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The Long Take: Messianic Time in Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14797580903244753

1740-1666

Gerard Loughlin,

Digital Media and Philosophy

Abstract This article invokes Giorgio Agamben's discussion of messianic time in his 2005 book The Time That Remains in order to explore Andrei Tarkovsky's late film, Nostalghia (1983). Agamben is wandering in a foreign land, as also Tarkovsky; Agamben in Christian theology and Tarkovsky in Italy. In St Paul Agamben finds an event without precedent and the arrival of a time that is time beside itself, an excess of temporality that opens possibility. Tarkovsky similarly defeats mere succession by realizing a screen time that makes time itself present in the duration of the film's long takes. In waiting on the film we wait on that which arrives in our waiting. The film is a kind of prayer, a patience and yearning for the time in which the “time of the end” arrives, transfiguring the present. Notes 2. See also Angus MacKinnon's interview with Tarkovsky in Gianvito Citation2006, pp. 155–162. “Nostalghia … is an exact reprint of my state of mind; it was my deed. I really wouldn't want to watch it again – it would be the same as someone who is ill looking at an x‐ray of their illness” (p. 159). 1. With others, I follow Tarkovsky's spelling of the title, as it appears in the film. 3. For the poems in translation see respectively Dunne Citation2008, p. 411 and Tarkovsky Citation1996, p. 215. The first is translated by Alexander Nemser and Nariman Skakov, the second by Kitty Hunter Blair. But the poems — ‘In Childhood I Fell Ill’ and ‘My Sight, My Strength, Grows Dim’ — are also translated by Virginia Rounding in Tarkovsky Citation2007, p. 70 and 73. For the originals see Tarkovsky Citation1991–93. 4. The eponymous Andrei Rublev (Citation1969) and Stalker (Citation1979), Domenico and Gorchakov in Nostalghia (Citation1983), and Alexander in The Sacrifice (Citation1986). 5. In the script the question is asked in response to seeing an ‘amazing landscape before sunset.’ ‘The ridges of the hills, covered in a haze, fluidly flow one after the other, like waves, each lit up in a distinct colour. The green evening sky, with the first star in the east, the immobile silhouettes of the slumbering trees on the gentle slopes, gilded in the transcendent mist and the quiet, magical light of the fading day shining on the pallid faces of the people locked away for so long’ (Guerro & Tarkovsky Citation1999, pp. 491–492). 6. In the script he meets a young boy, Marco (Guerra & Tarkovsky Citation1999, pp. 494–495). 7. The exchange is slightly more extended in the film. 8. The doctor (Anatoly Solonitsyn) hears the buzzing of insects when he falls off the fence at the beginning of Mirror (Citation1974), and lies on the earth beside Masha (Margarita Terekhova) — the ‘mother’ in what is a highly autobiographical film. Solonitsyn was Tarkovsky's first choice for the role of Gorchakov in Nostalghia, a character who is wanting to hear the insects. For discussion of the scene in Mirror see Loughlin Citation2007, pp. 290–291, 298–299. 9. The novels of Dostoyevsky (1821–81), especially The Idiot (1868–9), resonate in the film. Tarkovsky was writing a treatment of the latter while also working on Nostalghia. In fact he envisaged that The Idiot would require two films, disrupting, as he noted in his diary, ‘the sequence of the plot, and the episodes, because structure is not at all the same in literature as it is in film’ (25 July 1980; Tarkovsky Citation1994, p. 264). See further ‘On The Idiot’ in Tarkovsky Citation1994, pp. 371–377. 10. The fruit of paradise and the loss of Eden is a recurring theme in Tarkovsky's work. For a discussion of this in Ivan's Childhood (Citation1962) see Óttarsson Citation2006, pp. 175–76. 11. This sentiment is at the heart of Tarkovsky's Dostoevsky, who ‘was not so much religious as one of the first to express the drama of the man in whom the organ of belief has atrophied. He dealt with the tragedy of the loss of spirituality. All his heroes are people who would like to believe but cannot, and it seems to me that it is this concern with spiritual emptiness, with the crisis of religiosity, that explains the enormous interest in Dostoevsky here in the West’ (Tarkovsky to Ian Christie [1981] in Gianvito Citation2006, p. 68). Tarkovsky is describing the Dostoevskian hero, but he is also describing his own, and especially Gorchakov in Nostalghia. 12. In the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible it is a ‘stream’ that rises from the earth. 13. For a discussion of this scene see Loughlin Citation2008a.