All of this is a lengthy way of introducing a pretty simple point: that if you have a considerable instinct for reverence and if you don’t have an aversion to being revered, then it makes perfect sense to start revering yourself. If you’re a public figure then this occurs in public. This, I think, is what happened to Tarkovsky.
42 Reading about and around Stalker or Tarkovsky, one cannot go for long without this word miracle cropping up. ‘My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle,’ said Bergman. He was talking about Ivan’s Childhood, but continued in a way that could not but put one in mind of Stalker, as if his innermost cinematic wishes had come true. ‘Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room, the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.’ Kris, near the end of Solaris, also seems to be looking ahead to what the director might come up with next: ‘The only thing that remains for me is to wait. For what? I don’t know. A new miracle?’ There were more miracles to come from Tarkovsky— though none of these took the form of further employment for Donatas Banionis, who played the part of Kris. The caption at the beginning of Stalker describes the Zone as ‘a miracle.’ A still from The Sacrifice in the updated edition of Sculpting in Time was summarized by Tarkovsky with these words: ‘“Little Man” waters the tree his father planted, patiently awaiting the miracle which is no more than the truth.’ And the miraculous, it seems, was not confined to the effects created on-screen, but was part of the process by which they were achieved. Looking back on the numerous obstacles that had to be overcome with so many of the shots and set ups, production designer Rashit Safiullin said, ‘Every time it was a little miracle-making.’
The prevalence of miracles and the routinely miraculous in Tarkovsky perhaps hints at something more general about the society and history of which he was a product. One of the goals of Marxism-Leninism or of historical materialism is to do away with the category of the miraculous— in history, as in logic, there are no surprises. As the promise of the Soviet Revolution hardened into the relentless bureaucracy of Stalinism, so the opposite occurred. The thoroughness with which everyone was caught in the mechanism of the totalitarian system meant that any escape or exemption acquired the quality of a miracle. ‘The greater the degree of centralisation,’ writes Nadezhda Mandelstam in Hope Against Hope, ‘the more impressive the miracle.’ The more intolerable life became the more it became ‘impossible’ to live without miracles. Addressing letters to Stalin in the hope of clemency or of having a sentence commuted—‘what is such a letter but a plea for a miracle?’—meant that people lived in the routine expectation of miracles: ‘They had become part of our life.’ On the occasions that these pleas were answered — as happened to Osip Mandelstam in 1934—people were ‘overjoyed.’ But, Nadezhda continues in terms curiously appropriate to Stalker, ‘one must remember that even if they got their miracles, the writers of such letters were doomed to bitter disappointment. This they were never prepared for, despite the warning of popular wisdom that miracles are never more than a flash in the pan, with no lasting effect. What are people left with in the fairy tales after their three wishes have come true? What becomes, in the morning, of the gold obtained in the night from the lame man? It turns into a slab of clay or a handful of dust. The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles.’
43 A view occasionally endorsed by Tarkovsky, in a 1981 interview, for example: ‘I completely agree with the suggestion that it was Stalker who had created the Zone’s world in order to invent some sort of faith, a faith in that world’s existence.’ And again, in 1986: ‘The Zone doesn’t exist. It’s Stalker himself who invented his Zone.’
44 This would certainly seem to be the lesson of The Return and The Banishment by Andrei Zvyagintsev. The Return (2003) starts spectacularly with a group of boys jumping from a high watchtower into deep water. Ivan, the youngest of a pair of brothers, is scared of making the jump so his brother, Andrei, and the others leave him up there, shivering and ashamed. The next day they learn from their mother that their father has returned after an absence of twelve years. Played by Konstanin Lavronenko (who looks like Russia’s answer to George Clooney and José Mourinho), he’s evidently some kind of gangster. The three of them, father and two sons, go on a road trip but it’s more like a pirated Russian offshoot of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme than a vacation. The father is a stern taskmaster; he has the unyielding harshness of a man who has done time and learned how to survive in the brutal world of the Russian prison system. He bullies and scares them and it all starts to seem like a test of the boys’ manly mettle. The buried loot or hidden treasure or whatever it is the father is trying to retrieve leads, after numerous setbacks, tests and diversions to a remote island — the father makes the boys row there after the boat’s engine gives out — dominated by another rickety old watchtower. Vanya climbs the tower, the hated father climbs after him, falls and dies. As a result of the skills the father has taught them in the course of their trip the boys are able to travel back home, without the father’s body, which sinks with the boat on the crossing back from the island.
The Return cries out to be interpreted as a return to— and extension of — the Zone, to the kind of cinematic space or vision discovered by Tarkovsky. (Even the walls of the abandoned building where the boys play and fight in the opening scenes seem Zonal; on the island there is a verdant meadow, in the middle of which stands an abandoned hut.) Tarkovsky bequeathed his progeny a sense of the visionary potential of film, of space. But he is a hard and gruelling taskmaster. If you want to follow his example you have also to kill him off. Once that has occurred you can make your own way into new, uncharted cinematic wilderness. I apologize for this explanation — one part Harold Bloom and one part ill-digested psychoanalysis— but you take the point.
The problem — though this becomes fully evident only with Zvyagintsev’s next film — is that he has not killed off the father, has not shaken off the huge and inhibiting debt to the master. Or perhaps, having killed him off in The Return, Zvyagintsev devotes the whole of The Banishment (2007) to atoning for this crime. Three of the first half dozen shots evoke, in turn, Nostalghia (car driving through landscape, curving out of and then back into shot), Stalker (bleak industrial zone, freight train) and Solaris (car hurtling into urban abyss). Thereafter it’s impossible not to succumb to spotting Tarkovsky allusions and references: kids leafing through books, or gazing at an orange fire (albeit in a hearth); Bach; Leonardo (in the form of a jigsaw puzzle of The Annunciation being completed by children). So overt is the Tarkovsky bequest that, at one point, when the wife and mother, Vera, takes a sip of her drink and puts the glass on the table one half expects her to start moving it telekinetically. She is pregnant but the child is not her husband’s (Lavronenko again, back from the dead or, if you prefer, returned from The Return); it — i.e., the film — is Tarkovsky’s. The house where all this occurs is located in a barren and beautiful landscape that, like the altogether more fecund setting of Mirror, is replete with childhood memories. ‘Why isn’t the creek flowing?’ asks Kir, the little boy, of his father, Lavronenko. Because, I found myself silently responding, Uncle Andrei has used it all up. ‘Did you see it [i.e., Uncle Andrei’s] flow [of images]?’ asks Kir again. ‘I saw nothing else,’ says Lavronenko, taking the words out of my mouth. By the end, needless to say, the rains replenish the creek, which starts to flow, turning it into a Zoney stream, complete with everyday detritus hallowed by the fact of being filmed. There is more to The Banishment than its Tarkovsky infatuation. Doubtless, I am guilty of the crime of which I am accusing Zvyagintsev: being so absorbed by Stalker that I can see nothing but Tarkovsky, so steeped in his view of the world that I mistake it for the world itself. Certainly Tarkovsky is not the only director whose work is, as they say, cited or sighted but he is the dominant force and I can think of no other film so dominated — to the point almost of self-immolation — by the work of another director.