Architectural Settings in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky
…I always thought it important – to the extent human spirit is indestructible – to show matter, which is subject to decay, destruction – as opposed to spirit which is indestructible.
- Andrey Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky’s disinterest in time as a determining factor of human life(i) stems from the belief that the essence of existence is contained in the timeless, almost archetypal, concepts of faith, home, nature, roots, the physical and spiritual journey through the world in search of one’s identity, the strive for spiritual integrity or the dissolution of it, among others. A part of its power the Tarkovsky image owes to its ability to encompass those concepts in their mere visual real-life manifestations, directly affecting the senses. “Thought is brief, whereas the image is absolute,” writes the director in his artistic testament Sculpting In Time (Tarkovsky, 41) and even in the most nonspecific of his ideas there exists the resonance of his denunciation of the relevance of chronological unfolding of time. In his own writings, the director restates multiple times his reliance on the directness of impact which visual information exerts on the beholder, epitomized by the still image, the viewing perspective remaining either static or, at the most, changing via barely noticeable shifts over long periods of time. More than anything, Tarkovsky’s visual images are contemplative in the nature of response they induce in the viewer, and their quality lies in their lack of clearly defined edges of meaning, which demands to be experienced perceptually, almost primitively, as a sensory device. Images articulate that which words fail to, due to the inherent quality of the visual to act on the realm of the subconscious, whereas language and thoughts are necessarily assimilated through a conscious process of translation, considered by the director as inevitably detrimental to the intensity of the image’s impact with emotions.
As one of the few auteur* figures in Russian cinema (if not the only one), throughout his professional career Tarkovsky manages to develop a unique stylistic vocabulary (not surprisingly considering himself an artist before all) through visual methods that are not defined by cinematographic typology. The Tarkovsky image is a distinct symbiosis between ultimate authenticity (the so-called real quality of everyday life) of the visual compositional elements, and complex sub-layers of inarticulate philosophical meanings, cultural references and narrative clues, all of which congregate in the totality of the film image. “No one component of a film can have any meaning in isolation: it is the film that is the work of art” (Sculpting, 114), not its composite art forms as generally regarded. Studying the use of architectural settings in isolation in Stalker, Mirror, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice thus proves a challenge verging on inadequacy, unless one recognizes it as is an integral element of both the compositional and the semiotic parts of the structure. It is viable to claim that architecture exists not as an impersonal subcategory of those, but as a cinematographic entity independent in its own right, yet one whose only validation for existence is its interrelation with both form and content.
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In Stalker the interior of the protagonist’s home is essentially a vast empty space where the walls are crude, as if unfinished, and the furniture is brought to a minimum of most needed objects, arranged with no specific significance of aesthetic care or use-efficiency. The scenes further on, when narrative takes place in the Zone itself, reflect the same eerie atmosphere as in the opening scenes. Every surface, regardless of whether it is interior, exterior (the distinction often cannot even be pinpointed due to the close-up framing of shots) is permeated by subdued cold sepia-blue colors and a feel of moisture, typical of deserted locations where human existence has fled from its artifacts. As a formal gesture, one of the most prominent features of Tarkovsky’s use of architectural setting is to conjure up an atmosphere of a surreal level of existence - a stylistic mark not only suitable for the script of Stalker but also pertinent to all four films. Everything bears the merciless signature of time, but peculiarly enough the power of time is not conventionally implied as the cause for natural destruction, but as indicative of deterioration that is happening simultaneously with life. Thus the unreal atmosphere not only serves as a visual-compositional factor - it signifies the first recurrent major semiotic motif in Tarkovsky’s movies - that of spirituality as the core of existence and the lack of it in the physical dimension of the world. The lack of natural signs of life in the surrounding architecture is present even in the inhabitable space of the Stalker’s home, vocalizing an ambiguous prison-like quality of functioning man-made structures and disconnection of man from his surroundings (“I am imprisoned everywhere,” Stalker, Stalker).
The confinement of the human by the physicality of the real world manifested as a sickly existence that is embodied in the decrepitude of human artifacts is a concept which exceeds the specifics the particular script demands. It is rather a recurrent philosophical aspect in Tarkovsky’s artistic motivation, as well as central for his personal philosophy(ii). The idea was initially formulated by Henri Bergson, an early 20th century French philosopher, who was one of the most influential figures in the development of Russian existentialist philosophy - and one of Tarkovsky’s intellectual cornerstones, as mentioned in Sculpting in Time. Bergson formulated an entirely new theory about the spiritual life of the human being, the premise of which was to overcome the gap between spirit and matter, between the physical confinements of the human and the timeless infinity of the surrounding world.iii
This said, the complex nature of architecture in Tarkovsky’s movies is more clearly understood as a compositional device that also takes on an important narrative function. At the transitional point in Stalker when the characters enter from the ‘real’ world into the Zone, Tarkovsky does not hesitate to ascribe to architectural settings the untraditional role of an active narrative element with an inherent power to amend the conditions of narrative logic. In the warehouse scene there is the radical rupture of familiar natural spatial and temporal relations of events. Fast transition from open into enclosed spaces, among deserted (almost unreal) industrial structures perplexes the sensual orientation of the viewer until finally open space disintegrates into fragments and shrinks into narrow and hostile-looking interiors – a metaphoric entrance into the Zone. Similarly, in The Sacrifice, apocalyptical events (inflicted on the world by humans) are represented by ominous views of architectural debris and various shattered artifacts among which frantically running human figures are shown.
Architecture in Tarkovsky however, reveals rather than conceals. Upon entering the Zone, the physical possesses the same unaesthetic formal characteristics of realistic authenticity as it does in reality (meticulously rendered surface textures, sharpness of focus that almost reaches a painful clarity, all building up a paradoxical feeling of grotesque beauty of the Tarkovsky movie). The transitional point into the Zone consists not in the change of visual or tactile quality through traditional cinematographic “gimmick” (Sculpting, 133) techniques to indicate a break with the real, but in the minimalization of expressive means. The unusual and the mystical are signified by the radical rupture of natural spatial and temporal connectivity of the physical world. Fewer and more austere-looking architectural elements are present, mostly remnants of cultures and ages; the presence of the human beings is the only force that holds the decrepit place together. Most shots, furthermore, consist of close-ups (revealing portions of walls as background) thus eliminating any point of reference – one has no spatial clues about the hierarchy or dimensions of spaces. The lack of a consistent point of view is strengthened by these glimpses of identifiable structures and surfaces, so that the viewer is engaged into the narrative by trying to spatially orient themselves. This amplifies the ‘labyrinth’ feeling of sensory disorientation and uncertainty, and with it the tension of despair and senselessness – until the spatial chaos and illogicality reaches its culmination in the Room itself. Considering the Zone as an allegory of the world of eternity where humans have come to find their spiritual selves, and referring to Bergson’s theory, the disintegration of matter and logic of the physical world only intensifies the futile nature of the quest to find one’s identity. The spirit in modern man has thus atrophied into pragmatism and arrogant atheism.
The idea carries over in the use of architecture in Nostalghia, where the relationship between man and his material surroundings, is presented as entirely mechanicaliv, devoid of the most remote sense of interaction between the protagonist and the immediate material dimension of existence surrounding him. A significant portion of the narrative takes place in a hotel room in Italy, offering every commodity for existence to a modern man. Yet the viewer cannot escape the burdensome feeling of lethargy, the lack of creative energy for life – rather the energy of the cinematographic images invested into evocating the degrading quality of physical edifices and paraphernalia that were meant to serve man.
Western film critics have often labeled Tarkovsky’s use of materials as impoverished and lacking in stylev; however, the director’s choice is more of an intentional stylistic gesture which, in all four films, is central to conveying his underlying motif of a modern society bound to self destruction. The same visual elements of Stalker are used in Nostalghia to represent modern conditions of existence - blank walls, a limited grey chromatic zone, especially the lack of perspective through the window openings – faced by a solid stone wall, a gesture which intensifies the claustrophobic feeling of imprisonment caused by separation from one’s cultural roots. Similarly, in Mirror, interiors are hollow and sterile, especially in the printing press scene where the emotional response evoked by the dehumanized hallways and artificial lighting is takes uneasiness to its extreme – a predatory sense of terror. Tarkovsky manages to capture with acute exactitude the psychological effects which structures are capable of exerting upon the individual, undeniably based on his own experience of the aesthetic brutalities of socialist realism.
It is as if these sterile impersonal interiors have gained the power to suffocate the spirit and reflect the tormented psychological condition of the protagonists by virtue of their detachment from anything remotely aesthetical and spiritual. Even the grandeur of classical architecture is bestowed a discomforting quality of solitude, they somehow lack the richness of culture and spirituality acquired with ages, as is the stereotype in films and literature. The solitary feeling embodied in those structures (essentially cathedrals and other religious architecture) is created by recurrent shots of long monotonous surfaces (massive stone walls with no indications of beginning, end or dimensions), as if humans have left the structures they have once raised to extol their devotion to the Christian God and have thus abandoned Him and their own spirituality altogether, as shown in the last scene of the deserted Italian cathedral.
Architectural surrounding in Nostalghia is given yet another dimension through the discrepancy in scale between the grandiose dimensions of classicism and the complete detachment of the minute human figures, almost victimizing the individual, who appears fragile and lost amongst massive columns, and vast stone structures which reverberate with emptiness. Tarkovsky maneuvers with the technique of open, broad viewing perspective just as convincingly as he does with close-up shots of architectural detail, depending on the specific semiotic needs of individual scenes. The desolate atmosphere is further accentuated by the length of individual shots, as Tarkovsky relies on stretching of the perception of time to emphasize every object, even the most minute, as meaningful; every gesture is blown up in scale because of the static quality of the settings and of camera motion.
Upon further observation, the nervous and uneasy atmosphere of Tarkovsky’s interiors and exteriors appears to be projected onto the surroundings by the unhealthy psychological state of the characters itself, just as much as surroundings induce oppressive feelings. Architecture has absorbed the degree of the emotional intensity being experienced by the image of the tormented protagonist. The question of where the source of the suffocating feeling of despair in Tarkovsky’s films lies - whether the settings force it or the characters project it on their surroundings – remains stubbornly unclear. It is especially so, when one considers the degree of detachment of humans, their unconscious refusal to ‘conquer’ or ‘utilize’ the physical for their own convenience in a deterministic quest for the healing effects of spirituality. According to Tarkovsky’s own artistic statements on the relationship between character and setting, meaning is carried equally between the two and born out of the very act of interaction between the two, of the unique specificity of different situations presented, where all elements are equally important for expressing ideas. This epitomizes the general belief of the director that “the cinema image is observation of life’s facts within time, organized according to the pattern of life itself” (Sculpting 68), an approach which accounts for the simple yet heavy with meaning images. He ), most likely by virtue of the fact that his works take on the individual significance of conditions of human existence as opposed to grand historical themes as was the common practice of propagandistic and heroic thematic of Soviet Union cinema. attempts to find universal meaning in every-day detail, claiming that “Imagination is less rich than life.” (Sculpting 127) The effect is obvious in the fact that Tarkovsky’s films address a variety of audience circles and age groups (as seen in various critical accounts on his career and in his own interviews(vi)
A necessary philosophical detour - Bergson’s theory laid the foundations for Tarkovsky to identify memories as the spiritual core of man’s identity*, a theory which justifies his preoccupation with the timeless conflict between spirituality and materiality, of man’s spiritual journey through the physical obstacles of the surrounding world and the search for identity in memories. The only architectural images that bear relatively wholesome connotations are the ones representing home, specifically the home of childhood. The dream or recollection moments which represent the characters’ home are the few instances when architectural entities in Tarkovsky’s work are depicted as intact, not falling apart, even welcoming. In this respect architectural setting could also serve as a synecdoche in Tarkovsky’s wide range of imagery use. In the sphere of the narratives, home represents the concepts of security, motherhood, childhood, family, also Russia as the lost motherland. In the sphere of Russian cultural connotations, which comprise the semiotic totality uniting Tarkovsky’s work, it also stands for the nurturing forces of the earth and nature from which the human race has irreversibly alienated itself. Considering Russia’s strong traditional values and cultural ideas shared and passed from generation to generation, the images of home and landscape bear a metaphoric weight which is hardly recognized by the Western world viewer – they are both general in their recognizability as well as retaining individual references to particular ideas of the films.
Thus, as one of the icons of memory, the childhood home is a semiotic element of dual nature. Its importance lies in the therapeutic power to heal the ruptures of identity during the process of remembering. This process is an unconscious summoning of memories of the lost home to which the protagonist has no way of returning. The motif of returning to the long lost home does not mean their quest is not necessarily deemed futile because the journey through the soul is its own and only ramification - what matters is the journey not the final destination (“The path is infinite. And the journey has no end” Tarkovsky, Interview, 1985). However, the nature of memories is not optimistically entitled with a magical power to remedy the fragmentation or loss of identity. As any of Tarkovsky’s concepts, it is ambiguous: “as a moral being, man is endowed with memory which sows in him a sense of dissatisfaction, it makes him vulnerable, subject to pain.” (Sculpting 59) As much as they heal, memories also bring down the spirit, by placing the individual in a state of destined impotence upon realization that the ideals of an organic bond between man and his world are forever lost.
The heightened awareness of aural and visual detail in Tarkovsky's dream representations of home testifies to this complex emotional imperative, especially powerful in Mirror. Probably the most exact description of the effect of Tarkovsky’s most ‘difficult’ film would be Vida Johnson’s observation that the film logic is entirely governed by emotional, not rational, plausibility.vii To a significant extent architecture becomes an extension of the psychological predisposition of the protagonist. The familiar qualities of empty interiors are present in the apartment scenes, where no particular signs of aesthetic taste (decoration) or time-signifiers are exist. A significant number of the apartment scenes are permeated by a feeling of emptiness where the narrative is the only indicator of human existence, and he is present not visually but only in the form of an anonymous voice. A ghastly and undefined feeling of void thus builds up; even when human figures (the mother and son) appear, the sense of claustrophobia is still present, accentuated by the repetitiveness and “dreariness of [the spouses’] arguments” (Johnson, 127). The cinematographic technique is repeated later in The Sacrifice, where the desaturated color effects, the metallic colors of the interiors, create a coldness that “echoes the characters’ empty relationships with each other, matching the deliberate formality of their movements, gestures and poses.” (Johnson, 180).
Architecture in Mirror functions as a mere pictorial device which aims to express transcendent ideas of cultural heritage and the narrator’s search for his identity through means of association. He tries to place himself within the timeless concepts of past, nation and history more so than attempting to reach reconciliation within the specific places and people in which have a personal meaning to his present life. It also functions as a device which helps tie the scattered time-frames together, by presenting recognizable elements which indicate whether the particular event takes pertains to the past or present. In the scenes of childhood, the dacha (traditional rural Russian home) is essential to the narrative logic, since it represents the place where he found and then irreversibly lost his connection to the nurturing (for the spirit) values of mother and family. The moment when the barn burns down bears strong connotations of a breaking point in the life of the protagonist. It represents an event which defies common logic – fire in the rain – and is indicative of the personal catastrophe of the family being shattered by the loss of the father. The fire scene is closely followed by a childhood dream scene in which his home is represented as literally falling apart into fragments – a visual account of a disrupted childhood. After that point, the home is not an intact entity anymore and translates into the present in feelings of failed responsibility and guilt(viii).
Architecture has also a peculiar relationship with time in the films. Since the present in all four movies only signifies, through its corrupted materiality, a spiritual degradation and frustration, the structures of the present accordingly retain no emotional attachment for the characters. Andrei, in Nostalghia, treats the classical and modern beauty of Italy with an almost misanthropic denunciation, and documentation on the production process points that Tarkovsky was aiming precisely at that effect: upon examining possible locations for shooting, rejected most of them as “too Beautiful” (Johnson 157). On the other hand a dream image of the past reveals Andrei’s home in the motherland, which is the same recurrent visual motif as in Mirror – unpretentious, yet welcoming and homey house amidst nature – a rarely peaceful image. It is clearly loaded with intense emotional and cultural positivity by virtue of the fact that in Andrei’s dreams it epitomizes not a hostile modernity but the past where the roots of his spirituality lie.
Architecture, therefore, is a physical manifestation of Tarkovsky’s understanding of the subjective category of time – as he considers time as a congregation of fragmented ‘states’ which comprise individual lives. These states, unchanging entities of memory, are usually separated by the emotional content the individual invests in them - and so are all places, artifacts and people pertaining to these highly personalized states. This results in the montage technique which the director uses Nostalghia and Mirror, allowing for time fragments to govern the narrative by being chronologically unrelated, scattered and sometimes even superimposed on each other in order to convey the fragmentation of human life, as in the last scene of Nostalghia. The scene is indicative of Tarkovsky’s method of utilizing stillness to create a sense of disparity(ix).
The element of fire has a strong connection with architectural setting in the movies, The burning of the home is a motif which occurs in The Sacrifice as well and bears even more important meaning to the idea of the film than it does in Mirror. Tarkovsky’s last film opens the narrative with a monologue given by the protagonist to his young son, in which the home is initially presented as a cherished memory, equated to a period of happiness and optimism in the life of Alexander. As the narrative progresses however, the home turns into an imprisoning physical constrained in which psychological torment and unstable relationships flourish. Until finally the home becomes the object of Alexander’s sacrifice – not in the name of salvation of humanity from a nuclear disaster, but a way of temporary relief of the tormented spirit. By burning the home which ones was the valued core of family happiness, Alexander attempts to eradicate, to the extent allowed by the constraints of his personal world, the corrupted in human nature which he sees represented in the house, the cause of his personal misfortune.
The image of the home in The Sacrifice is repeated in the model made by the child, as a possible sign of appropriation, through recreation, of the world by a human being at the very beginning of the process of maturing. The shift in perspective from large to small and vice versa, also possibly indicated the realization of the feeble nature of the human spirit. Tarkovsky seems play with the concept in a contradictory manner, by implying that the spirit of man contains the power of creation (the child) and destruction (the father) at their own whim, ascribing to man the power of a divine creator. At the very end of the film, though the real home is destroyed, the copy remains in the world (even only as a part of the realizations of the boy about the place he occupies in the surrounding world), as a metaphor of the seed of spiritual harmony which would be nurtured by the child just like the dead Japanese tree.
Natural elements work in close interaction with architecture to achieve certain cinematographic effects. Fire is the most expressive one, presenting the destructive potential of humanity over its own artifacts. Water, however, is another one which traditionally embodies the power of nature over man-made structures. Tarkovsky’s use of water is another recurrent motif, which, for one, serves a technical function – when combined with solid structures it adds significantly to the audio texture of the films. Conceptually, it takes the readability of imagery further, most often seen in flooded interiors of abandoned (often religious) buildings, which the characters physically walk through. The relationship could be read in Jungian terms, for whom bodies of water represent the subconscious level of man’s identity, the contents of which they are unaware of, regardless of how hard they try to investigate it or what is evident on the surface . The moment of Stalker where water is a central element is evoked, as the characters slowly reaching realizations about their inner selves.
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Even though architectural settings at first sight might appear lifeless structures due to the an-aesthetic quality they have in Tarkovsky’s movies, they are incredibly complex entities of visual and conceptual significance, much in the spirit of the director’s claim that “the artistic image cannot be one-sided: in order justly to be called truthful, it has to unite within itself dialectically contradictory phenomena.” (Sculpting 54) Indeed, before all, the director uses it as yet another set element of the compositions of film frames. Regardless of their nature (be it architecture, landscape, natural elements,x characters, relationships), all cinematographic means are united by the fact that to recreate life(x) is film’s purpose and its only possible execution which renders it successful. Dissecting Stalker, Mirror, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice into independent elements of composition, cinematographic technique, and narrative logic would thus be tantamount to a rather one-sided attempt to comprehend the difficulty of his movies. Architecture’s function occupies a state in between being a formal, and detached from narrative and psychological dynamics, compositional element and an active element with its own power to affect the narrative and psychological dynamics. It possesses both of these qualities, but extends the first one immensely and does not impose on the second. Occupying this peculiar state, architectural setting is one of the aspects of Tarkovsky’s movies which renders central the ability to recognize the higher level of dialogue. Tarkovsky’s work falls into the category of intellectual cinema recognized by Eisenstein several decades earlier(xi) in which the content as expressed by image-sensual structures, not narrative, is the essential quality of the film.
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footnotes:
i Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting In Time, 2000. pp. 41
* auteur – a film director whose personal influence and artistic control over his or her films are so great that he or she may be regarded as their author, and whose films may be regarded collectively as a body of work sharing common themes or techniques and expressing individual style or vision.
ii Andrei. Sculpting In Time, 2000. pp. 36-56
iii Evlampiev, Igor. Khudozhestvennaya Filosofiya Andreya Tarkovskogo, 2001. pp. 120-122
iv Evlampiev, Igor. pp. 271
v Johnson, Vida. The Films Of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, 1994. pp. 143
vi Tarkovsky, Andrei. Interview: “The Problem of Inner Freedom.” Stockholm, 1985.
* For Bergson the human consciousness was identical with his spirit and they were an unchanging system of relationships encompassing and being encompassed by the world, as the common layer the ‘world’ and the ‘human’ shared was personal memory.
vii Johnson, Vida. pp.124
viii Johnson, Vida. pp. 122
ix Lamster, Mark, ed. Architecture and Film, 2000. pp. 115
x Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting In Time, 2000. pp. 65
xi Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, 1949. pp. 128-132
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Bibliography of Works Consulted
Primary:
? Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting In Time. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000
? Tarkovsky, Andrei. Symbols vs. Metaphor. Interviews. https://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Symbols.html Retrieved 12/14/03
? Tarkovsky, Andrei. Interview: “The Problem of Inner Freedom.” Illig, Jerzy and Neuger, Leonard. Stockholm, 1985. https://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/interview.html Retrieved 12/14/03
Secondary:
? Johnson, Vida. The Films Of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994
? Klimoff, E., Zorkaya, N, ed. Mir I Filmy Andreia Tarkovskogo. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1991
? Turovskaya, M, ed. 7 ? Ili Filmy Andreia Tarkovskogo. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1991
? Evlampiev, Igor. Khudozhestvennaya Filosofiya Andreya Tarkovskogo. St. Petersburg: Aleteya, 2001
? Gillespie, David. Soviet Cinema. Essex: Pearson Education Press, 2003
Tertiary:
? Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1949
? Sitney Adams, ed. The Avant-Garde Film. New York: New York University Press, 1987
? Lamster, Mark, ed. Architecture and Film. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000
? Brougher, Kerry. Art and Film Since 1945, Hall Of Mirrors. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Monacelli Press, 1992