time sickness in andrey tarkovsky’s the · pdf filemost private experience that can be...

In Essays Critical and Clinical, a study that productively probes the close bondbetween 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. Theworld is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature thenappears as an enterprise of health.”1 At once diagnosticians and healers, writersattuned to the imbrication of literature and health incisively take note where lan-guage and thought enter into clinical states that foreclose creative work and “thepossibility of life.” Such writers, who may lack the conventional hallmarks ofphysical and mental good health, remedy the clinical by fashioning a limber andrigorous image of thought. They plumb the depths of suffering to invent alter-native practices that resist forms of domination and oppression.

The writer stimulated by a literary “fitness” exposes the world’s most uglysymptoms, those that debilitate thought and devastate human agency; by deployingmanifold tropes for health, he or she also crafts novel bodily states and disposi-tions that reinvigorate our relationship to the world and to ourselves. AlthoughDeleuze’s compelling work focuses on literature, one can conjecture that film toomay 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

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TIME SICKNESS

IN ANDREY TARKOVSKY’S THE SACRIFICE

Résumé: Cet essai explore les relations qui se tissent entre la maladie physique etle désordre temporel dans le dernier film d’Andrey Tarkovsky, Le Sacrifice. Les afflic-tions, qui incluent les syncopes, les saignements de nez et les crises hystériques sontnombreuses dans Le Sacrifice et la plupart des recherches sur Tarkovsky traitent cesépisodes comme les symptômes d’une faiblesse physique, émotionnelle et spiri-tuelle du personnage. L’examen attentif permet toutefois de montrer comment cessymptômes inhabituels peuvent être lus comme les épisodes d’une profonde etparadoxale « maladie du temps ». Il est suggéré que la maladie dans Le Sacrificeindique une disjonction radicale entre le temps séculier et spirituel que le filmcherche à réparer. En s’inspirant des travaux théoriques de Tarkovsky et en étudiantattentivement les articulations cinématographiques, cet essai montre comment LeSacrifice dépeint la maladie du temps tout en nous donnant le remède de sa restau-ration par le geste du don.

remedy of the contemporary condition, asking viewers in turn to reconsidernotions of the body, wellbeing, agency, and visual culture. In other words, thefilmmaker would demonstrate forcefully that cinema, akin to its literary coun-terpart, is indeed a health and that the medium has much to offer in combiningcritical and clinical enterprises.

This essay suggests that Andrey Tarkovsky is one such filmmaker. Throughouthis career, and culminating in The Sacrifice (1986), the director’s final film,Tarkovsky exhibited a continual concern and care for the human condition. Eventhough 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 itspatient. With the thematics of The Sacrifice in mind, one can make an initialdiagnosis: the loss of spiritual values has condemned the world to undergoingconstant technological threats that range from Chernobyl to world war. To thedetriment of spiritual life, humankind has become the victim of its own worldmastery, achieved through a pernicious and volatile concoction of power, tech-nology, reason, and cynical instrumentalism. This dubious disparity betweenmaterialism and spiritualism possesses legible signs manifested on the bodies ofTarkovsky’s characters. The symptoms, frequently seen across the director’s cor-pus, include unusual physical maladies such as nosebleeds, syncopes (or faintingspells), hysterical attacks, stammerings, and bodily levitations. Often placed withina film form that attenuates narrative causality, eschews classical editing patterns,and renders an oneiric and spiritually symbolic mise-en-scène, the Tarkovskiansymptom can be situated between the material and spiritual realms.

The narrative of The Sacrifice suggests that unconventional measures mustbe taken to remedy the Weltschmertz afflicting humankind. It develops around afamily gathering, celebrating the father’s (Alexander’s) birthday. As the day’sevents unfold inside the isolated country house, we soon learn that nuclear cat-astrophe is imminent. A loud rush of fighter jets is heard overhead, an occa-sionally garbled television message crackles a dire announcement, and a suddenloss of electricity intervenes. Brief cutaways to panic-stricken victims fleeingthrough scattered debris give clues that a third world war is happening. To wardoff the terrible event, Alexander performs two redemptive acts. First, after hisfriend and soothsayer Otto claims that making love to Maria, a servant and so-called witch, will save “everything,” Alexander heeds his male companion’s sug-gestion. With trepidation, he pays her a visit and engages in an awkwardcoupling. Second, Alexander prays to God and vows to sacrifice everything thatbinds him to the world, including his power to speak.

When the disaster has been averted—though it is unclear whether it evenbegan—Alexander makes good on his promise. He sets the family home ablazeand renounces speaking, only to be shuttled away by ambulance in front of adistraught 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

TIME SICKNESS IN ANDREY TARKOVSKY’S THE SACRIFICE 67

sapling, Little Man, mute throughout the film, finally speaks: “In the beginningwas the Word? Why is that, Papa?” By emphasizing child and tree, the final shotachieves closure by echoing the opening credit sequence, which showedLeonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, in such a way that the blessed infant and blos-soming tree are at the center of the image.

Alexander’s actions are spiritually symbolic, unlike those of a conventionalprotagonist. As a teacher and essayist wracked with metaphysical doubt andmelancholy, Alexander lacks the clear decisiveness and stable identity of main-stream 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 anappropriate response to our dreadful condition and instead wallows in self-doubt. In this regard, Alexander figures as a typical Tarkovskian protagonist, likethe eponymous Stalker (1979) or Andrei in Nostalghia (1983). All three seek oth-erworldly solutions to the overpowering forces that render them physically andspiritually frail. In contrast to the conventional hero who clear-headedly drivesthe narrative forward, Alexander suffers from suspensions of any and all narra-tive motion (fig.1).

Much critical work on Tarkovsky has underscored the weakness character-izing his protagonists. Mark Le Fanu sees conventional agency questioned byTarkovsky: “But in ‘late’ Tarkovsky we are met with something that can only bedescribed as an elevation of powerlessness, a hostility to conventional action, aquietism.”2 Going a step further, Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie propose thatphysical maladies can be traced to Tarkovsky’s interest in spiritualism rather thanheroic action: “Characters fall, stumble, and trip a great deal, usually as a preludeto some form of self-discovery, spiritual enlightenment, or change of circum-stances; the fall may also imply that they need to learn the humility that most of theminitially lack.”3 For Johnson and Petrie, like many commentators, the unusualbodily attitudes point to a spiritual sickness inhabiting the body. Similarly,although stammering rarely appears in film, it predominates in Tarkovsky’swork, most notably in Mirror (1975) and The Sacrifice. Akin to physically fallingdown, the stammer constitutes a stumbling over words and can be treated as aspiritual 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 clin-ical state, these illnesses find their source not in somatic or mental causes, butrather in the character’s religious emptiness and lack of proper moral strength.

While the Tarkovskian symptoms certainly attest to spiritual maladies, theyalso figuratively mark the body with a more profound infirmity. Central to myargument is that the spiritualism/materialism dichotomy etiologically derivesfrom a deeper disjunction between material and spiritual flows of time that hascome to both infect and determine the present. Much as Hamlet sensed, timeitself has gone off-kilter, become deranged, and the body maps out its pathology

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in Tarkovsky’s work. Tarkovsky invites viewers to rethink the present conditionby creatively engaging with the past and present, while opening avenues forthinking the future. Equally important, Tarkovsky asks viewers to consider thebody as figure of an aberrant or sacred time. Often characterized by unexpectedgestures or bodily dispositions, the Tarkovskian body suffers fits or attacks oftime, 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 cancure the world by hitting directly at the cause of this unique illness, time itself.

The filmmaker’s own writings reveal a fairly homogeneous theorization offilmic time that bears upon the concerns addressed in this paper and will pro-vide a basis for discussing The Sacrifice. Published in English as Sculpting inTime, a collection of insights compiled over many years with Olga Surkova, thebook charts the director’s ideas about cinema as art and as possessive of aunique relationship with time. He quite compellingly argues that the challengefor the filmmaker resides in joining separate temporal fluxes, summarizing hisrole thusly: “I see it as my professional task, then, to create my own, distinctiveflow of time.”5 Time flows differently in every filmic image, so that “the cinemahas to be free to pick out and join up facts taken from a ‘lump of time’ of anywidth or length.”6 Slices of time constitute raw materials for both filmmaker andeditor, but Tarkovsky stresses that such temporal “lumps” are not necessarilyhomogeneous or measured in equal proportion.

In Tarkovsky, the pressure of time that runs through shots, as well assequences, often assumes an ambiguous shape. If a film like Mirror is often calledpoetic, this is due to the multifarious modes of reality, from world history to the


Fig.1. Alexander (Erland Josephson), the unconventional hero of Andrey Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986).

most private experience that can be affected by temporal rhythm. Turovskayaexplains, “The unusual quality of Mirror lies in its juxtaposition of time scales thatare normally subject to different yardsticks of measurement.”7 The historical timein the newsreels is imbricated with the time and history of the family and its his-tory. Synthesizing or syncopating the two pressures provides the unique poeticstructure of Mirror. Each individual flow (history, memory, and dream, forinstance) carries its own force or temporal timbre. Despite the dissimilar natureof these separate states of reality and their concomitant temporal pressures, edit-ing makes them resonate and communicate in inventive ways.

Manifold temporal flows of differing widths and lengths occur throughoutTarkovsky’s work, among them dreams, memories, spiritual states, and fan-tasies. Each shift to another temporal flux tends to undermine any realist, onto-logical grounding of the image in presence, and instead hints at an indeterminateimage, as if emerging from an “elsewhere.” Viewers familiar with Tarkovsky’swork no doubt vividly remember the oneiric scenes of flowing water in Stalkeror the recurrent trope of rain falling inside a house. These moments, etched per-manently in our mental film archive, appear so otherworldly in great partbecause they indicate a sudden departure from conventional temporal articula-tion in cinema. Yet some of Tarkovsky’s most defining moments, the strikingconflagrations of buildings in Mirror or The Sacrifice, for instance, also seemtethered 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 newflow, often requires tremendous patience on the viewer’s part, as its significanceis not immediately apparent and, as we shall see in The Sacrifice, bafflesattempts at simple demarcation.

Tarkovsky’s films resolutely avoid employing conventional cues that distin-guish these different modes or time scales of reality. Eschewing special effects anddistortions of the image to represent dreams, Tarkovsky hints at the ontologicalrealism of the image underpinning his method: “Dreams on the screen are madeup of exactly these same observed, natural forms of life.”8 In Tarkovsky’s cinema,dreams resemble objective reality, as do characters’ fantasies, reminiscences, andflashbacks. These dissimilar modes vary by temporal width and length, and notby purely qualitative difference marked by conventional cues (the dissolve thatleads into a dream, the distorted camera angle or image that depicts madness, andso on). As a result, what is often at stake in reading Tarkovsky is recognizing theproximity between dreams, personal reveries, and reality. One must ask how timeflows in the shot and how the shot connects with other temporal currents,whether imaginary or real. The tension between oneiric images specific to a par-ticular temporal flow and images that remain indefinite forms a distinguishingtrait of Tarkovsky’s cinema, and viewers frequently must content themselves withindeterminacy. Equally crucial to Tarkovsky’s conception of cinematic time isrhythm, which helps to clarify his conceptualization of editing. The director

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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 tem-poral pressure that neither conceptual montage nor narrative causality can limit.The justification for expressing rhythm within the shot must come from else-where. Without resorting to a Romantic definition of the artwork, in which artaspires to attain the sublime, identifying what precisely constitutes this “else-where” proves to be thorny terrain. To help readers grasp what he means by pres-sure, 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 apointer to something stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity; apointer to life.10

The pressure of time exceeds its reduction to the representational capacity ofcinema, the visual depiction located within the frame. As an entity that flows,time passes through but more importantly outside the frame; it strays from nar-rative action and realist representation toward what Deleuze called literature ashealth—the possibility of life.

At first glance, Tarkovsky’s emphasis on the temporal rhythm within theshot, and rhythmic extension beyond the shot, ultimately towards infinity, seemslike a critique of montage. Certainly, Tarkovsky’s predilection for filming in longtakes might parallel, and thus reinforce, the validity of this position. YetTarkovsky situates editing under the greater force of rhythm, the poetic interplayof temporal currents bearing varying widths and lengths. In this sense, editingbecomes a by-product of rhythm, rather than its generator: “Although the assem-bly of the shots is responsible for the structure of a film, it does not, as is gen-erally assumed, create its rhythm. The distinctive time running through the shotsmakes the rhythm of the picture; and rhythm is determined not by the length ofthe edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them.”11 Increating a distinctive flow of time, editing plays an important role, but it mustamplify and resonate with the temporal rhythm within a shot and between shots.The opposition between long take and editing is only superficial, becauserhythm 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 subtletemporal pressure, the shifts to different time-scales, that provide a pointer tolife. To guarantee clear legibility of rhythm, Tarkovsky’s use of objects in TheSacrifice gauges the sudden shifts and pressures of time. Consider the glass pitch-er of milk that inexplicably jumps from the armoire or the wine glasses that sud-denly begin clinking together. Lacking immediate realist explanations for their


motivation, objects appear to move by a pulsating force. As if compelled by anunseen power, these vibrating objects that recur throughout Tarkovsky’s oeuvreconstitute remarkably oneiric moments. To heighten their suddenness, Tarkovskyeither places them within an extreme long take or directly following one. In addi-tion, the unexpected quivering of objects appears all the more dream-likebecause human physical movement is kept to a minimum.

Yet these exceptional moments do not derive entirely from an inexplicablenarrative source. As in other Tarkovsky movies, they do have causes—in the caseof the pitcher, viewers soon hear rumbling sounds of fighter jets. Yet a conven-tional cause is severely attenuated, or only understood retroactively, so thatviewers must wait patiently for clear cause-and-effect relationships to emerge. Assuch, these moments appear fantastic precisely because they cannot beexplained immediately by narrative or realist readings. Peter Green frames thisrecurrent aspect of Tarkovsky’s cinema through what he terms the “principle ofaccountability to natural law,” or a realist explanation that could clarify the leg-ibility of all events.12 Because these moments initially materialize so uncannily,all realist readings will encounter a fundamental ambiguity. Wine glasses sud-denly jingle, and the principle of accountability to natural law retroactively deter-mines that the fighter planes cause this phenomenon. But why do thesewarplanes growl over an extremely isolated estate? Only later do we learn of theimpending nuclear holocaust—hence the patrolling fighters heard from offscreen—but the war only presents itself in black-and-white images, garbled tele-vision messages, and an unanticipated power outage. It remains unclear whetherthe disastrous event is in fact happening, and thus the narrative-driven causali-ty is actively undermined in favor of hesitations and deferrals of meaning.

Occupying an indeterminate status, these exceptional instances attest to aschism fashioned by the pressure of a disordered time. Temporal force introducesinto representation something uncannily other and unruly captured in unpre-dictable moments. In this regard, Turovskaya correctly emphasizes temporal het-erogeneity in Tarkovsky: “In all Tarkovsky’s work, this ‘individual stream oftime’ is something which pulsates, moves not smoothly but in jerks, in explo-sions of meaning, however hard the director insisted upon the amorphousnessand simplicity of his images.”13 As a throbbing force that progresses not uni-formly but rather in jerks and spasms, time sends objects and people into con-vulsive states and movements. The pressure of time both exceeds andundermines any coherent meaningful narrative or realist function applicable toobjects and bodies.

Like the unexpected movements of objects, the body similarly forms a privi-leged site where temporal pressure makes itself directly felt and legible. Bodies andmovements appear prey to an indiscernible or attenuated “cause,” which can beread neither entirely as somatic nor as psychological. The pressure of time throwsthe world off kilter. From out of nowhere, this force makes objects tremble and

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bodies suffer unusual afflictions. The body acts as indicator of temporal rhythmwithin the shot, while repeated gestures connect broader segments. Gesture figuresprominently when the pressure has become too much, when one shot or tempo-ral block is on the verge of passing into another. Tarkovsky thus invites viewers toread 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 thebodies of Alexander and Otto, the town postman and friend of Alexander.Presented as an eccentric or holy fool, Otto commences the birthday festivitiesby giving Alexander an authentic map of Europe from the 1600s. Touching uponthe film’s thematics, Otto claims it is a “sacrifice,” and that “every gift involvesa sacrifice.” The postman proceeds to tell Victor (a family friend) and Adelaide(Alexander’s wife), both of whom are understandably quite impressed with hisgift, that in his spare time he’s a collector: “I collect incidents, things that areunexplainable but true.” When asked for specifics, Otto describes one of hisprized 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 pho-tographic portrait studio. Upon receiving the print, the mother was shocked bythe developed image: it contained both her and her dead son, who was eighteenin 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 approachtheir stricken friend. The next shot, in close-up, shows Otto’s face with eyelids


Fig.2. Otto (Allan Edwall) faints after recounting a story about a photograph containing a tem-poral disjunction.

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 itsseat. Holding his pocket watch to his ear, Otto explains his malady: “It was onlyan evil angel passing by, who saw fit to touch me.” Perplexed, Victor asks if he’splaying 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 orjoke, an exclamation point added to his rather unbelievable story. At the sametime, his explanation, that an angel touched him, highlights Tarkovsky’s “law ofaccountability,” in which cause-and-effect relationships are attenuated. Whetherread as a joke or an otherworldly encounter, Otto’s sudden fit appears to stretchtoward the miraculous.14 While Otto’s foibles certainly mark him as an enigmaticfigure, 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 willseek scientific causes for them (fig.3). By checking Otto’s pulse, Victor naturallyinvestigates a somatic source for the fall. Despite affirming the contrary, Otto willin fact make a joke when he listens to his watch, visually resuscitating the classicMarx 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 thereference, intended or not, illuminates how reason (represented by Victor) remainsunable to understand nonsense or the irrational; instead, reason seeks scientific,commonsensical causes. Victor attributes the fall to Otto’s idiosyncratic person-ality, whereas the scene’s ambiguity provocatively hints at a different source—

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Fig.3. Victor (Sven Wollter) and Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood) find Otto eccentric and his story oftemporal disjunction unbelievable.

that physical time stopped suddenly and Otto was caught somewhere betweenrationalized moments, measured in ticks and tocks, between the regular heart-beats felt in Otto’s pulse.

Otto’s strange avocation similarly emphasizes how time and image cannotalways be reduced to commonsensical interpretations, and therefore his hobbyimplies a division or disjunction between legible and visible discursive formations.When it comes to interpreting the unruliness of time, reason will only get you sofar, but Otto’s photograph shows the uncanny power of visual media to overlaydistinctive times, such as the (present) mother and (past) son. The inherentcapacity of photography to instantaneously capture the present encounters theforgotten or repressed past returning unexpectedly. This miraculous imbricationof times comes with a price exerted on the body, though. Shortly after mention-ing the two separate times in the photograph (1940 and 1960), Otto suffers hisswoon that takes viewers by surprise. Tarkovsky suggests that the unanticipateddistinctive times superimposed in the photograph connect to Otto’s unforeseencollapse. Otto’s body senses a temporal schism or pressure, achieved by thesupernatural ability of photography to link living and dead. Like the soldier, hetoo returns from the dead, from a temporal nowhere.

Akin to Otto’s encounter with an evil angel, the film’s opening shots establishthe body as symptomatically marked by the pressure of time; they also introduceAlexander as powerless in terms of spirituality and action. An unconventionalhero, the saturnine Alexander and his weaknesses prime viewers for the exces-sive character of temporal pressure that exerts itself upon him. Early in themovie, Otto asks him, “Say, how is your relation to God?” Alexander replies,“Non-existent, I’m afraid.” Otto then proceeds to give viewers expository infor-mation about Alexander, who “lectures for the students at the university” andwrites essays, but his mood is also always gloomy. Otto suggests to Alexander, “Youshouldn’t grieve so much. You shouldn’t yearn so for something. You shouldn’tbe waiting like that.”

Although slightly befuddled by the awkward shift from friendly chitchat tometaphysical talk, Alexander balks at Otto’s assessment. Nonetheless, Otto’sassertion that Alexander suffers melancholia soon hits home. Moments laterAlexander begins to analyze his, and humanity’s, own symptoms. Because tech-nology and power have become instruments of fear, “We have acquired a dread-ful disharmony, an imbalance if you will, between our material and spiritualdevelopment.” Alexander then claims that it is too late to find a solution and thathe is weary of words. A long monologue ensues and leads to self-analysis: “Atlast I know what Hamlet meant. He was fed up with windbags. If only someonecould stop talking and do something instead. Or at least try to.”

During Alexander’s monologue, filmed in a long take, Little Man exits the framewithout his father noticing. Initially lost in his thoughts, Alexander discovers heis alone and intently scans his surroundings for the boy. From off-screen we hear


the patter of footsteps gathering steam, and Little Man suddenly jumps onAlexander’s back. Visibly shaken, Alexander drops to one knee. The cameraimmediately cuts to the son, whose nose has dripped blood onto his shirt.Returning to Alexander, a medium long shot shows him reaching an arm forwardin 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, asif in slow motion, accompanied by his voice-over: “Dear God, what’s wrong withme?” and finally collapses (fig.4).

The camera abruptly cuts to a black-and-white image of a courtyard strewnwith debris; we hear a shepherd’s call and thunder on the soundtrack as thecamera pans downward to display a wrecked auto, a wooden chair, and watercoursing through a small runnel. Continuing the pan, the shot displays a win-dowpane that reflects a city seemingly untouched by disaster. As the pan finish-es its downward trajectory, we see ostensible blood spatter, then two long dripsrunning toward the top of the frame. A fade out ends the sequence, and the nextshot displays Alexander leafing through a book of medieval paintings, given tohim by Victor. Alexander notes that the paintings possess “such wisdom andspirituality” and are “like a prayer. And all this has been lost. We can’t even prayany longer.” He then tells his family how happy he is because he received atelegram from his acting friends, his fellow “Idiotists” and “Richardians,” a ref-erence to his performance of works by Dostoevsky and Shakespeare (oddlyRichard III, not Hamlet) during his college years.

By placing Alexander’s monologue at the beginning of the sequence and thecitation of religious paintings at its end, Tarkovsky emphasizes the disparitybetween materialism and spirituality. Alexander initially bears witness to hisown 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 andimage thus provide convenient bookends for the sequence, but what happens inthe middle troubles notions of before and after, of cause and effect. No mentionis made of Alexander’s swoon when he returns home, or in fact throughout therest of the film. The black-and-white images and non-diegetic shepherd’s call thatfollow Alexander’s collapse tempt viewers accustomed to Tarkovsky’s temporalinterplays 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, thesource of Alexander’s blackout remains ambiguous. The cut to catastrophiceffects is fundamentally irrational because it lacks any narrative or chronologicalmotivation. The shift from Alexander keeling over to an apocalyptic vision, setoff from the preceding shots by its lack of color, complicates any clear linkage orsignification. The edit fashions a sliding effect, in which rational connectionsbetween images attenuate and are in danger of losing time. Sandwiched betweentwo present moments—Alexander’s collapse and his scrutiny of the paintings—the image of disaster constitutes what Deleuze terms an irrational cut, spatially

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and temporally indefinite.15 Following Deleuze’s cue, David Rodowick describesthe disruptive effects produced by the irrational cut: “The interval no longerforms part of the image or sequence as the ending of one or the beginning of theother. Nor can other divisions—for example, sound in relation to image—beconsidered as continuous or extendable one into the other. The interval becomesan autonomous value.”16 Opposed to the clear temporal legibility fashioned bycontinuity editing or Eisensteinian montage, the interstice disrupts stable andmeaningful temporal articulation. Instead of establishing coherent linkages deter-mined by before and after or cause and effect, the irrational cut retains a temporalautonomy from other images. It marks the pressure of time as moving in jerksand spasms; it floats between determinate times, and figures the paradoxicalinstant when time gets lost or comes off its hinges.

Similarly, sound plays a crucial role in developing the interaction of distincttemporal flows. One cannot diegetically locate the shepherd’s call, which teetersuneasily between times and spaces. Claiming provocatively that the idea ofTarkovsky making a silent film is “inconceivable,” Michel Chion identifies theshepherd’s call as “acousmatic,” or lacking any diegetic source: “We may define itas neither inside nor outside the image.”17 In turn, Chion argues that acousmaticsounds 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 dimen-sion, it has gone elsewhere, disengaged from the present.”18 The acousmatic calldestabilizes the imagetrack and its ability to maintain control over a coherenttemporality. Inside and outside of space and time, it overlays the film’s mostambiguous images. Not long after Alexander’s prayer, a black-and-white image


Fig.4. Alexander (Erland Josephson) swoons as he considers the disparity between spiritualand material development.

shows water dripping inside a house, a recognizable figure to those familiar withTarkovsky’s films. We hear the call again in one of the film’s most oneiricmoments, as Alexander stumbles through a landscape of snow and mud. Bothimages hover inconclusively somewhere between recollection, fantasy projec-tion, or dream. As such, the acousmatic marks a temporal schism betweensound and image, the pressure of time having undermined their stable corre-spondence. In its ambiguity, it also locates Alexander in a figurative temporaland subjective elsewhere outside of physical time. Alexander appears to havelost time and lost himself as lucid subject and agent of change, suffering the syn-cope 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 fullof 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 crit-ics. Promptly shifting the tenor of the conversation, Alexander reflects on his dis-like of acting. He asserts that he gave up his nascent career because he feltplaying others embarrassed him, “But worst of all I was ashamed of being hon-est onstage. It was a critic who first saw that.” He notes how an actor’s “identi-ty dissolves in his roles. I didn’t want my ego dissolved. There was something init that struck me as sinful, something feminine and weak.” For Alexander, per-forming Shakespeare’s or Dostoevsky’s characters entails becoming someoneutterly other, which he sees as a symptom of weakness and he experiences it asan overpowering sense of loss, of a figurative “identity theft” that haunts deci-sive action.

The reference to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot resonates strongly with Tarkovsky’sown interests in health, time, and identity in artistic activity; it also invites view-ers to pause and creatively probe the connections that exist between the two pro-tagonists in each work, Alexander and Prince Myshkin.19 Significantly, theinnocent, socially naïve, and noble-hearted Myshkin suffers from epileptic fitsthat render him doubly “diseased.” His putative idiocy derives in part from hissocial awkwardness, as he struggles to comprehend the novel’s two centralfemale characters, the capricious Aglaia Epanchin and the self-destructiveNastasya Filippovna. More importantly, epilepsy marks the prince as physicallyand mentally weak, a condition that burdens all of his social interactions andinspires a profound sense of dread in his spiritual outlook. Christ-like in hisdemeanor, the prince senses a spiritual emptiness within the social circles henavigates, and his attacks attest to the utter disparity between material, finan-cial, 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-calledidiocy from the Epanchin’s patrician guests, he accidentally tips over the price-less vase and subsequently succumbs to another epileptic fit.

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Himself an epileptic, Dostoevsky describes the sudden physical and psy-chological changes that occur before and during a bout with what Slavic lan-guages term “falling sickness.”20 Initially, absent-mindedness and confusionjumble the thoughts of Myshkin, who in prior bouts “often even mixed up thingsand faces.” Conscious of his agitated state, the prince knows what will come,and this thought weighs heavily upon him. Subject to “sadness, spiritual dark-ness and oppression,” seconds before the actual swoon occurs Myshkin abrupt-ly feels this heaviness and foreboding lift, so that “his brain seemed at momentsto become aflame” and time “passed like a flash of lightning.”21 Experiencing aheightened state of self-consciousness and spiritual awareness, the prince findshimself propelled beyond simple notions of physical and mental health. Suchmoments begin with a feeling of “spiritual darkness and oppression” and thensuddenly transform into a more profound state of consciousness, in which “allhis vital forces suddenly exerted themselves to the utmost all at once.”22

In The Idiot, the instant of heightened awareness teeters precariouslybetween being understood as debilitating physical disease and a state of pro-found spiritual health. Myshkin wonders whether such moments are “nothingbut disease, the disturbance of a normal state; and if so, it was not at all the high-est 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 isa somatic disease that marks him as an idiot socially, it also allows him to moveto 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 mixedcurses that produce both intense awareness and profound despondency,Dostoevsky also reflects upon the varying time-scales that come with the suddenbouts. During one episode, Myshkin “had actually had time to say to himself inthat 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 extra-ordinary 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 ofwater had not had time to spill, though he had had the time, in that same sec-ond, to survey all the habitations of Allah.’”25 A significant disparity existsbetween time passing in a conventional sense—understood through the physicalmovement of vase from table to floor—and time passing at an incalculable rate,in which one can apprehend seemingly infinite movements and expanses. Timesuddenly hesitates by contracting to an intensified present moment that simul-taneously exhausts itself (“there shall be no more time”) and by expanding to alimitless space and time that encapsulates the “whole of life.”

By citing Alexander’s performance as Myshkin in The Sacrifice, with an


emphasis placed upon the broken vase, Tarkovsky cleverly imports a Russianwriter who thoughtfully fashioned a literature that explored health and timethrough epilepsy. Although Alexander is not a social idiot in the way the princeis, both discern a yawning fissure separating material life and spiritual life, andboth texts treat the disparity through tropes of illness and disjunctive temporali-ties. Myshkin and Alexander comprehend that “other” times, those that radicallydiffer from everyday rhythms, provide a point of access into deeper, more restora-tive temporalities. Yet whereas Dostoevsky filters the experience of epileptic timethrough Myshkin’s subjectivity, Tarkovsky figuratively shifts the experience to theviewer, who discerns differences in time-scales through falling bodies and pitchers,irrational cuts, and acousmatic voices. Like the vase that hesitates betweentimes, between actually falling to the ground and opening onto broader widthsand lengths of time, Alexander becomes a conduit of divergent times. His suddenswoon and ensuing thoughts about acting as “feminine and weak” spur furtherreflection upon subjectivity, fainting spells, and spirituality.

The pairing of time loss with ego loss occasioned by acting the role of PrinceMyshkin thus forms two coordinates for considering the consequences ofAlexander’s blackout. To drop out of time means to drop out of oneself, a dis-position that possesses two effects, like two sides of the same coin. On one hand,the fainting spell can only reinforce Alexander’s repeatedly stated overwhelmingsense of powerlessness in the face of materialism’s victory. The ego loss associ-ated with the swoon therefore forms one test on his road to recovering spiritu-ality, or at least aligning the spiritual flow with that of the material. On the otherhand, the fit disrupts the ordinary time that has perniciously trapped us in thematerial. Reason, science, and power capitalize on ordinary time, and the blackoutpresents a potential escape route from the grasp of materialism. Despite consti-tuting an ordeal for Alexander, his collapse allows him to wage his battle in thename of a time to come or, in Dostoevsky’s terms, “a moment worth the wholeof life.” It provides the “pointer to life,” the basis of Tarkovsky’s theorization offilmic time and spiritual health.

Alexander’s arrival at Maria’s stresses how losing time and ego connect tothe film’s broader concerns. When the clock sounds three bells, an agitatedAlexander implores, “We won’t have time.” Kneeling beside Maria, he begs herto “save me. Save us all!” As Alexander puts his head in her lap, Maria notesAlexander’s confusion and offers to take him home. Seconds later Alexanderaffirms his seriousness when, in a medium close-up, he retrieves a handgun andputs it to his head, stating emphatically, “Don’t kill us!” Though reluctantly com-pliant, Maria nevertheless undresses Alexander, punctuating each action with aconsoling tone. All of a sudden, an extraordinarily oneiric medium long shotdisplays the horizontal couple levitating and rotating in mid air. Maria verballyplacates 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

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the camera slowly tracks back from the pair, a disconsolate Alexander weepswhile Maria comforts him. The couple slowly rises to hover several feet aboveground, and the camera stops its movement (fig.5).

The film proceeds to repeat the black-and-white images of disaster wit-nessed earlier, in which several people are now seen fleeing toward the camera.As the camera pans downward, the shepherd’s call resumes and an awkwardverbal exchange ensues. Maria says, “There, there,” only to be interrupted byAlexander’s emphatic pleas, “No! No!” Maria asks what the problem is, andAlexander 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 bothphysically at the outset of the scene when he keels over on the bicycle and ver-bally by stammering the word “can’t.” Verbal and physical impairment doubleeach 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 pronouncedit to you, trippingly on the tongue.” The meaning of the term tripping hasan internal dialectic that relates to walking and talking. On the one hand, itmeans “stumbling,” “erring.” Thus, one might speak of a tripper as “some-one or something that causes stumbling,” often with reference to the mouthor tongue.26

Although Tarkovsky nowhere explicitly references Hamlet as a “tongue tripper,”one can conjecture that the director correlates Shakesperean physical and verbal


Fig.5. Alexander (Erland Josephson) and Maria (Gu∂rún Gísladóttir) levitate as they make love.

maladies with suspensions of time. Stuttering entails a gap between letters andwords, and the outcome of the delay is never guaranteed in advance. In an effortto speak fluently, stutterers employ substitutions that “often effect changes inmeaning,” as Shell avers.27 What happens in the middle of words or sentencesgains prominence because the “end” can turn up unexpected results.

In this light Alexander’s bicycle accident and verbal stammering do not sim-ply hinder or delay something from happening in time; rather, they form crucialcomponents of a bodily disposition that expresses a disjunctive time. It is theemphasis placed on the hiatus or hesitation that marks Tarkovsky’s films soprominently, to the point where bodies, gestures, and speech are temporarilyplaced on “pause.” In doing so, they challenge our expectations of what the nextimage will bring, what subsequent posture the body will adopt, and what tem-porality the image implies. Akin to stammering, the film’s fainting spells and lev-itation express the paradoxical moment in which time has seized up or movesonly in fits and starts, and this delay in time creates the opportunity to heal atemporal disjunction. The association of Alexander with the stammering Hamlet,who felt it necessary to set right an empty time out of joint, and the epilepticPrince Myshkin, who sensed that temporal hesitation allowed him to access a“moment worth the whole of life,” demonstrates Tarkovsky’s concern for theinterconnection between time and health.

What follows in the film remains consistent with the puzzling editing andmise-en-scène at work in Alexander’s initial loss of consciousness. Shortly afterthe shots of black-and-white disaster, we see Maria dressed as Adelaide (anoth-er stolen identity) and a naked Marta shooing chickens inside the house, imagesthat 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 isback to normal, as if the disaster had in fact been averted. A call to Alexander’seditor confirms that the world keeps on turning regularly. Alexander will thenmake good on his promise to God by performing his sacrifice of material pos-sessions and the power to speak (fig.6). After the ambulance carts away the madAlexander, Little Man revisits the tree that opened the film. Despite Alexander’sstrange behavior, The Sacrifice nonetheless achieves a great degree of closure bycoupling 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 thestructure of the gift elaborated in Jacques Derrida’s Given Time. Alexander’sgreater sacrifice cannot be accounted for by readings determined by narrativeclosure and linear temporality. Every act of giving anticipates another reciprocalact in return, so that even the most unique gift, the one least likely to have anequivalent, 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 intothe bargain. Derrida seeks to move beyond this conventional notion of the gift to

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open more radical ways of thinking of giving as an ethical act. Playing with thepolysemic word “present,” Derrida stresses that giving entails a disruption of lin-ear and rational time, which is bound to an economy of calculation andexchange. To question this restricted economy, he asks, “But is not the gift, ifthere is any, also that which interrupts economy? That which, in suspending eco-nomic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange?”28 In other words, Derridaqueries, how can the philosopher (or artist) think of giving as invoking a tem-poral, social, and libidinal economy that bypasses exchange within calculablepresents and thus radicalize the homogeneous time of giving? How can oneavoid the pitfalls of giving without receiving, when any gift or sacrifice alreadyimplies recognition by the receiver and reciprocation in the future?

Derrida proposes a quite compelling response: “For there to be gift, not onlymust the donor or donee not perceive or receive the gift as such, have no con-sciousness of it, no memory, no recognition; he or she must also forget it rightaway.”29 Consciousness, memory, and recognition of the gift by giver and/orreceiver enter into a restricted economy. When donor and/or donee experienceand recognize the act of giving in time, as an instance measured by determinatepresents and an object that “is,” they miss the more radical economy that under-pins it—a general economy that knows no exchange and entails a useless expen-diture of energy and time. Suspension of movement and exchange characterizesa general economy, and in the hiatus between giving and receiving, between tickand tock, the gift insinuates itself. For Derrida, thinking the gift thereforeinvolves a troubling aporia: the gift eludes presence in time, yet it “is not nothing.”


Fig.6. Alexander (Erland Josephson) sacrifices his home after his encounter with Maria (GudrúnGísladóttir).

To give time means to slip in between definite temporalities and stable identitiesthat could recognize or remember an exchange; to lose oneself as an ego by suf-fering blackouts and levitations; to attune one’s ear to acousmatic voices thatemerge from an indefinite spatial and temporal source; to experience a “momentworth the whole of life” as a vase sways back and forth.

Given the strange series of narrative events that end The Sacrifice, structuredas a gift in the Derridean sense, one should wonder to which sacrifice does thetitle refer? Alexander’s prayer and his subsequent sacrifice? Or Alexander’s sexualencounter with Maria, which directly precedes the return to normalcy? The firstpossible solution rests on reading the film as cyclical, the turns and returnscaused by narrative and thematic closure supporting its validity. Alexander’s sac-rifice would thus be a consequence (or deed) brought forth by his words, theprayer to God, and can be determined within a coherent, linear temporality ofbefore (praying) and after (torching the home). Occurring within an ordered time,Alexander’s actions convert religious faith (prayer) into a sacred act, therebyescaping, finally, his own helplessness. The spiritual reading of Alexander’s ges-ture thus foregrounds the beginning and end as producing closure, so that temporalpressure becomes subject to a predictable structure and a restricted economy. Infact, to gain hermeneutic currency this reading must bypass the middle portions—the images of disaster, levitation, stammerings, and fainting spells that animatethe film’s rhythm and are articulated by irrational cuts.

Signs of familial and fraternal love, gifts abound within the film and preparefor Alexander’s greater sacrifice. Yet such gifts differ in kind from Alexander’sencounter with Maria. Performing a radically different type of sacrifice as gift,Alexander offers himself and his sexual coupling with Maria in order to realigntime, to make the perverted natural order healthy once again. The moment oflevitation enacts a suspension of time and bodily movement and figures the para-doxical “instant” of the gift. Akin to his earlier fainting spell, Alexander goesnowhere in time, but he performs the gesture of giving (time). His suspendedaction fashions a rhythmic hesitation, in which orgasm is temporarily arrested,reconfiguring or readjusting the even balance of time. The film thus points to thetroublesome nature of Hamlet’s (and Alexander’s) dilemma. To set right thecursed time, or the unruly schism introduced between temporal pressures, onecannot do it in time. Rather, Alexander must become a gift of time. His swoon andlevitation 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 thecraft of filmmaking into an enterprise of health determined by temporal para-doxes. A process of sculpting in time, cinematic invention provides provocativeavenues 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

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time out of joint. These filmic elements attest to the interplay between temporalrhythms and pressures that undercut any uniform yardstick of measurement. Ahost of unusual physical maladies—including nosebleeds, stammerings, syn-copes, and levitations—that debilitate the body also gauges temporal disjunctionas a profound struggle undergone by Alexander. In spite of suffering bouts oftime sickness, Alexander slips in between times and identities to execute hisremedial sacrifice, to heal a world that has come off its hinges.

NOTES1. 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 andFaber, 1989), 80.

5. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of TexasPress, 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, whosesudden epileptic fall is very different from the stumbling that in other films precede spiri-tual illumination.” Johnson and Petrie, 174. The authors are correct in pointing out thatOtto will not attain spiritual illumination, which they argue happens in Alexander’s case. Iwill test that conclusion in my analysis of Alexander’s fall below, but for now, Ottoremains a crucial, albeit secondary, character.

15. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Robert Galeta and HughTomlinson (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 (NewYork: 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 corre-spondences between Dostoevsky’s Myshkin and Tarkovsky’s Alexander and encouragingme to pursue them as maladies of time.

20. One of the anonymous readers pointed out this linguistic nuance. A productive trope, theterm reverberates across Tarkovsky’s corpus and The Sacrifice. One immediately thinks ofthe failed balloon flight that opens Andrei Rublev (1969) or the apples that jump fromthe moving cart in Ivan’s Childhood (1962), both of which suggest a sudden return fromspiritual realms to those earthly. The reference in The Sacrifice to Prince Myshkin, thefalling pitcher, the sudden bicycle accidents, and the several fainting spells enter into cre-ative relationships with spirituality that cogently develop cinema as a health.


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 ofFlorida. His dissertation, entitled “The Chronotopic Imagination: Aberrant Timesand Figures in Cinema” renews study of time and the body in cinema. He is Co-Principal Investigator of “Catastrophe: Disruptions in Time,” funded by theUniversity of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study.

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