Andrei Tarkovsky’’s Reverence of Time

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Our life, the period, space, and potential of existence, are best expressed through the candle scene in Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia.

Our life, the period, space, and potential of existence, are best expressed through the candle scene in Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. In it, a man, played by Oleg Yankovsky, is trying to cross an empty pool without letting a candle go out. Tarkovsky keeps the camera on Yankovsky for over four minutes in a single take, following the character’s every move while lulling the audience into hypnosis. Under his hypnosis, the structure of time, motion, and the plot began to dissolve, and in its place is cyclical pacing, mimicking the constant, meaningless void humanity is trapped in. Essentially, the scene is a metaphor for the never-ending loop of life we are all in, birth, boredom, and death. Tarkovsky put it as such:

“From the moment you say “action” until you say “cut,” what is that? It’s the fixing of reality of time’s essence. No other artform is able to fix time as cinema does. It is a mosaic made with time.”

Nostalghia (1983)

We are made so aware of time we exist alongside the director’s milieu in this single take. With it moving at the same pace as our own, we are made acutely aware of its snail’s pacing and become overwhelmed at how uncomfortable we are at the parallel. We are in every second, minute, and moment of Yankovsky’s back and forth. This effect is pushed further by the scene directly preceding it when a man sets himself on fire in the middle of a town square.

Mirror (1975)
Mirror (1975)

The pandemic has had the same effect on all of us. Time feels both fleeting and monotonous. We are seemingly rushing through months while living through an epoch. It can be a strange and dream-like feeling. Not unlike the experience which comes from watching a Tarkovsky film. Take any of his seven masterpieces, Nostalghia, Stalker, or Solaris, and each deals with time as a central character. Its presence in his canon impacts and changes his character. It erodes and transcends his landscapes. And it deconstructs the narrative flow of his films away from a point a to point b conventional framework and focuses on the second by second transition in-between.

Mirror (1975)
Mirror (1975)


The poetics of Tarkovsky are imbued with the personal and ethereal. The one-of-a-kind artist created moving paintings. They were mostly silent and still, save for rich tracking shots. He captured every drop of water, the crackling of a fire, or beating heart. This could be referred to as “pure cinema,” as film critics have often eulogized his work. His work was unlike any other auteur because he trusted the camera to capture the real-life machinations behind our unified emotions and desires. As he once said, “If during my work I find that a shot or a take might resemble what has already been done by another great director, I modify the scene to prevent that it may happen.”

Mirror (1975)

Take, for example, The Sacrifice, made in 1986 and set in a country house on the coast of Sweden. The movie brings together a family celebrating the family patriarch’s birthday, Alexander, played by Erland Josephson. The film chronicles a set period, in this case, a 24-hour cycle. Distraught with turning another year old, and perhaps none the wiser, Alexander laments his impotence at capturing the moment by mocking a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet,

“Words, words, words,” he mutters. “If only we could shut up and do something.”

Stalker (1979)

It could easily be deduced Tarkovsky is using Alexander’s frustration as a stand-in for his own. The director understood the failings of language and all its trappings and used other means at his disposal within cinema to capture what we wanted to say. In other words, Tarkovsky let his images do the talking.

Stalker (1979)
Stalker (1979)


Tarkovsky returns to the symbolism of a lit match when Alexander uses a match to burn down his house in agreement with God. Tarkovsky plays with the concept of diegetic music by having Alexander flip on the radio to score his home’s destruction. As the house slowly erupts in flames, we watch in real-time as each flame licks up and around the house, mirroring the decay of Alexander’s mental state as he tries in his misbegotten way to save his family from nuclear holocaust. Tarkovsky even rigged the house to burn down in precisely 8 minutes and 10 seconds, which mirrors the scene’s length.

To find the level of realism he wanted to portray in his films, he was willing to go to great lengths. In 1979’s Stalker, he whittles down the movie into its most basic narratives - a stalker, whose job is a guide, takes two people, a Writer, and a Professor, into a dangerous milieu dubbed “The Zone” or “the quietest place in the world,” says the Stalker. Such a place is part of the same world as the ocean in Solaris. By stripping away narrative plot devices and utilizing minimal dialogue, he allows the language of his unique cinematic style to do the talking. Always grounded in stark realism, he began production in an abandoned hydroelectric power station in Estonia.

Nostalghia (1983)


Nostalghia (1983)

As in Nostalghia, we see and hear every character’s texture stumbling within the film’s composition. We smell every pile of oozing mud. We hear every splash of poisoned water from the Stalker’s heavy boots as the three traverses the industrial landscape of broken glass and trash. Vladimir Sharun was a sound engineer on Stalker and claimed the repeated reshoots, which contained contamination from a chemical plant upstream from the set, caused Tarkovsky’s death from Cancer in 1986, the director’s wife Larissa in 1998, and Anatoly Solonitsyn (who plays the Writer) in 1982. Whether this was true or not, the scene embodies post-apocalyptic desecration. The grays, browns, and blacks of Stalker’s environments feel more like stains than a color palette.

Nostalghia (1983)

By making the audience aware of the passing of time, the audience is made aware of our mortality and insignificance. This endows his cinema with an elasticity not granted to other films limited by sequential narration. Instead, Tarkovsky manipulated time through lingering and exhausting takes to build pressure in a scene. This storytelling style reflects the metaphorical camera in each of our heads, flicking images to our brains to tell a life-long story.

Nostalghia (1983)

While Tarkovsky shied away from intellectualizing his work, we are left to our own devices to synthesize his films, which is why he avoided arcane symbolism. He openly defied set interpretations of what his films meant. If one walks away not understanding what Tarkovsky was doing, perhaps they are not aware of how little we know about life and how to live it. Tarkovsky certainly did not invent cinema, but he was the reformation to bring it back to its original intent - as a means to reflect and refract life back at us. He would not recognize the bastard film has become with its endless editing and harsh cuts. Modern cinema has become obsessed with speeding things up, afraid of what might be discovered if time’s slowed down. Tarkovsky’s cinema moved the way we do, not as an oscillating head sputtering out of control but as a deliberate stare forward.

Nostalghia (1983)


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