Nostalghia by Andrei Tarkovsky: Reconfiguring Nostalgia Through Representational Aesthetics
Note: This post has an audio-visual recording on loop at the bottom and can be unmuted or/and paused manually.
Nostalghia (1983) by Andrei Tarkovsky
Watching any of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films is a form of prolonged meditation. Every Tarkovsky film that I have watched has always left me in deeply introspective reveries while slowly growing on me, with the exception of Mirror and Stalker which left indelible imprints on me as soon as I finished watching them. I think it is Tarkovsky’s uncanny ability to make me continually revisit and replay certain scenes in his films that truly makes him the greatest in my eyes. Nostalghia (1983) was no different.
I decided to watch this film because a friend in Andorra had very recently watched it and sent me a small video recording of an incredibly shot sequence accompanied by a superb monophonic sound design. However, as with every Tarkovsky film, I had to take a couple of days to mentally prepare myself to sit down and watch it in one sitting. I cannot eat when I watch his cinema. Not because I choose not to, but rather because his films are so arresting in nature that I have no choice at all in this matter. Once I finished Nostalghia, I had to simmer in my thoughts for a couple of more days until the disorientation of watching it wore off as I slowly absorbed enough to write this review.
I can understand why a lot of cinephiles would recommend Nostalghia as a starting point for anyone who is interested in understanding Tarkovsky’s cinematic oeuvre. It is, after all, the only non-Russian film that he made outside of the Soviet Union. Unlike most of his other films, this film has a discernable plot, at least in the beginning. A Russian poet is on an intellectual journey to unearth the life of a deceased Russian composer Pavel Soznovsky who had visited Italy in the 17th century before returning to Russia and drinking himself to death. It seems simple and straightforward enough but viewers are thrown off-guard right from the moment the film begins with a car stopping in the middle of a misty meadow as a woman who happens to be a translator (Domiziana Giordano) gets off to make her way to a church at the behest of the protagonist Andrei (Oleg Yankovsky). There are Christian overtones that very quickly define the purpose of a woman but this trope is only sparingly brought up in the rest of the film.
Andrei is already quite tired of the lush beauty of Italy which is so different from the desolate landscapes of Russia but this is not translated in the visual sequences of the film. On the contrary, the viewers are left confused about whether the protagonist and his translator are really in Italy or in Russia. This is the genius of Tarkovsky. He deftly creates a sense of confusion in the very first minute of the film. Tarkovsky had deliberately chosen to shoot in a small area of Tuscany for its resemblance to the countryside that surrounded Moscow. The theme of nostalgia has already aesthetically permeated through this carefully crafted mise-en-scene.
Andrei is unable to forget the uncultivated countryside of Russia where his wife and family await his return while his translator Eugenia recites a poem by Arsenii Tarkovsky (Andrei Tarkovsky’s father) in Italian only to be told by Andrei that the true meaning of the poem is lost in translation and that art cannot be translated. The short discourse is an intellectual one wherein Eugenia challenges this break by mentioning that music needs no translation and can be felt without words. The theme of untranslatability is now planted in the narrative along with the cultural clashes that happen within the realm of translation. Eugenia and Andrei do not get along well. In my understanding, this scene was Tarkovsky’s oblique attempt at trying to showcase the difficulties of a Western audience trying to understand Russian sensibilities and also a means of depicting how they perceived his films.
As the film progresses, viewers witness that Tarkovsky introduces a madman by the name of Domenico (Erland Josephson), who becomes a subject of great interest for Andrei the protagonist. Domenico and Eugenia undergo a disconnect almost as soon as the latter tries to pry information out of him at the request of her client. She leaves the scene which moves on to Andrei striking up a conversation with Domenico as the latter cycles relentlessly on a broken, stationary bicycle. After successfully befriending Domenico, Tarkovsky challenges the theme of untranslatability by bridging the gap between the insane and the sane. Andrei is invited into Domenico’s abode and this is where memories of the sane and the insane begin to mingle with reality.
Tarkovsky uses two distinct palettes to showcase two narratives that interweave and propel the film to the end. One is the etiolated color palette that primarily comprises hues of brown and green, and the other is an austere palette of silver and gray that denote nostalgic flashbacks. The choice of colors is deliberate, greens and browns represent earthiness or the materiality of reality, whereas the silver and grays represent ethereality. The etiolation is once again a deliberate choice, which in my understanding, was made to chromatically indicate how Andrei is unable to truly experience his lived reality in Italy.
However, the true potential of these two narratives and color palettes is achieved only through their repeated intercuts. Andrei is unable to commit to his research as he continually longs for his family and has flashbacks of Russia. His nostalgia is not a romanticized, easily assimilable, and palatable past memory that the postmodernists fondly theorize about. It is a deeper, more serious, and continual longing that is impossible to fulfill because it is more imagination than past reality. And thus, it acquires a debilitating quality that slows down and stalls Andrei from returning home.
One would ask, how does Tarkovsky show such a complex, avant-garde reconfiguring of nostalgia? The idea of nostalgia becomes precisely the locus of most of Tarkovsky’s characteristic cinematic devices that function as visual correlatives of complex emotion that exteriorize the inner experience of the characters in the film. He deploys the same slow tracking camera movements that he had used in Stalker while offering the viewers very similar painterly shots of nature and Yankovsky to push them into psychological excursions. The medieval architecture in slow decay and ruin with moss and foliage growing as puddles glisten in the misty light of the day, are visual indicators of the fallibility and porousness of human memory that transforms into nostalgia with time and separation. Nostalghia, much like his other films, urges the viewers to engage with the interiority of the protagonist as he dreams and while he dreams, his mind melds reality with it, thus rejecting the modernist desire for teleological progression. By focusing on the extended mind-states and flashbacks of both Andrei and Domenico, Tarkovsky not only rejects the Soviet Socialist film style of representing daily, objective realities of propaganda films sanctioned by the state, he also fights against the passive, brain-dead mass appeal of cinema that Walter Benjamin warned the world about in his seminal essay “Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction”.
Tarkovsky continually resists the surface model or simulacra and escapism of modern cinema by pushing his depth model of cinema and subsequently challenging the “pastiche” of postmodernism that solely relies on a consumption of the past that is bereft of the viewers’ lived experience. Tarkovsky uses a deconstructionist approach to portray the erosion of deep, meaningful engagement and experience through his increasingly tortured protagonist who slowly but surely loses his agency with respect to carrying out his research. Andrei no longer simply remembers the past. His “nostalgia” is the past that is embellished by his imagination, and imagination as we know it is never lived in reality because if it were, then it would cease to be what it is. The more he familiarizes himself with the memories of Domenico, the more caged he is in his self-sustaining bubble of nostalgia. The camera takes become ever so slow at this point. Viewers truly sink into these delirious reveries of both Domenico and Andrei and this is where the intercutting of flashbacks merges the seemingly insurmountable bridge of untranslatability of culture, language, space, the past, and the present. The moment of their complete merge is crystallized when Andrei sees Domenico instead of his reflection in a mirror. Andrei is no longer completely sane and his longing can no longer be rationalized. At the same time, we notice in the subsequent mise-en-scenes that the puddles increase in number, and Domenico’s abode slowly overflows with water.
Water is a recurring symbolist imagery in Tarkovsky’s works. It is almost always Tarkovsky’s symbol of memory but in Nostalghia it denotes nostalgia as well as depression. Andrei keeps taking pills and even undergoes an episode of nose-bleeding due to his medication and as the film progresses, the waters rise, and his depression proportionally deepens. There is more stasis and more silence in Tarkovsky’s long shots as they function as forms of free indirect discourse created by the understanding and reception of the scenes by the individual viewer.
Andrei is completely immobilized by his dreams and nostalgic yearning for home and family which are represented by his fellow countryman Soznovsky and Domenico respectively to the point where his visions begin to transpose themselves on reality. Viewers are met with mise-en-scenes which are a carefully crafted amalgamation of real-life and miniature landscapes. The camera zooms in ever so slowly that the distinction between the two dissolves and we are left wondering what is real and what isn’t. This dissolution of what is contrived and what is natural is an extension of the previously described intercutting of the memories and dreams of Andrei and Domenico which repeatedly fractures the former’s emotions. This ruptures the barriers of circumstantial, surface-level differences and allows two cultures to interact and negotiate at a level that transcends all spatiotemporal differences.
As with the climax of Stalker, similarly, the climax of Nostalghia happens with a Andrei’s spiritual and humanist realization that he is Soznovsky as well as Domenico. The semiotics of identity have been erased only to be replaced by the randomness of deconstruction. That all these men’s dreams and desires essentially the same and are untethered to any politico-historical markers. Nostalgia transforms the initial simple understanding of home and it becomes very much like art which reshapes reality. However Tarkovsky does not cave into the comforting idea of art being a cathartic and curative form of reconciling with an unpalatable reality by reconfiguring our perspective. Rather, Tarkovsky rejects it by positing his theory that art must be paradigm-shattering and revelatory in nature which is reminiscent of the chiasmic call of Benjamin when he vindicated the work of art and attempted to imbue it with a political valence that it had lost due to industrialization and the rise of capitalism.
While Tarkovsky artistically portrayed the amorphously messy permeability of identity and memories, he juxtaposed this with the geometry of medieval monuments and arches and utilized their progressive duplication as a visual metaphor for an unending descent to madness that all three men slowly underwent. Even though the film relies on the exterior ambiance and psychological states of being, it does come to a formalistic full circle with Andrei reciting his father’s poetry as he paces about with a candle before he dies of perhaps an overdose of medication. The last shot of the film is where Andrei sits on a grassy patch behind a puddle of water with his German Shepherd and the midground is his Russian home that is overwhelmed by the sublime largeness of the Italian arches that constitute the background . There is rain and there is snow at the same time, which indicates that this is a vision that is a true amalgam of both Italy and Russia, an emotionally complex and composite reflection of Tarkovsky’s desire to return home but also his realization that he cannot go home because of the stifling mandates of the Soviet Union. With the mention of his father’s poetry Nostalghia, and the film being dedicated to his mother Tarkovsky, with great artistic poignance, revealed that his home lay within the worlds of his films.
Sequence from Nostalghia (1983) by Andrei Tarkovsky video recorded by my friend
