and lack of proper moral strength.
While the Tarkovskian symptoms certainly attest to spiritual maladies, they
also figuratively mark the body with a more profound infirmity. Central to my
argument is that the spiritualism/materialism dichotomy etiologically derives
from a deeper disjunction between material and spiritual flows of time that has
come to both infect and determine the present. Much as Hamlet sensed, time
itself has gone off-kilter, become deranged, and the body maps out its pathology
68 THOMAS ODDE
Fig.1. Alexander (Erland Josephson), the unconventional hero of Andrey Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986).
in Tarkovsky’s work. Tarkovsky invites viewers to rethink the present condition
by creatively engaging with the past and present, while opening avenues for
thinking the future. Equally important, Tarkovsky asks viewers to consider the
body as figure of an aberrant or sacred time. Often characterized by unexpected
gestures or bodily dispositions, the Tarkovskian body suffers fits or attacks of
time, yet it can also harness a sacred power of gesture to heal the world.
Exhibiting unusual symptoms, the body serves as a relay between times that can
cure the world by hitting directly at the cause of this unique illness, time itself.
The filmmaker’s own writings reveal a fairly homogeneous theorization of
filmic time that bears upon the concerns addressed in this paper and will provide a basis for discussing The Sacrifice. Published in English as Sculpting in
Time, a collection of insights compiled over many years with Olga Surkova, the
book charts the director’s ideas about cinema as art and as possessive of a
unique relationship with time. He quite compellingly argues that the challenge
for the filmmaker resides in joining separate temporal fluxes, summarizing his
role thusly: “I see it as my professional task, then, to create my own, distinctive
flow of time.”5 Time flows differently in every filmic image, so that “the cinema
has to be free to pick out and join up facts taken from a ‘lump of time’ of any
width or length.”6 Slices of time constitute raw materials for both filmmaker and
editor, but Tarkovsky stresses that such temporal “lumps” are not necessarily
homogeneous or measured in equal proportion.
In Tarkovsky, the pressure of time that runs through shots, as well as
sequences, often assumes an ambiguous shape. If a film like Mirror is often called
poetic, this is due to the multifarious modes of reality, from world history to the
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69
most private experience that can be affected by temporal rhythm. Turovskaya
explains, “The unusual quality of Mirror lies in its juxtaposition of time scales that
are normally subject to different yardsticks of measurement.”7 The historical time
in the newsreels is imbricated with the time and history of the family and its history. Synthesizing or syncopating the two pressures provides the unique poetic
structure of Mirror. Each individual flow (history, memory, and dream, for
instance) carries its own force or temporal timbre. Despite the dissimilar nature
of these separate states of reality and their concomitant temporal pressures, editing makes them resonate and communicate in inventive ways.
Manifold temporal flows of differing widths and lengths occur throughout
Tarkovsky’s work, among them dreams, memories, spiritual states, and fantasies. Each shift to another temporal flux tends to undermine any realist, ontological grounding of the image in presence, and instead hints at an indeterminate
image, as if emerging from an “elsewhere.” Viewers familiar with Tarkovsky’s
work no doubt vividly remember the oneiric scenes of flowing water in Stalker
or the recurrent trope of rain falling inside a house. These moments, etched permanently in our mental film archive, appear so otherworldly in great part
because they indicate a sudden departure from conventional temporal articulation in cinema. Yet some of Tarkovsky’s most defining moments, the striking
conflagrations of buildings in Mirror or The Sacrifice, for instance, also seem
tethered to a determinate time within the temporal logics of the respective films.
Discerning and identifying a distinctive flow of time, or the upsurge of a new
flow, often requires tremendous patience on the viewer’s part, as its significance
is not immediately apparent and, as we shall see in The Sacrifice, baffles
attempts at simple demarcation.
Tarkovsky’s films resolutely avoid employing conventional cues that distinguish these different modes or time scales of reality. Eschewing special effects and
distortions of the image to represent dreams, Tarkovsky hints at the ontological
realism of the image underpinning his method: “Dreams on the screen are made
up of exactly these same observed, natural forms of life.”8 In Tarkovsky’s cinema,
dreams resemble objective reality, as do characters’ fantasies, reminiscences, and
flashbacks. These dissimilar modes vary by temporal width and length, and not
by purely qualitative difference marked by conventional cues (the dissolve that
leads into a dream, the distorted camera angle or image that depicts madness, and
so on). As a result, what is often at stake in reading Tarkovsky is recognizing the
proximity between dreams, personal reveries, and reality. One must ask how time
flows in the shot and how the shot connects with other temporal currents,
whether imaginary or real. The tension between oneiric images specific to a particular temporal flow and images that remain indefinite forms a distinguishing
trait of Tarkovsky’s cinema, and viewers frequently must content themselves with
indeterminacy. Equally crucial to Tarkovsky’s conception of cinematic time is
rhythm, which helps to clarify his conceptualization of editing. The director
70 THOMAS ODDE
underscores that “the dominant, all-powerful factor of the image is rhythm,
expressing the course of time within the frame.”9 Each shot contains its own temporal pressure that neither conceptual montage nor narrative causality can limit.
The justification for expressing rhythm within the shot must come from elsewhere. Without resorting to a Romantic definition of the artwork, in which art
aspires to attain the sublime, identifying what precisely constitutes this “elsewhere” proves to be thorny terrain. To help readers grasp what he means by pressure, and its fundamentally excessive character, Tarkovsky posits:
[Time] becomes tangible when you sense something significant, truthful,
going beyond the events on the screen; when you realize, quite consciously,
that what you see in the frame is not limited to its visual depiction, but is a
pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity; a
pointer to life.10
The pressure of time exceeds its reduction to the representational capacity of
cinema, the visual depiction located within the frame. As an entity that flows,
time passes through but more importantly outside the frame; it strays from narrative action and realist representation toward what Deleuze called literature as
health—the possibility of life.
At first glance, Tarkovsky’s emphasis on the temporal rhythm within the
shot, and rhythmic extension beyond the shot, ultimately towards infinity, seems
like a critique of montage. Certainly, Tarkovsky’s predilection for filming in long
takes might parallel, and thus reinforce, the validity of this position. Yet
Tarkovsky situates editing under the greater force of rhythm, the poetic interplay
of temporal currents bearing varying widths and lengths. In this sense, editing
becomes a by-product of rhythm, rather than its generator: “Although the assembly of the shots is responsible for the structure of a film, it does not, as is generally assumed, create its rhythm. The distinctive time running through the shots
makes the rhythm of the picture; and rhythm is determined not by the length of
the edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them.”11 In
creating a distinctive flow of time, editing plays an important role, but it must
amplify and resonate with the temporal rhythm within a shot and between shots.
The opposition between long take and editing is only superficial, because
rhythm forms the primary temporal articulation in cinema.
Putting this idea of sculpting in time into practice can prove to be tricky.
The filmmaker always runs the risk that viewers may miss entirely the subtle
temporal pressure, the shifts to different time-scales, that provide a pointer to
life. To guarantee clear legibility of rhythm, Tarkovsky’s use of objects in The
Sacrifice gauges the sudden shifts and pressures of time. Consider the glass pitcher of milk that inexplicably jumps from the armoire or the wine glasses that suddenly begin clinking together. Lacking immediate realist explanations for their
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motivation, objects appear to move by a pulsating force. As if compelled by an
unseen power, these vibrating objects that recur throughout Tarkovsky’s oeuvre
constitute remarkably oneiric moments. To heighten their suddenness, Tarkovsky
either places them within an extreme long take or directly following one. In addition, the unexpected quivering of objects appears all the more dream-like
because human physical movement is kept to a minimum.
Yet these exceptional moments do not derive entirely from an inexplicable
narrative source. As in other Tarkovsky movies, they do have causes—in the case
of the pitcher, viewers soon hear rumbling sounds of fighter jets. Yet a conventional cause is severely attenuated, or only understood retroactively, so that
viewers must wait patiently for clear cause-and-effect relationships to emerge. As
such, these moments appear fantastic precisely because they cannot be
explained immediately by narrative or realist readings. Peter Green frames this
recurrent aspect of Tarkovsky’s cinema through what he terms the “principle of
accountability to natural law,” or a realist explanation that could clarify the legibility of all events.12 Because these moments initially materialize so uncannily,
all realist readings will encounter a fundamental ambiguity. Wine glasses suddenly jingle, and the principle of accountability to natural law retroactively determines that the fighter planes cause this phenomenon. But why do these
warplanes growl over an extremely isolated estate? Only later do we learn of the
impending nuclear holocaust—hence the patrolling fighters heard from off
screen—but the war only presents itself in black-and-white images, garbled television messages, and an unanticipated power outage. It remains unclear whether
the disastrous event is in fact happening, and thus the narrative-driven causality is actively undermined in favor of hesitations and deferrals of meaning.
Occupying an indeterminate status, these exceptional instances attest to a
schism fashioned by the pressure of a disordered time. Temporal force introduces
into representation something uncannily other and unruly captured in unpredictable moments. In this regard, Turovskaya correctly emphasizes temporal heterogeneity in Tarkovsky: “In all Tarkovsky’s work, this ‘individual stream of
time’ is something which pulsates, moves not smoothly but in jerks, in explosions of meaning, however hard the director insisted upon the amorphousness
and simplicity of his images.”13 As a throbbing force that progresses not uniformly but rather in jerks and spasms, time sends objects and people into convulsive states and movements. The pressure of time both exceeds and
undermines any coherent meaningful narrative or realist function applicable to
objects and bodies.
Like the unexpected movements of objects, the body similarly forms a privileged site where temporal pressure makes itself directly felt and legible. Bodies and
movements appear prey to an indiscernible or attenuated “cause,” which can be
read neither entirely as somatic nor as psychological. The pressure of time throws
the world off kilter. From out of nowhere, this force makes objects tremble and
72 THOMAS ODDE
Fig.2. Otto (Allan Edwall) faints after recounting a story about a photograph containing a temporal disjunction.
bodies suffer unusual afflictions. The body acts as indicator of temporal rhythm
within the shot, while repeated gestures connect broader segments. Gesture figures
prominently when the pressure has become too much, when one shot or temporal block is on the verge of passing into another. Tarkovsky thus invites viewers to
read movement, objects, and gesture not as narratively or conceptually determined
(his ostensible spiritualism), but rather as symptoms of time.
Early in the film, two moments of syncope, or fainting spell, overwhelm the
bodies of Alexander and Otto, the town postman and friend of Alexander.
Presented as an eccentric or holy fool, Otto commences the birthday festivities
by giving Alexander an authentic map of Europe from the 1600s. Touching upon
the film’s thematics, Otto claims it is a “sacrifice,” and that “every gift involves
a sacrifice.” The postman proceeds to tell Victor (a family friend) and Adelaide
(Alexander’s wife), both of whom are understandably quite impressed with his
gift, that in his spare time he’s a collector: “I collect incidents, things that are
unexplainable but true.” When asked for specifics, Otto describes one of his
prized items, a photograph of a mother and her son, who died in World War II.
Years later the mother moved away, “far from her memories,” and visited a photographic portrait studio. Upon receiving the print, the mother was shocked by
the developed image: it contained both her and her dead son, who was eighteen
in the picture, but eerily she was her current age.
After providing his captive audience with the anecdote’s strange payoff,
Otto slowly turns around, suddenly teeters and then violently collapses in a heap
(fig.2). Hesitating for several seconds, Adelaide and Victor cautiously approach
their stricken friend. The next shot, in close-up, shows Otto’s face with eyelids
TIME SICKNESS IN ANDREY TARKOVSKY’S THE SACRIFICE
73
Fig.3. Victor (Sven Wollter) and Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood) find Otto eccentric and his story of
temporal disjunction unbelievable.
shut, as if he were dead. As Victor checks his pulse, the torpid Otto opens his eyes.
Adelaide asks, “Are you ill?” to which Otto responds, “No, nothing is wrong.”
Crawling to a chair, Otto props himself up by stabilizing his weight against its
seat. Holding his pocket watch to his ear, Otto explains his malady: “It was only
an evil angel passing by, who saw fit to touch me.” Perplexed, Victor asks if he’s
playing a joke, to which Otto curtly replies, “There’s nothing to joke about here.”
Given Otto’s eccentricities, one wonders whether his fall is in fact a stunt or
joke, an exclamation point added to his rather unbelievable story. At the same
time, his explanation, that an angel touched him, highlights Tarkovsky’s “law of
accountability,” in which cause-and-effect relationships are attenuated. Whether
read as a joke or an otherworldly encounter, Otto’s sudden fit appears to stretch
toward the miraculous.14 While Otto’s foibles certainly mark him as an enigmatic
figure, his episode functions to highlight the irrationality of temporal pressure.
Otto’s story and blackout provide a foil to Victor, a doctor who no doubt will
seek scientific causes for them (fig.3). By checking Otto’s pulse, Victor naturally
investigates a somatic source for the fall. Despite affirming the contrary, Otto will
in fact make a joke when he listens to his watch, visually resuscitating the classic
Marx brothers’ line, “Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.” No doubt,
Otto listens to his watch to check whether it was damaged during the fall. Yet the
reference, intended or not, illuminates how reason (represented by Victor) remains
unable to understand nonsense or the irrational; instead, reason seeks scientific,
commonsensical causes. Victor attributes the fall to Otto’s idiosyncratic personality, whereas the scene’s ambiguity provocatively hints at a different source—
74 THOMAS ODDE
that physical time stopped suddenly and Otto was caught somewhere between
rationalized moments, measured in ticks and tocks, between the regular heartbeats felt in Otto’s pulse.
Otto’s strange avocation similarly emphasizes how time and image cannot
always be reduced to commonsensical interpretations, and therefore his hobby
implies a division or disjunction between legible and visible discursive formations.
When it comes to interpreting the unruliness of time, reason will only get you so
far, but Otto’s photograph shows the uncanny power of visual media to overlay
distinctive times, such as the (present) mother and (past) son. The inherent
capacity of photography to instantaneously capture the present encounters the
forgotten or repressed past returning unexpectedly. This miraculous imbrication
of times comes with a price exerted on the body, though. Shortly after mentioning the two separate times in the photograph (1940 and 1960), Otto suffers his
swoon that takes viewers by surprise. Tarkovsky suggests that the unanticipated
distinctive times superimposed in the photograph connect to Otto’s unforeseen
collapse. Otto’s body senses a temporal schism or pressure, achieved by the
supernatural ability of photography to link living and dead. Like the soldier, he
too returns from the dead, from a temporal nowhere.
Akin to Otto’s encounter with an evil angel, the film’s opening shots establish
the body as symptomatically marked by the pressure of time; they also introduce
Alexander as powerless in terms of spirituality and action. An unconventional
hero, the saturnine Alexander and his weaknesses prime viewers for the excessive character of temporal pressure that exerts itself upon him. Early in the
movie, Otto asks him, “Say, how is your relation to God?” Alexander replies,
“Non-existent, I’m afraid.” Otto then proceeds to give viewers expository information about Alexander, who “lectures for the students at the university” and
writes essays, but his mood is also always gloomy. Otto suggests to Alexander, “You
shouldn’t grieve so much. You shouldn’t yearn so for something. You shouldn’t
be waiting like that.”
Although slightly befuddled by the awkward shift from friendly chitchat to
metaphysical talk, Alexander balks at Otto’s assessment. Nonetheless, Otto’s
assertion that Alexander suffers melancholia soon hits home. Moments later
Alexander begins to analyze his, and humanity’s, own symptoms. Because technology and power have become instruments of fear, “We have acquired a dreadful disharmony, an imbalance if you will, between our material and spiritual
development.” Alexander then claims that it is too late to find a solution and that
he is weary of words. A long monologue ensues and leads to self-analysis: “At
last I know what Hamlet meant. He was fed up with windbags. If only someone
could stop talking and do something instead. Or at least try to.”
During Alexander’s monologue, filmed in a long take, Little Man exits the frame
without his father noticing. Initially lost in his thoughts, Alexander discovers he
is alone and intently scans his surroundings for the boy. From off-screen we hear
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the patter of footsteps gathering steam, and Little Man suddenly jumps on
Alexander’s back. Visibly shaken, Alexander drops to one knee. The camera
immediately cuts to the son, whose nose has dripped blood onto his shirt.
Returning to Alexander, a medium long shot shows him reaching an arm forward
in obvious distress. While looking straight ahead and with his jaw slackened,
Alexander awkwardly gropes for a nearby tree. He turns to land on his back, as
if in slow motion, accompanied by his voice-over: “Dear God, what’s wrong with
me?” and finally collapses (fig.4).
The camera abruptly cuts to a black-and-white image of a courtyard strewn
with debris; we hear a shepherd’s call and thunder on the soundtrack as the
camera pans downward to display a wrecked auto, a wooden chair, and water
coursing through a small runnel. Continuing the pan, the shot displays a windowpane that reflects a city seemingly untouched by disaster. As the pan finishes its downward trajectory, we see ostensible blood spatter, then two long drips
running toward the top of the frame. A fade out ends the sequence, and the next
shot displays Alexander leafing through a book of medieval paintings, given to
him by Victor. Alexander notes that the paintings possess “such wisdom and
spirituality” and are “like a prayer. And all this has been lost. We can’t even pray
any longer.” He then tells his family how happy he is because he received a
telegram from his acting friends, his fellow “Idiotists” and “Richardians,” a reference to his performance of works by Dostoevsky and Shakespeare (oddly
Richard III, not Hamlet) during his college years.
By placing Alexander’s monologue at the beginning of the sequence and the
citation of religious paintings at its end, Tarkovsky emphasizes the disparity
between materialism and spirituality. Alexander initially bears witness to his
own powerlessness, then finds it reconfirmed in Victor’s gift, the book of paintings/
prayers that attest to the fact that “we can’t even pray any longer.” Dialogue and
image thus provide convenient bookends for the sequence, but what happens in
the middle troubles notions of before and after, of cause and effect. No mention
is made of Alexander’s swoon when he returns home, or in fact throughout the
rest of the film. The black-and-white images and non-diegetic shepherd’s call that
follow Alexander’s collapse tempt viewers accustomed to Tarkovsky’s temporal
interplays to ask where he went during his swoon and in what time did he go.
Even though Little Man’s playful attack serves as its putative cause, the
source of Alexander’s blackout remains ambiguous. The cut to catastrophic
effects is fundamentally irrational because it lacks any narrative or chronological
motivation. The shift from Alexander keeling over to an apocalyptic vision, set
off from the preceding shots by its lack of color, complicates any clear linkage or
signification. The edit fashions a sliding effect, in which rational connections
between images attenuate and are in danger of losing time. Sandwiched between
two present moments—Alexander’s collapse and his scrutiny of the paintings—
the image of disaster constitutes what Deleuze terms an irrational cut, spatially
76 THOMAS ODDE
Fig.4. Alexander (Erland Josephson) swoons as he considers the disparity between spiritual
and material development.
and temporally indefinite.15 Following Deleuze’s cue, David Rodowick describes
the disruptive effects produced by the irrational cut: “The interval no longer
forms part of the image or sequence as the ending of one or the beginning of the
other. Nor can other divisions—for example, sound in relation to image—be
considered as continuous or extendable one into the other. The interval becomes
an autonomous value.”16 Opposed to the clear temporal legibility fashioned by
continuity editing or Eisensteinian montage, the interstice disrupts stable and
meaningful temporal articulation. Instead of establishing coherent linkages determined by before and after or cause and effect, the irrational cut retains a temporal
autonomy from other images. It marks the pressure of time as moving in jerks
and spasms; it floats between determinate times, and figures the paradoxical
instant when time gets lost or comes off its hinges.
Similarly, sound plays a crucial role in developing the interaction of distinct
temporal flows. One cannot diegetically locate the shepherd’s call, which teeters
uneasily between times and spaces. Claiming provocatively that the idea of
Tarkovsky making a silent film is “inconceivable,” Michel Chion identifies the
shepherd’s call as “acousmatic,” or lacking any diegetic source: “We may define it
as neither inside nor outside the image.”17 In turn, Chion argues that acousmatic
sounds and their so-called presence “are more like invocations,” an aspect that
“is fairly typical of sound in Tarkovsky’s feature films: it calls to another dimension, it has gone elsewhere, disengaged from the present.”18 The acousmatic call
destabilizes the imagetrack and its ability to maintain control over a coherent
temporality. Inside and outside of space and time, it overlays the film’s most
ambiguous images. Not long after Alexander’s prayer, a black-and-white image
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shows water dripping inside a house, a recognizable figure to those familiar with
Tarkovsky’s films. We hear the call again in one of the film’s most oneiric
moments, as Alexander stumbles through a landscape of snow and mud. Both
images hover inconclusively somewhere between recollection, fantasy projection, or dream. As such, the acousmatic marks a temporal schism between
sound and image, the pressure of time having undermined their stable correspondence. In its ambiguity, it also locates Alexander in a figurative temporal
and subjective elsewhere outside of physical time. Alexander appears to have
lost time and lost himself as lucid subject and agent of change, suffering the syncope as an absence of the self.
Soon after his spell, Alexander will articulate his fear of the absence of self.
His daughter Marta remembers him performing Shakespeare and Dostoevsky,
and how on stage he once dropped a vase from a tray, “and your eyes were full
of tears.” Alexander claims he had something in his eye during his performance,
as if to downplay his skills that had so impressed both Adelaide and theater critics. Promptly shifting the tenor of the conversation, Alexander reflects on his dislike of acting. He asserts that he gave up his nascent career because he felt
playing others embarrassed him, “But worst of all I was ashamed of being honest onstage. It was a critic who first saw that.” He notes how an actor’s “identity dissolves in his roles. I didn’t want my ego dissolved. There was something in
it that struck me as sinful, something feminine and weak.” For Alexander, performing Shakespeare’s or Dostoevsky’s characters entails becoming someone
utterly other, which he sees as a symptom of weakness and he experiences it as
an overpowering sense of loss, of a figurative “identity theft” that haunts decisive action.
The reference to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot resonates strongly with Tarkovsky’s
own interests in health, time, and identity in artistic activity; it also invites viewers to pause and creatively probe the connections that exist between the two protagonists in each work, Alexander and Prince Myshkin.19 Significantly, the
innocent, socially naïve, and noble-hearted Myshkin suffers from epileptic fits
that render him doubly “diseased.” His putative idiocy derives in part from his
social awkwardness, as he struggles to comprehend the novel’s two central
female characters, the capricious Aglaia Epanchin and the self-destructive
Nastasya Filippovna. More importantly, epilepsy marks the prince as physically
and mentally weak, a condition that burdens all of his social interactions and
inspires a profound sense of dread in his spiritual outlook. Christ-like in his
demeanor, the prince senses a spiritual emptiness within the social circles he
navigates, and his attacks attest to the utter disparity between material, financial, and social realms on one hand, and spiritual realms on the other. Indeed,
at the moment Myshkin needs to be invisible socially, and thus hide his so-called
idiocy from the Epanchin’s patrician guests, he accidentally tips over the priceless vase and subsequently succumbs to another epileptic fit.
78 THOMAS ODDE
Himself an epileptic, Dostoevsky describes the sudden physical and psychological changes that occur before and during a bout with what Slavic languages term “falling sickness.”20 Initially, absent-mindedness and confusion
jumble the thoughts of Myshkin, who in prior bouts “often even mixed up things
and faces.” Conscious of his agitated state, the prince knows what will come,
and this thought weighs heavily upon him. Subject to “sadness, spiritual darkness and oppression,” seconds before the actual swoon occurs Myshkin abruptly feels this heaviness and foreboding lift, so that “his brain seemed at moments
to become aflame” and time “passed like a flash of lightning.”21 Experiencing a
heightened state of self-consciousness and spiritual awareness, the prince finds
himself propelled beyond simple notions of physical and mental health. Such
moments begin with a feeling of “spiritual darkness and oppression” and then
suddenly transform into a more profound state of consciousness, in which “all
his vital forces suddenly exerted themselves to the utmost all at once.”22
In The Idiot, the instant of heightened awareness teeters precariously
between being understood as debilitating physical disease and a state of profound spiritual health. Myshkin wonders whether such moments are “nothing
but disease, the disturbance of a normal state; and if so, it was not at all the highest form of existence, but on the contrary must be considered the very lowest.”23
Thus, Myshkin appears enveloped in a strange logic. Even though his epilepsy is
a somatic disease that marks him as an idiot socially, it also allows him to move
to a higher state of self-awareness “full of luminous, harmonious joy and hope.”
Yet after his episodes, Myshkin questions whether it is worth experiencing a
“moment worth the whole of life” when in fact “stupefaction, spiritual darkness,
idiocy stood before him as vivid consequences of these ‘higher moments.’”24
While tempting readers to reconsider these “higher moments” as mixed
curses that produce both intense awareness and profound despondency,
Dostoevsky also reflects upon the varying time-scales that come with the sudden
bouts. During one episode, Myshkin “had actually had time to say to himself in
that very second that this second, for the infinite happiness he had fully felt,
might well be worth the whole of life” and “somehow to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more time. ‘Probably’, he added, smiling,
‘this is the very second in which the epileptic Mohammed’s upset pitcher of
water had not had time to spill, though he had had the time, in that same second, to survey all the habitations of Allah.’”25 A significant disparity exists
between time passing in a conventional sense—understood through the physical
movement of vase from table to floor—and time passing at an incalculable rate,
in which one can apprehend seemingly infinite movements and expanses. Time
suddenly hesitates by contracting to an intensified present moment that simultaneously exhausts itself (“there shall be no more time”) and by expanding to a
limitless space and time that encapsulates the “whole of life.”
By citing Alexander’s performance as Myshkin in The Sacrifice, with an
TIME SICKNESS IN ANDREY TARKOVSKY’S THE SACRIFICE
79
emphasis placed upon the broken vase, Tarkovsky cleverly imports a Russian
writer who thoughtfully fashioned a literature that explored health and time
through epilepsy. Although Alexander is not a social idiot in the way the prince
is, both discern a yawning fissure separating material life and spiritual life, and
both texts treat the disparity through tropes of illness and disjunctive temporalities. Myshkin and Alexander comprehend that “other” times, those that radically
differ from everyday rhythms, provide a point of access into deeper, more restorative temporalities. Yet whereas Dostoevsky filters the experience of epileptic time
through Myshkin’s subjectivity, Tarkovsky figuratively shifts the experience to the
viewer, who discerns differences in time-scales through falling bodies and pitchers,
irrational cuts, and acousmatic voices. Like the vase that hesitates between
times, between actually falling to the ground and opening onto broader widths
and lengths of time, Alexander becomes a conduit of divergent times. His sudden
swoon and ensuing thoughts about acting as “feminine and weak” spur further
reflection upon subjectivity, fainting spells, and spirituality.
The pairing of time loss with ego loss occasioned by acting the role of Prince
Myshkin thus forms two coordinates for considering the consequences of
Alexander’s blackout. To drop out of time means to drop out of oneself, a disposition that possesses two effects, like two sides of the same coin. On one hand,
the fainting spell can only reinforce Alexander’s repeatedly stated overwhelming
sense of powerlessness in the face of materialism’s victory. The ego loss associated with the swoon therefore forms one test on his road to recovering spirituality, or at least aligning the spiritual flow with that of the material. On the other
hand, the fit disrupts the ordinary time that has perniciously trapped us in the
material. Reason, science, and power capitalize on ordinary time, and the blackout
presents a potential escape route from the grasp of materialism. Despite constituting an ordeal for Alexander, his collapse allows him to wage his battle in the
name of a time to come or, in Dostoevsky’s terms, “a moment worth the whole
of life.” It provides the “pointer to life,” the basis of Tarkovsky’s theorization of
filmic time and spiritual health.
Alexander’s arrival at Maria’s stresses how losing time and ego connect to
the film’s broader concerns. When the clock sounds three bells, an agitated
Alexander implores, “We won’t have time.” Kneeling beside Maria, he begs her
to “save me. Save us all!” As Alexander puts his head in her lap, Maria notes
Alexander’s confusion and offers to take him home. Seconds later Alexander
affirms his seriousness when, in a medium close-up, he retrieves a handgun and
puts it to his head, stating emphatically, “Don’t kill us!” Though reluctantly compliant, Maria nevertheless undresses Alexander, punctuating each action with a
consoling tone. All of a sudden, an extraordinarily oneiric medium long shot
displays the horizontal couple levitating and rotating in mid air. Maria verbally
placates her floating partner, murmuring, “There, there. There’s nothing to fear,”
as we hear the soft roar of fighters and the shepherd’s call on the soundtrack. As
80 THOMAS ODDE
Fig.5. Alexander (Erland Josephson) and Maria (Gu∂rún Gísladóttir) levitate as they make love.
the camera slowly tracks back from the pair, a disconsolate Alexander weeps
while Maria comforts him. The couple slowly rises to hover several feet above
ground, and the camera stops its movement (fig.5).
The film proceeds to repeat the black-and-white images of disaster witnessed earlier, in which several people are now seen fleeing toward the camera.
As the camera pans downward, the shepherd’s call resumes and an awkward
verbal exchange ensues. Maria says, “There, there,” only to be interrupted by
Alexander’s emphatic pleas, “No! No!” Maria asks what the problem is, and
Alexander stutters, “I c-c-c-can’t.” Here it is noteworthy that Maria repeats words
(“there, there” and “poor, poor”) and more importantly Alexander stumbles both
physically at the outset of the scene when he keels over on the bicycle and verbally by stammering the word “can’t.” Verbal and physical impairment double
each other, recalling the Danish prince Hamlet’s maladies. As Marc Shell notes,
Hamlet connects speech and gesture to limping:
[Hamlet] requests of the players: “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced
it to you, trippingly on the tongue.” The meaning of the term tripping has
an internal dialectic that relates to walking and talking. On the one hand, it
means “stumbling,” “erring.” Thus, one might speak of a tripper as “someone or something that causes stumbling,” often with reference to the mouth
or tongue.26
Although Tarkovsky nowhere explicitly references Hamlet as a “tongue tripper,”
one can conjecture that the director correlates Shakesperean physical and verbal
TIME SICKNESS IN ANDREY TARKOVSKY’S THE SACRIFICE
81
maladies with suspensions of time. Stuttering entails a gap between letters and
words, and the outcome of the delay is never guaranteed in advance. In an effort
to speak fluently, stutterers employ substitutions that “often effect changes in
meaning,” as Shell avers.27 What happens in the middle of words or sentences
gains prominence because the “end” can turn up unexpected results.
In this light Alexander’s bicycle accident and verbal stammering do not simply hinder or delay something from happening in time; rather, they form crucial
components of a bodily disposition that expresses a disjunctive time. It is the
emphasis placed on the hiatus or hesitation that marks Tarkovsky’s films so
prominently, to the point where bodies, gestures, and speech are temporarily
placed on “pause.” In doing so, they challenge our expectations of what the next
image will bring, what subsequent posture the body will adopt, and what temporality the image implies. Akin to stammering, the film’s fainting spells and levitation express the paradoxical moment in which time has seized up or moves
only in fits and starts, and this delay in time creates the opportunity to heal a
temporal disjunction. The association of Alexander with the stammering Hamlet,
who felt it necessary to set right an empty time out of joint, and the epileptic
Prince Myshkin, who sensed that temporal hesitation allowed him to access a
“moment worth the whole of life,” demonstrates Tarkovsky’s concern for the
interconnection between time and health.
What follows in the film remains consistent with the puzzling editing and
mise-en-scène at work in Alexander’s initial loss of consciousness. Shortly after
the shots of black-and-white disaster, we see Maria dressed as Adelaide (another stolen identity) and a naked Marta shooing chickens inside the house, images
that contribute to the highly indeterminate and dream-like quality of the film.
After this unusual sequence, the rest of the scene will suggest that everything is
back to normal, as if the disaster had in fact been averted. A call to Alexander’s
editor confirms that the world keeps on turning regularly. Alexander will then
make good on his promise to God by performing his sacrifice of material possessions and the power to speak (fig.6). After the ambulance carts away the mad
Alexander, Little Man revisits the tree that opened the film. Despite Alexander’s
strange behavior, The Sacrifice nonetheless achieves a great degree of closure by
coupling a final, almost sublime, act with a return to the film’s initial scene.
In its ambiguous cuts and gestures, the levitation and final scene enact the
structure of the gift elaborated in Jacques Derrida’s Given Time. Alexander’s
greater sacrifice cannot be accounted for by readings determined by narrative
closure and linear temporality. Every act of giving anticipates another reciprocal
act in return, so that even the most unique gift, the one least likely to have an
equivalent, nonetheless enters a restricted economy of exchange. The phrase
“give, and you shall receive” perfectly expresses the closed circuit of exchange,
in which a determinable, though indefinite, future time has already entered into
the bargain. Derrida seeks to move beyond this conventional notion of the gift to
82 THOMAS ODDE
Fig.6. Alexander (Erland Josephson) sacrifices his home after his encounter with Maria (Gudrún
Gísladóttir).
open more radical ways of thinking of giving as an ethical act. Playing with the
polysemic word “present,” Derrida stresses that giving entails a disruption of linear and rational time, which is bound to an economy of calculation and
exchange. To question this restricted economy, he asks, “But is not the gift, if
there is any, also that which interrupts economy? That which, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange?”28 In other words, Derrida
queries, how can the philosopher (or artist) think of giving as invoking a temporal, social, and libidinal economy that bypasses exchange within calculable
presents and thus radicalize the homogeneous time of giving? How can one
avoid the pitfalls of giving without receiving, when any gift or sacrifice already
implies recognition by the receiver and reciprocation in the future?
Derrida proposes a quite compelling response: “For there to be gift, not only
must the donor or donee not perceive or receive the gift as such, have no consciousness of it, no memory, no recognition; he or she must also forget it right
away.”29 Consciousness, memory, and recognition of the gift by giver and/or
receiver enter into a restricted economy. When donor and/or donee experience
and recognize the act of giving in time, as an instance measured by determinate
presents and an object that “is,” they miss the more radical economy that underpins it—a general economy that knows no exchange and entails a useless expenditure of energy and time. Suspension of movement and exchange characterizes
a general economy, and in the hiatus between giving and receiving, between tick
and tock, the gift insinuates itself. For Derrida, thinking the gift therefore
involves a troubling aporia: the gift eludes presence in time, yet it “is not nothing.”
TIME SICKNESS IN ANDREY TARKOVSKY’S THE SACRIFICE
83
To give time means to slip in between definite temporalities and stable identities
that could recognize or remember an exchange; to lose oneself as an ego by suffering blackouts and levitations; to attune one’s ear to acousmatic voices that
emerge from an indefinite spatial and temporal source; to experience a “moment
worth the whole of life” as a vase sways back and forth.
Given the strange series of narrative events that end The Sacrifice, structured
as a gift in the Derridean sense, one should wonder to which sacrifice does the
title refer? Alexander’s prayer and his subsequent sacrifice? Or Alexander’s sexual
encounter with Maria, which directly precedes the return to normalcy? The first
possible solution rests on reading the film as cyclical, the turns and returns
caused by narrative and thematic closure supporting its validity. Alexander’s sacrifice would thus be a consequence (or deed) brought forth by his words, the
prayer to God, and can be determined within a coherent, linear temporality of
before (praying) and after (torching the home). Occurring within an ordered time,
Alexander’s actions convert religious faith (prayer) into a sacred act, thereby
escaping, finally, his own helplessness. The spiritual reading of Alexander’s gesture thus foregrounds the beginning and end as producing closure, so that temporal
pressure becomes subject to a predictable structure and a restricted economy. In
fact, to gain hermeneutic currency this reading must bypass the middle portions—
the images of disaster, levitation, stammerings, and fainting spells that animate
the film’s rhythm and are articulated by irrational cuts.
Signs of familial and fraternal love, gifts abound within the film and prepare
for Alexander’s greater sacrifice. Yet such gifts differ in kind from Alexander’s
encounter with Maria. Performing a radically different type of sacrifice as gift,
Alexander offers himself and his sexual coupling with Maria in order to realign
time, to make the perverted natural order healthy once again. The moment of
levitation enacts a suspension of time and bodily movement and figures the paradoxical “instant” of the gift. Akin to his earlier fainting spell, Alexander goes
nowhere in time, but he performs the gesture of giving (time). His suspended
action fashions a rhythmic hesitation, in which orgasm is temporarily arrested,
reconfiguring or readjusting the even balance of time. The film thus points to the
troublesome nature of Hamlet’s (and Alexander’s) dilemma. To set right the
cursed time, or the unruly schism introduced between temporal pressures, one
cannot do it in time. Rather, Alexander must become a gift of time. His swoon and
levitation sidestep a determinable presence and occasion a loss of self, memory,
and recognition.
As a physician of culture and of the human condition, Tarkovsky turns the
craft of filmmaking into an enterprise of health determined by temporal paradoxes. A process of sculpting in time, cinematic invention provides provocative
avenues for reconsidering the intimate bond between time and the body.
Tarkovsky shows that film cannot directly represent the act of giving time.
Rather, camerawork, editing, gesture, and dialogue work in concert to signify a
84 THOMAS ODDE
time out of joint. These filmic elements attest to the interplay between temporal
rhythms and pressures that undercut any uniform yardstick of measurement. A
host of unusual physical maladies—including nosebleeds, stammerings, syncopes, and levitations—that debilitate the body also gauges temporal disjunction
as a profound struggle undergone by Alexander. In spite of suffering bouts of
time sickness, Alexander slips in between times and identities to execute his
remedial sacrifice, to heal a world that has come off its hinges.
NOTES
1.
Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3.
2.
Mark Le Fanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 96.
3.
Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 219.
4.
Maya Turovskaya, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, trans. Natasha Ward (London: Faber and
Faber, 1989), 80.
5.
Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2000), 120-21.
6.
Ibid., 65.
7.
Turovskaya, 67.
8.
Tarkovsky, 71.
9.
Ibid., 113.
10.
Ibid., 117-18.
11.
Ibid., 117.
12.
Peter Green, Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest (London: MacMillan, 1993), 116.
13.
Turovskaya, 100.
14.
For this reason, Johnson and Petrie argue, “Otto is a deliberately enigmatic figure, whose
sudden epileptic fall is very different from the stumbling that in other films precede spiritual illumination.” Johnson and Petrie, 174. The authors are correct in pointing out that
Otto will not attain spiritual illumination, which they argue happens in Alexander’s case. I
will test that conclusion in my analysis of Alexander’s fall below, but for now, Otto
remains a crucial, albeit secondary, character.
15.
See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Robert Galeta and Hugh
Tomlinson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 173-188.
16.
David Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time-Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997),
13-14.
17.
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. and ed. Claudia Gorbman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129.
18.
Ibid., 123-24.
19.
I wish to thank one of the two anonymous readers for alerting me to the fruitful correspondences between Dostoevsky’s Myshkin and Tarkovsky’s Alexander and encouraging
me to pursue them as maladies of time.
20.
One of the anonymous readers pointed out this linguistic nuance. A productive trope, the
term reverberates across Tarkovsky’s corpus and The Sacrifice. One immediately thinks of
the failed balloon flight that opens Andrei Rublev (1969) or the apples that jump from
the moving cart in Ivan’s Childhood (1962), both of which suggest a sudden return from
spiritual realms to those earthly. The reference in The Sacrifice to Prince Myshkin, the
falling pitcher, the sudden bicycle accidents, and the several fainting spells enter into creative relationships with spirituality that cogently develop cinema as a health.
TIME SICKNESS IN ANDREY TARKOVSKY’S THE SACRIFICE
85
21.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Anna Brailovsky (New York: The Modern Library,
2003), 244.
22.
Ibid.
23.
Ibid., 244-45.
24.
Ibid., 245.
25.
Ibid., 245-46.
26.
Marc Shell, Stutter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 171.
27.
Ibid., 23.
28.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 7.
29.
Ibid., 16.
THOMAS ODDE recently received his Ph.D. in English from the University of
Florida. His dissertation, entitled “The Chronotopic Imagination: Aberrant Times
and Figures in Cinema” renews study of time and the body in cinema. He is CoPrincipal Investigator of “Catastrophe: Disruptions in Time,” funded by the
University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study.
86 THOMAS ODDE