In the last month I’ve watched Tarkovsky’s oeuvre of seven films (I ignored his student work and his later documentary). Three (Stalker, Solaris, Mirror) I had seen multiple times before; Stalker remains, for me, a masterpiece and the one to watch if you simply want to dip briefly into Tarkovsky ... but a dipping would be a mistake. He’s a director to lingeringly bathe in. Like Joyce in literature, Tarkovsky doesn’t produce any mediocrity. There are forces of nature in art which produce works prodigiously: some, like Balzac, at over 90 novels, leave me consistently cool; others, like Hitchcock, with over 50 films, create a few masterpieces, with the rest largely competent or good. But each of Tarkovsky’s films is a distinctive jewel, a provocative mystic-meditative emotionally potent exploration of human existence. His technical trademarks—long takes, silence and water (who does water like he?), a periodic and strategic use of colour—and his grounded big themes—god, love, death, desire, suffering, innocence, hope—combine enticingly, seamlessly; I am frequently awed by the Rembrandt-beauty of his images: impeccably nuanced, stunning, eternal.
Many of his films feature a child at their spiritual center. Both Stalker and The Sacrifice end with such a fusion of futility and hope through the character of a child that this impossible union seems to become (but is it?) the very noblest aim of art and spirit.
In The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky stretches his typical themes—our themes—further into Western myth, particularly through the end of the cycle of the Word (the death of God, the threat to patriarchy, the puncturing of monism and the One). It ends, after an apocalyptic descent somewhat reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Ran (the Lear figure, broken, mad, his world in flames), with the child by the dead tree his father planted for him, having told him the story before his descent, in fairytale fashion, of how a monk had watered a dead tree daily for three years, at which point it was found one morning alive and blossoming. His father now mad and gone, the apocalypse seemingly averted, the child lies on his back beneath the tree after having watered it and muses,
In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?
I have a sense that the boy sets the question aside as largely irrelevant (a historical curiosity, to use language he wouldn’t use) and instead calmly, slowly, engages in his dream of faith in a dead tree that, through patience and hope, comes alive.
Curiously and perhaps aptly, Tarkovsky died shortly after The Sacrifice was completed; the film is dedicated to his son.
