The last of what would turn out to be a mere handful of films by
this major director, a relatively meagre opus which nevertheless houses
some of the most remarkable and lyrical images to have ever been created
on film, The Sacrifice (Offret sacrificatio) is undoubtedly
Tarkovsky's cinematic last will and testament. Completed when the director
had already been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the film bears all the
signs of being a sort of summa of all the familiar Tarkovskian
themes and motifs and is, moreover, explicitly dedicated —"with hope and
confidence"— to Tarkovsky's young son, Andrejusja.
In his own comments about the film, in
Sculpting in Time and
elsewhere, Tarkovsky consistently characterized the film as a spiritual
parable exemplifying the particularly Christian conception of
self-sacrifice in the interests of community and in the name of a higher
ideal And, in fact, it's not difficult to read Alexander, the protagonist
of The Sacrifice, as a further development of Domenico, the "holy
fool", who in Tarkovsky's previous film, Nostalghia (1983) —and,
significantly, played by the same actor, Erland Josephson— immolates
himself by fire while intoning the Christian injunction to repentance and
self-abnegation from the top of Rome's Capitol Hill. Read this way,
Alexander's setting fire to his house at the end of The Sacrifice
is merely another, and more symbolic, version of Domenico's act of
self-martyrdom in the service of a Christian ideal.
And yet perhaps the sacrifice of
The Sacrifice is decidedly more
complex and more pagan. As Tarkovsky himself recounted more than
once, the original idea for what eventually became the major part of the
screenplay of The Sacrifice had come to him long before the making
of Nostalghia and was a story which he had always called "The
Witch". The nuclear apocalyptic scenario in which Alexander comes to make
a pact with God was only added much later and it's noteworthy that
Tarkovsky's attempt to bring these two stories together in the final
version of the film, as we have it, has seemed to even usually favourable
critics to have not quite succeeded. However one might ultimately judge
the success or failure of this attempted narrative integration, if one
looks for it one can certainly glimpse, amidst all the frenetic comings
and goings of Alexander in front of the burning house, the image of a man
kneeling in gratitude before a witch called Maria, the spectral and pagan
counterpart, no doubt, of that Adoration of the Magi by Leonardo
that opens the film and then reappears significantly at crucial points.
Moreover, if Alexander's pact with the Christian God obviously figures
largely in the film, motivating the final great conflagration of the
house, the film would also seem to explicitly invoke, through the mouth of
Otto, the enigmatic postman, the thought of Nietzsche, the anti-Christ,
and in particular the central Nietzschean "doctrine" of the Eternal
Return, that "hardest of all thoughts to bear" which Nietzsche's
Zarathustra's nevertheless calls his "greatest gift" to humankind. As the
supreme and willing affirmation of each Moment in its eternal nowness, the
Eternal Return is Nietzsche's attempt to redeem the transitoriness of Time
and to supply the only possible antidote to that life-denying and
world-weary nihilism that clearly is Alexander's major affliction as he
reaches his fiftieth birthday. So perhaps it's not simply a burning house
then, but a Zoroastrian fire, that is throwing its light on Alexander's
genuflection before the "good witch", Maria, and what is being enacted in
this clearly-pagan ritual is less a Christian sacrifice of the self and
more the supremely affirmative gesture of a Nietzschean
self-transfiguration.
The burning house of The Sacrifice would thus represent not only
the culmination of Tarkovsky's final film but of his life and work as a
whole. For within its spectacular — and possibly Zoroastrian — flames the
beautiful but gloomy and ultimately paralizing nostalgia, congealed in all
those houses that have appeared so insistently in Tarkovsky's other films,
is finally not only dispelled but transfigured, into light, into madness
and into laughter through the joyful affirmation of the Moment and of
Life. Every gift is also a sacrifice, says Otto to Alexander; otherwise
what sort of a gift would it be? By the same token The Sacrifice is
also a gift, the gift of Zarathustra, the poetic testament left by a
father to his son, a testament which shines with the brightness of a final
willed self-transfiguration.
From SENSES
OF CINEMA
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