The Sacrifice (Offret / Sacrifatio)

Perhaps, it's worth re-assessing Andrei Tarkovsky's films.  At least three reasons urge me in this direction.  Tarkovsky's last movie, The Sacrifice was made at a time when many people feared that the world was imperiled by nuclear war -- Tarkovsky shot the movie about a year before the momentous meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykyavik, negotiations triggered by increasing anxiety about the fate of the planet in the context of a rapidly accelerating arms race.  Today, the planet is similarly threatened, although the causes of our impending doom are different.  But Tarkovsky worked in a world that seemed to him increasingly fragile and endangered -- and, I think, this is our condition today.  Second, Tarkovsky is certainly the director who has had the greatest influence on people making serious films today -- his magisterial long takes, his tone of portentous melancholy, his dense allusions to European cultural history, all of these elements in his work have been decisive with respect to auteurs as diverse as Bi Gan and Lars von Trier (the Danish director's Melancholia is almost a remake of The Sacrifice).  Third, we need to be reminded that the liberal consensus, now collapsing in much of the world, is not necessarily fundamental to great art.  Tarkovsky is a profoundly conservative, even, reactionary director, never more mystically Russian than when he was in exile.  It is worth attempting to understand a world view that has literally nothing in common with either the limousine-liberalism of Hollywood or the more hard-bitten left-wing politics of most Indy films.  Tarkovsky lived under Stalin and he hated anything remotely like communism -- this gives his films a texture very unlike anything produced by consensus democratic (small "d") liberals.  

The Sacrifice made on a desolate Swedish island where Tarkovsky was living in exile is grandiose to the point of absurdity.  What makes the film fascinating is that Tarkovsky, certainly, conceived aspects of the movie as comedy.  I have no doubt that the famous ending of the film -- at least, the very long take in which Alexander runs mad like King Lear after burning down his summer cottage -- is intended as some kind of bitter comedy.  I think critics have misread that scene if they see it as a profoundly serious or cathartic image of Alexander's collapse, which, in the megalomaniac context of the film represents the collapse of the European world.  There's no doubt that Tarkovsky sees Alexander's madness as evidence of the destruction of Europe's high culture.  What is misunderstood is Tarkovsky's tone:  he stages this shot as comedy -- on some level, he thinks the film's climax is funny.  

On many different ways, The Sacrifice riffs on themes in the work of Ingmar Bergman, beginning with The Seventh Seal (with its intimations of the apocalypse), continuing through the isolation and sexual psychodrama of Persona, and, also, referencing Shame, the 1968 film in which the collapse of a marriage occurs in parallel with a catastrophic and devastating war.  The film begins squarely in Bergman territory -- a famous actor, now retired from the stage, has retreated to an isolated wind-swept island where he lives with his younger wife and a mute child, nicknamed "Little Man".  Bach's "Erbarme Dich" ("Have mercy on us") played on the soundtrack establishes the apocalyptic context, the notion that the world can be saved only by God's grace.  Alexander is played by Erland Josephson, one of Bergman's stalwart, repertory players.  (He appears as a surrogate for Bergman in his Scenes from a Marriage and, later, made for TV movies, including Sarabande).  The actor celebrates his birthday by planting a tree, more a wind-blasted stake with some naked branches, next to the beach by his summer cottage.  Little Man helps him.  Alexander tells the child an anecdote about a Russian orthodox monk who planted a dead tree but brought the tree to life by ritualistically watering it once a day, at the exact same time, for three years. Alexander, the actor, encounters an enigmatic post man who delivers mail by bicycle.  He and the postal carrier discuss Nietzsche's idea of the "eternal recurrence of the same".  While brooding alone on this notion, Little Man playfully jumps on Alexander who reacts with momentary rage, giving the child a bloody nose.  Alexander's daughter and her nasty husband, Victor, an arrogant physician, appear to celebrate the great man's birthday.  This is not a happy family.  Alexander's wife slinks around in an outfit that looks like a costume from a production of a neo-classical play, something by Racine or Corneille.  She is bitter that Alexander has abandoned the stage -- the woman is a mass of seething vitriol, on the edge of hysteria, like one of the domestic vampires in a Strindberg play.  Victor gives Alexander a book of Russian icons, symbolizing, it seems, the old self-assurance and redemptive grace of the Russian Orthodox faith.  The post man arrives with a framed map of Europe, a beautiful piece of cartography made in the 16th century -- this gift establishes Tarkovsky's fundamental notion, that the world is comprised of Europe and European culture and that any other place is literally outside of the pale.  (There are no references to America, of course, and Victor's plan to move to Australia -- the antipodes to Europe -- is met with expressions of unmitigated horror.)  These gifts correlate to an unfinished painting by Leonardo da Vinci, "The Gift of the Magi".  (The sacred book of icons and the map of Europe are the first two gifts -- there is a third gift, as well, although it is offered in what seems to be a dream:  this gift, made by Little Man and the postman Olaf, is a tiny scale-model of the summer cottage where the film's action takes place.)  The film's exorbitant and wildly ambitious scope is implied by this imagery -- if people are giving gifts to Alexander in the context of the Three Wise Men, then, it is obvious that Tarkovsky conceives of his hero as a sort of Christ.  Christ's job is to save the world and its people.  Alexander gets his salvific opportunity when jets scream overhead, the movie tilts into a monochromatic sepia, and a huge globe-like vase of milk (the world? Mother Nature?) falls from the cupboard and bursts on the floor.  The end of the world has come and the people on the island, hearing stammered messages of calamity on their radio, sit around disconsolate, some of them sedated by Victor, awaiting their deaths.  Alexander, however, conceives the notion that he can save the world:  he prays to God and makes a vow that he will sacrifice everything that he loves to bring back the world as it existed before this awful apocalypse.  Olaf, the post man, offers a more pragmatic solution -- he tells Alexander that the actor's eerie-looking maid, an Icelandic woman, is a powerful witch and that if he rides his bike around the bay to sleep with her, she will be persuaded to restore the world.  Alexander embarks on this mission and has some sort of encounter with the spectral-looking Icelandic witch.  After some debate and Alexander threatening suicide, the witch embraces him and they float in the air over the dark tortured landscape of her rumpled bed.  A little later, Alexander awakes -- he's back in Kansas again.  The power is on and the telephone works.  The sun is shining brightly.  Alexander believes that he has saved the world and so, true to his vow, he stacks up all the chairs and furniture in the cottage and lights the place on fire, possibly intending to burn up Little Man in the process.  His wife and daughter have been vehemently debating Victor's move to Australia and have wandered off.  When they see the summer house burning, they run back and remonstrate with Alexander who has apparently gone completely mad -- he looks like an insane samurai wearing a Japanese robe with a yin-yang sign on its back.  An ambulance arrives and hauls Alexander away as the house collapses in a fiery vortex.  Little Man is alive.  He is laboriously carrying buckets of water to the tree that he and Alexander planted the previous day.  The Icelandic maid rides her bike across the partially flooded landscape.  Little Man reclines under the skeletal tree and speaks for the first time in the movie:  "In the beginning was the Word -- what did you mean by that Papa?"  This ending suggests that whatever crisis afflicted Alexander, and, by extension, the European World, the sun is now shining and a new beginning is possible.  

Of course, the film is fantastically detailed in composition and editing and full of remarkable images.  The middle sequence involving the apparent holocaust is shot in dull, neutral tones -- it has the eerie ambience of the midnight sun in the far north:  the sky is covered in a creamy pall of milky radiance that doesn't seem to have any clear origin.  The cottage is a character in the film.  Like the horror house in Hereditary (a film also influenced by Tarkovsky), the inside of the structure, full of vast theatrical and empty sets, bears no relationship to the rather humble exterior.  Tarkovsky signals Alexander's increasing madness by having his hero climb up and down a ladder to enter and leave the house -- he will no longer cross its threshold.  Whether the world was actually destroyed or whether the apocalypse is merely a nihilistic fantasy of the protagonist is left ambiguous and undecided.  We have seen Alexander swoon and fall to the ground -- a black and white shot, taken from an aerial perspective shows a courtyard with a wrecked car and debris of various sorts covering the pavement.  This image is peculiar to Alexander and seems to be some kind of dream.  The long dark and mostly still central sequences in the film (the end of the world) are orchestrated to faint, twilight cries, whispered music, that we can barely hear, and, sometimes, plaintive Noh flute.  The Noh flute signifies Alexander's fury and madness -- it wails as he runs about in flailing circles after lighting his home on fire.  The movie, Tarkovsky's last (he was dying of cancer), is a compendium of the director's signature shots:  there are pans over muddy swamps full of rotting leaves, obscure spring-like gears, documents, hoards of coins under the water; we see the main set reproduced as a tiny model; lovers float in mid-air; people present themselves to the camera as luxurious, but faceless, masses of hair; events take place in real time -- Alexander laboriously attempts to light matches to set a tablecloth on fire; we see images that suggest adultery (Alexander's wife with a man lying on his side in an orchard); everywhere there are mirrors, windows that both reflect light and allow us to vaguely see into the murky landscape.  The film's ambitious are epic:  Alexander represents the great artist who must save the West from the forces of irreligious nihilism.  Of course, in order to understand these deadly forces, he must embody them himself -- he is an actor, without a real identity, someone who contains the nihilistic peril within himself.  The great man must save the world by either sacrificing everything he loves or by sleeping with an Icelandic witch or both.  Alexander is uniquely equipped for the task of redeeming Europe -- he is Christ receiving the gifts of the Magi, but has also played the part of the supreme nihilist Shakespeare's Richard III.  In his more Christ-like avatar, Alexander has acted the part of the Idiot, Prince Myshkin.  Someone addresses him as a "Richardian (e.g. nihilist)" and "Idiotist" -- that is, follower of the saintly Prince Myshkin.  

I have said that Tarkovsky intends aspects of this film to be comical.  Clearly, the director views the pretentious Alexander as a monster of self-regard.  Alexander's fatal grandiosity, perhaps, triggers the whole apocalypse -- it's something that he admits that he has been waiting for all his life, a chance to prove his messianic chops.  Several scenes signal that Tarkovsky has difficulty taking Alexander's self-aggrandizing vanity seriously.  Alexander is always collapsing, swooning, falling down -- when he crosses a huge empty set there's only one piece of furniture in the room:  needless to say, he bangs into it, hitting his shin, and almost toppling over.  On an empty road stretching for miles in the White Night, there are two little puddles.  Of course, Alexander on his bicycle steers right for the puddles splashes into them and crashes the bike.  Most importantly, when Alexander goes to see the witch, he tells a long anecdote about how he cleaned out his mother's disorderly garden, hacking and cutting to remove the weeds and undergrowth.  Alexander goes on and on about this activity expressing horror that he destroyed the "natural" aspects of the garden.  The Witch very reasonably asks him:  "Well what did your mother think?"  Alexander evades the question -- he has completely forgotten the premise of his story, that is, that he tidied-up the garden so that his sick and dying mother would have something more pleasant to view from her window.  This scene is actually funny -- you can laugh out loud at Alexander's absurd pretentiousness and that fact that he has forgotten the point of his own story because it had something to do with his mother and not himself.  (In the same scene, when Alexander puts a gun to his head to make the witch embrace him, the viewer has the same response:  Alexander is so childish and self-absorbed that he has to threaten suicide to get anyone to take him seriously.)  Earlier in the film, the post man, who seems some sort of angel, told a story about a cockroach on a table set for an elaborate and pompous dinner party -- the cockroach just ran around and around in circles as if he "intended" something.  At the end of the movie, Alexander is the cockroach -- he runs around and around in circles, plunging into puddles and falling repeatedly, as if "intends" something.  In the end, the men in white (who you expect to deploy butterfly nets to catch him) grab a hold Alexander, get him in the back of the ambulance, although he breaks free a couple of times, and take him off-stage.  We can't say that we miss him.

I think Tarkovsky was spoofing, in part, Ingmar Bergman.  Initially, he sought permission to shoot the film on Bergman's Faroe island off the coast of Sweden -- the Swedish military wouldn't authorize this due to secret bases on the island and Tarkovsky had to make due with another nearby island.  Tarkovsky's assistance cameraman was Daniel Bergman, Ingmar's son, and the film was shot by Bergman's longtime director of photography, Sven Nyquist.  I presume that there was some level of circumspect hostility and aggressive competition between the two men.  An island is a small place to harbor to titanic world-shaking geniuses.  Erland Josefsson literally stands in for Bergman in the Swedish director's ouevre.  Therefore, I think it is reasonable to suggest that Alexander (recall Bergman's autobiographical Fanny and Alexander) is intended as a malicious portrait of the great Swedish film maker.  Tarkovsky may not be wholly conscious of the fact that he is also satirizing his own pan-Slavic and mystical pretensions in this film.