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In this article I intend to reflect upon the
ways in which Andrei Tarkovsky has decided to represent
"facts". I believe that for Tarkovsky this project
involves questions about time and history in a way it does
in few other contemporary artists. For Tarkovsky the
approach of transforming facts into what is most commonly
called "fiction" is based on sophisticated reflections upon
the relationship between history and the present, and these
reflections transcend, so I think, the playfulness of many
classical "postmodern" approaches. Tarkovsky developed his
ideas on time in cinema by overcoming the most important
cinematic principle of modernity: the Formalist method of
montage. Tarkovsky is opposed to modernism if we perceive
the Formalist avant-gardism that has brought forward
classical modern devices like montage, juxtaposition and
alienation as a typical manifestations of modern
aesthetics. However, Tarkovsky's expressions are at the
same time incompatible with those of "postmodern"' attempts
of overcoming modernity; and this is due to Tarkovsky's
particular view on history, memory and time.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.47
1. Empathy against Estrangement
The aesthetic
phenomenon of "dream" is elaborated by Tarkovsky into a
much more consistent version of anti-realism. In regard to
dream become important the considerations of the formalists
and of Tarkovsky concerning another notion that has also
often crossed the field of the modern and postmodern
problematics: the concept of empathy (Einfühlung). In the
middle of all Formalist film theory there is the idea that
the montage of different scenes produces cinematic time.
Montage creates a conflict between different shots and
time, as a purely functional relationship between shots,
arises out of montage as an abstract element. The central
figure in Formalist film theory is Sergei Eisenstein whose
aim was to overcome "intuitive creativity" through
"rational constructive composition of effective elements."
(Eisenstein, 1988, p. 175) In a Futurist manner, Eisenstein
designs artistic activity as the process of organizing raw
material. A large part of this cinematic theory is based
on the principle that represents the main theoretical
notion for the philosophy of Russian Formalism, the notion
of ostranenie (alienation, estrangement, German:
Verfremdung). Within every shot there is, so Eisenstein,
a conflict between, for example, an object and its spatial
nature or between an event and its temporal nature. To
combat, as Eisenstein says, "intuitive creativity" by
basing one's aesthetic strategy on the combination of raw
cinematic material (for example, shots) is also in
agreement with another main Futurist-Formalist project: to
overcome an aesthetic theory of Einfühlung. We are here
provided with a further aspect of the concept of time in
Formalism. Cinematic time is no longer seen as an element
that can be perceived through Einfühlung but time exists
"as such" not as "real time" but as a quality that can only
be experienced as an artistic-technical device.
Accordingly, Eisenstein insists that the result of montage
will never be represented by a certain "rhythm", by a
certain regular pattern of series of shots. The reason for
this is that such a cinematic "rhythm" as a temporal
quality of film still relies too much on, so Eisenstein's
expression, "artistic feeling". In "The Montage of Film
Attraction" (1924) he writes:
A rhythmic schema is arbitrary; it is established
according to the whim or the 'feeling' of the director and
not according to mechanical periods dictated by mechanical
conditions of the course of a particular motor process.
(...) The audience of this kind of presentation is deprived
of the emotional effect of perception, which is replaced
by guesswork as to what is happening. (Eisenstein, 1988,
p. 48)
Eisenstein quotes even the German philosopher Theodor
Lipps, the foremost theoretician concerning the philosophy
of empathy, to make clear the absurdity of one of Lipps's
point if we apply it to theory of cinema. Lipps's theory,
so Eisenstein thinks, would rely only on the "emotional
understanding of the alter ego through the imitation of the
other" (ibid., p. 49). Finally, this would lead to the
"tendency to experience one's own emotion of the same kind"
(ibid.). This means that the rhythm that we "feel" in
cinematic time is an illusion in so far as it is the rhythm
that we transfer from our own being into the films that we
see. Eisenstein has moved away from Meyerhold's idea that,
film "is all a matter of the rhythm of movements and
actions. This rhythm with a capital R is precisely what
imposes responsibilities on the cameraman, on the director,
on the artist, and on the actors." ("Portret Doriana
Greiia, Iz istorii kino: Dokumenty i materialy," [1965] p.
22, quoted from Ivanov, 1973, p. 30) However, for
Eisenstein as for Formalist film theory in general, time
is a matter of montage which creates not even rhythm. The
images that are linked through montage provide no subject
for Einfühlung. For Formalists, montage, like poetry, is
not equivalent with "thinking in images". This Formalist
idea of montage is inspired by Shklovsky who criticizes
in his manifesto "Art as a Device" Potebnja's conception
of poetry as a "thinking in images". Potebnja's conception,
so Shklovsky finds, leads to the creation of symbols as
the main aesthetic occupation. For Formalism, however,
artistic activity, does not consist in the creation of
symbols but in the reorganization of their
constellations:
AS/SA nº 15,
p.48
The more you understand an age, the more convinced you
become that the images a given poet used and which you
thought his own were taken almost unchanged from another
poet. The works of poets are classified or grouped
according to the new techniques that poets discover and
share, and according to their arrangement and development
of the resources of language, poets are much more concerned
with arranging images that with creating them. Images are
given to poets; the ability to remember them is far more
important than the ability to create them. (in Lemon and
Reis, 1965, p. 7)
An art, which consists only of symbols, will be
artistically expressionless like algebra; the task of
formalist artists is to "de-automatize" the fixed schemes
of automatization. In the first place this means to
retransform symbols into "things", into "material", and to
capture then, by means of the artistic camera shot,
original constellations of this material. The different
shots will then be assembled through montage out of which
time flows as a dynamic cinematic notion. This means that
cinematic time is not "staged" like in theatre, but seized
through unusual combinations of diverse material. It is
worth while to show that, through this particular concept
of time in cinema. Formalist film theory undertakes the
task to combat (exactly like formalist literary theory)
naturalism and impressionism simultaneously. Formalist film
theory finds that the "image" is always the photographic
image, which is nothing other than a simple reproduction
of reality. In this way it corresponds to both naturalism
and impressionism because both of these artistic tendencies
had their particular ways of seeing things as, generally
speaking, "they really are". Formalist cinematography
believes to have discovered a means to overcome the concept
"image" of both schools. In this sense the theoretician B.
Kazansky writes in "The Nature of Cinema":
The naturalists severely limited the problem of art to
the reproduction of reality. Impressionism was a definite,
almost technical way of seeing things 'as they are,'
eliminating the attraction toward any kind of personal
feeling, evaluation or fantasy. And since for them the
genuinely visible was the genuinely paintable 'planar'
phenomenon of the world, in drawing mere 'naked
reproduction' did not constitute an significant problem,
since skillful hand motion did not enter into their
aesthetic method. Thus, their artistic method was
theoretically 'photographic.' (in Eagle, 1981, p.
108)
The strong point of cinema is that it does not need to
rely on "the mechanical copying of nature,' [and on] the
purely technical reproduction on the screen of some real
object" (ibid., p. 110) as does, in a Formalist view,
photography. Cinema has the capacity to "transform nature"
by relying on the verfremdende effect of montage. Here, for
the first time in Formalist film theory, the motto
"ostranenie against (impressionist or naturalist)
Einfühlung" has become a matter of time. Eisenstein's and
the Formalist's visions of an 'intellectual film' developed
into the direction of a cinematic semiotics in which some
critics miss a kind of original expressiveness. Having
overcome symbolism, for Formalism shots are no symbols but
signs. A shot cannot exist isolatedly as can a symbol but
it exists only as a sign within the whole organism that is
created by the director and his film montage. Consequently,
an object in a film is not represented but denoted. Within
Formalist, and in particular Eisenstein's cinematic
structuralism, "meaning" is produced through the fact that
every sign functions within a certain timely structure.
Shots become now only functions. It is well known that
Andrei Tarkovsky combated several of Eisenstein's main
ideas though it has rarely been examined how he proceeded
with this project in particular.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.49
Ivanov states correctly
that one of Tarkovsky's aims was to emphasize the
significance of the shot as a means of representation of
objects and not of their denotation and that he therewith
overcame Eisenstein in a remarkably effective way (Ivanov,
1985, p. 300). Ivanov points, however, also to the immense
difficulties that we meet when trying to describe
Tarkovsky as being directly opposed to Eisenstein since
Tarkovsky combats like Eisenstein symbolism in cinema
(ibid., p. 291). The truth must be looked for in a new
concept of cinematic time that is proper to Tarkovsky. It
is a concept of time that is in the truest sense of the
word "post-modem", as I will develop in the further course
of this article.
The concept of time in Formalism is that of a
"non-staged" time that is produced exclusively through
montage. This means that for Formalism cinematic reality
is not staged nor does the director try to transfer reality
on the screen by means of any kind of direct intuition (as
it was intended, for example, by impressionism); at the
same time. Formalism does not adhere to naturalist concepts
of representation. Also Tarkovsky refuses impressionism
as an art which, as he writes in Sculpting in Time "sets
out to imprint the moment for its own sake" (Tarkovsky,
1986, p. 192) and as an ideology which he finds
artistically insufficient. He equally rejects the "staged",
painterly, arrangement of shots, as it is common, for
example, in the films of Fellini. Mikhail Romadin wrote
about Tarkovsky's relation to Fellini's aesthetics:
"Fellini's method, where each scene is put together in the
same way as a painting is on canvas, was (...) unacceptable
for Tarkovsky. What will you have if, instead of a figure
drawn on canvas by the artist we see a live actor? This is
a surrogate painting, a live picture? ("Film and Painting"
in Tarkovskaja, 1990, p. 145) The 'live picture' remains
a transfer of an idea to reality, which lacks reality, and,
as we will see, which lacks time. To analyze Tarkovsky's
artistic strategy of expressing reality and time (or a
timely reality) through film we can look at one of his
statements of an apparently simple kind:
I once taped a casual dialogue. People were talking
without knowing they were being recorded. Then I listened
to the tape and thought how brilliant it was written' and
'acted'. The logic of character's movements, the feeling
the energy - how tangible it all was. How euphoric the
voices were how beautiful the voices. (Tarkovsky, 1986,
p. 65)
There is "feeling" as well as "rhythm" in this
conversation but this rhythm is not staged by the director.
As a consequence, it cannot be duplicated through
"imitation". Tarkovsky derives everything that he
appreciates in this dialogue from this dialogue by means
of observation. This means that the circularity of an
aesthetics of Einfühlung that Eisenstein mocked at in
regard to Lipps's aesthetic theory does not apply to
Tarkovsky's taped conversation because the reality
Tarkovsky captures is not "staged reality". It has neither
been produced by an "artistic feeling" nor will it be
perceived through the imitation of an empathic rhythm. In
fact, Tarkovsky's procedure when taping this dialogue is
neither realist nor impressionist. Would it then be right
to say that what Tarkovsky did is similar to what
Eisenstein and the Formalists propagated as the "capturing
of raw material"? The temptation to say so is great
because, obviously, Tarkovsky records the dialogue of the
persons "as it is", without altering it aesthetically in
the slightest way. Everything is due to, as he says, pure
"observation". Almost no violence destroys the intimacy of
the scene and the tape recorder has not even the amount of
presence that would have a voyeur.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.50
The "rape" of reality
that Derrida once reproached Levi-Strauss in De la
grammatologie when seeing him watching his object of
research is reduced, by Tarkovsky's discreet aesthetics
of taping, to a minimal degree. Derrida says that already
"the simple presence of the voyeur is a rape. First, pure
rape: a silent, immobile stranger assists the little girl's
game." (Derrida, 1967, p. 166) The game that is assisted
by Tarkovsky, however, seems to remain, even whilst being
observed, both innocent and a game. One of the reasons for
this is that Tarkovsky does not capture "reality" in the
way Eisenstein suggested to capture material. In other
words, he does not try to "think the unique within a
system" which would, once again according to Derrida, be
another act of violence. In De la grammatologie Derrida
writes: "Il y avait en effet une première violence a
nommer. (...) inscrire dans une différence, à classer, à
suspendre le vocatif absolu. Penser l'unique dans le
système, l'y inscrire, tel est le geste de l'archi-
écriture." (ibid., p. 164)
However, reducing reality to
systematizable material is an act that is much too violent
to be committed by Tarkovsky. The reason for this is that
his concept of cinematic time is fundamentally different,
Formalist time exists only as and through the relationships
between different shots: the shots themselves have no
"inner" time. Consequently, a Formalist would condemn the
dialogue taped by Tarkovsky because it represents for him
a realistic, "naked reproduction" of reality which comes
very close to the kind of aesthetics that Kazansky has
attributed to photography. Photography, so Kazansky
claims, is "stupid, dry, and boring, like statistics,
because it has no choice and is incapable of
generalization. It is obliged, like a mirror, to reflect
everything that lies in the field of its lens." (Eagle, p.
109) Also Tarkovsky's tape recorder undertakes no
selection and no artistic "dynamization" of the matter that
is provided by reality. However, Tarkovsky still perceives
in this single scene, in this unique "little girls' game",
a fascinating rhythm and a brilliantly `acted' scenario.
For Formalists a single shot (of which photography seems
to them a caricature) is static and mechanical because it
contains no time. As we have seen, for Formalists a
dynamical notion of time arises only through the montage
of several shots.
For Tarkovsky, on the other hand, also
a single shot has time; it contains a, as he says, kind of
"dynamic of the mood". It is interesting to observe that
Tarkovsky tends to define this kind of dynamic quality by
using conceptions that are similar to those used by
Formalists. Eisenstein sees the cinematic quality of a shot
in the fact that it contains an inner conflict "between an
event and its temporal nature". This conflict was supposed
to be produced through montage. It is slightly confusing
that also Tarkovsky points to the importance of "unusual
combinations of, and conflicts between, entirely real
elements", (1986, p. 72) since also Eisenstein's conflict
is based on the principle of ostranenie, of the "making
strange" of the filmed reality. However, Tarkovsky "makes
things strange" not by transferring a scene from "real
time" to "abstract time". Tarkovsky refers to a domain,
which he understands as an intermediary between
abstractness and concreteness: dream. In principle this
means that the impressions Tarkovsky wants to create do
not follow the kind of abstract logic by means of which
montage tried to produce cinematic time, but they are
founded on what Tarkovsky calls the "logic of the dream".
AS/SA nº 15,
p.51
I will examine this by concentrating on the example of the
taped dialogue. If the dialogue was "brilliantly acted"
though obviously nobody really acted, does this not remind
us of a dream? Also while we are dreaming, we do not act.
Our action is no action: it is not guided by motives, nor
are there any results materialized by consuming "real"
energy. The action proceeds like all alone, and through
this aspect dream is quite reminiscent of a game. The idea
of dream as an action that implies no "real" action has
since time immemorial fascinated philosophers. Hamann
writes in his Schriften : "Mir scheint die Ansicht gewisser
Philosophen, die der Menschenseele im Schlaf einen hoheren
Grad zuschreiben, von groBer Bedeutung sein. Die Fahigkeit,
die Zukunft zu entschleiem, ist nach ihrer Ansicht dann am
starksten, wenn die Seele nicht damit beschaftigt ist, sich
in Bewegungen und Handlungen des Korpers umzusetzen."
(Hamann, 1921, p. 371) Similarly, Bergson points to the
special state of "indifference" of the dreamer by writing:
"Veiller signifie vouloir. Cessez de vouloir, détachez-vous
de la vie, désinteresez-vous: par là même vous passez du
moi de la veille au moi des rêves, moins tendu mais plus
étendu que l'autre." (Bergson, 1922, p. 136) (It is
interesting that also Bergson insists that the dreamer's
reasoning is not "illogical" but that it follows its "own
logic", that the dreamer simply "raisonne trop".) Also for
Tarkovsky the (philosophical) problem of realism that we
encounter in "staged" dialogues is solved not by simply
refusing the process of staging and by working instead only
with material, but by letting the actions be non-actions
that do no longer follow the logic of experience of
everyday life.
The kind of action that cannot be seen, from
an exterior point of view, as an action because any neutral
position outside the dream is non-existent confronts us
with new problems in regard to the phenomenon of
ostranenie. For Formalist theory, even of the later phase,
the definition an exterior point of view, from which the
author can observe and redescribe reality, is immediately
linked to the device of ostranenie. Boris Uspensky's
definition of the interior and exterior points becomes here
important. Uspensky writes: "The external point of view,
as a compositional device, draws its significance from its
affiliation with the problem of ostranenie or estrangement.
The essence of the phenomenon resides primarily in the use
of a new or estranged view point on a familiar thing
(...)." (Uspensky, 1973, p. 131) The thing is "made
strange" by looking at it from the outside. The object of
everyday life becomes an object of aesthetic interest
because an author looks at it. The distinction between
inside and outside is a necessary precondition for "making
a thing strange" through the device of ostranenie. For
Tarkovsky, however, dream is not simply everyday life that
is made strange. The "logic of dream" is no anti-logic that
an author would have brought forward by "making strange"
what he still recognizes clearly as "logical thinking", as
a thinking that is proper to him and that is imbedded into
an intellectual framework of an authorial discourse. We
should refer here for a moment to Freud and mention that
already Freud rejected the view that the interior and
exterior spheres of a dream could be linked, all by
remaining clearly distinguished entities through direct
interrelationships. It is the more interesting that Freud
rejects this idea by making a case against Lipps. In The
Interpretation of Dreams Freud declares that a convincing
explanation for the fact why one dream motive has been
selected by the dreamer rather than another one, could not
be provided on the grounds of a redescription of exterior
stimulations and their possible effects on the interior
sphere of the dream.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.52
Freud quotes from Lipps'
Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens to show the limited
character of Lipps' (together with Wund's and Strumpell's)
theory because what they do not consider is that the
exterior stimulations themselves effectuate "oft genug bei
ihrer reproduktiven Wirksamkeit" a "sonderbare Auswahl,"
a choice that is due already to the intrinsic logic of the
dream itself Freud wntes: "Die Lehre von Strmpell und
Wundt ist aber unf„hig, irgend ein Motivanzugeben, welches
die Beziehung zwischen dem „uáeren Reiz und der zu seiner
Deutung gew„hlten Traumvorstellung regelt, also die
sonderbare Auswahl zu erkl„ren, welche die Reize oft genug
bei ihrer reproduktiven Wirksamkeit treffen.' (Lipps
Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, p. 170)." (Freud, 1945,
p. 154) Freud's interest in dream derives, very generally
speaking, from his conviction that the lack of logic and
coherence that we observe in dream should not be dismissed
as a failure of intellectual achievements but that it
contains its own form of intelligence which needs to be
analyzed and understood, (cf. ibid., pp. 38ff) Also
Tarkovsky thinks (though, in principal, being as far away
from psychoanalysis as possible) that the strangeness of
the dream should not be measured by means of a logic that
is different from the logic of the dream itself. Another
thinker who comes to mind here, when reflecting on forms
of human imagination that can dispense with a centered,
authorial position, is certainly Bakhtin; and indeed,
Bakhtin's ideas about the non-distinction of interior and
exterior points of view are very relevant in this context.
This becomes particularly clear in a lecture that Bakhtin
gave in the 1920s on the history of Russian literature
(that has been noted by R. M. Mirkina) where Bakhtin
alludes to the way how, in his opinion, Dostoevsky would
produce dreamlike narrations (though he later rectified
some of these points in his Dostoevsky book). Still, in the
notes of Mirkina we can read: "The world of our
fantasizing, when we think of ourselves, is quite
distinctive: we are in the role of both author and hero,
the one controlling the other we accompany the hero all the
time, his inner experiences captivate and absorb us. We do
not contemplate the hero, we co-experience with him.
Dostoevsky involves us into the world of the hero, and we
do not see the hero from outside." And further on: That
is why Dostoevsky's heroes on stage produce an entirely
different impression from the one they produce when we are
reading. It is in principle impossible to represent the
specificity of Dostoevsky's world on stage.... There is no
independent and neutral place for us; an objective seeing
of the hero is impossible. That is why the footlights
destroy a proper apprehension of Dostoevsky's works. Their
theoretical effect is - a dark stage with voices, and
nothing more." (Bakhtin, 1990, p. 236 note 49)
It is interesting that Bakhtin sees the dreamlike
fusion of several different points of view especially as
an alternative to traditional narrative forms that are
derived from the technique of "staging". Bakhtin accepted
certain formalist anti- theatrical tendencies leading to
reflections on ostranenie, but he did not develop these
ideas into the direction of avant- garde experimentalism;
rather prematurely, his initial idea was to develop them
into the direction of Tarkovsky's "logic of the
dream".
AS/SA nº 15,
p.53
Tarkovsky's principle of "making things strange" is
the most radical and therewith the most profound one.
Tarkovsky designs a new concept of time that overcomes the
"direct" forms of representation (for example those of
realism and impressionism) and he also overcomes the "logic
of traditional drama" (p. 20). What is remarkable, however,
is that his solution is not the "modem", abstract time of
Formalists. Tarkovsky's ostranenie is the ostranenie of
the "absolutely strange". It is a new aesthetic quality,
which has not simply turned over the logic of "real"
everyday life by converting it into an "unreal",
verfremdete world. Tarkovsky's expressions do neither
represent the "real" no do they symbolize the "unreal".
They remain in the domain of the "improbable" between
symbolization, representation and verfremdete expressions
and this is what gives them their "strange" character.
Through this "device" Tarkovsky overcomes cinematic
metaphorism and symbolism. The problem of "symbolism" and
"metaphorism" has to be seen in the context of this
strategy. The "zone" in Tarkovsky's Stalker does not
"symbolize anything, any more than anything else does in
my films; the zone is a zone, it's life, and as he makes
his way across it man may break down or may come through."
(ibid., p. 200) However, the "zone" remains strange just
because it claims, in such a tautological way, the
absolutely self-sufficient state of being only what it is.
The metonymical tendency of showing the detail only for the
detail's sake that has so often been praised as an
effective device of overcoming cinematic symbolism (see
Ivanov, 1985, p. 291) is also used by Tarkovsky.
However,
we might say that with him it has permeated deeper levels
of cinematic philosophy. One cannot insist enough that the
"logic of dreams" is, like ostranenie in Formalist film
theory, a matter of time. This means that dream is not
simply a matter of "form" in a rhetorical sense, as it has
once been claimed by Roland Barthes by writing that "it is
even probable that there exists a single rhetorical form,
common, for example, to the dream..." ("The Rhetoric of the
Image" in Barthes, 1986, p. 38) In Tarkovsky's films the
"unexpected combinations" of real elements have their
dreamlike effect not because they follow a certain
characteristic, formal, rhetoric, but because they take
place in the time of dream. One can ask: what is the form
or the structure of this time? It is better to say that
this concept of time possesses a basically non-structural
quality? The time of the dream is produced through
experiences, which come to us through memory: this means
in the first place that they come to us as experiences,
which have no temporal structure. We might remember a
certain day in our life but, so Tarkovsky asks, "how did
this day imprint itself on our memory?" he concludes that
they come to us that they come to us "as something
amorphous, vague, with no skeleton or schema. Like a
cloud." (p. 23) The vagueness of this kind of memories is
a timely vagueness, this means that they lack a "skeleton"
in the form of an abstract temporal structure. Tarkovsky
wants to seize these "memories" by using the expression of
dream. (One should mention that also for Freud the
"forgetfulness" about time and its illogical distortion
(confusion of years, time of the day, etc.) was one of the
main characteristics of dream). In film, "dream" is a
matter of time but for Tarkovsky this does not imply to
make a given piece of reality strange by shifting it from
one timely level to another.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.54
This concept of dream existed
in Formalism and it was understood as an ostranenie, which
stylizes "normal" time into the "non-normal" time of dream.
"Stylization" has here a very limited character. The
Formalist theoretician A. Piotrovsky, for example, writes
about this kind of Stylization: "It is possible to produce
a shift of normal time relations, motivated by a `dream'
or by `intoxication', but these stylized features (...) are
always necessarily perceived as artificial and not
organically cinematic, they soon become irritating."
("Toward a Theory of Cine-Genres", in Eagle, 1981, p. 137)
Piotrovsky makes an interesting point concerning the
importance of "organicalness" in Formalist film theory (an
idea that can be traced also in modernist art). Formalism
freely juxtaposed "raw material" up to a point that, being
confronted with the result of ostranenie and montage, we
are unable to perceive, as Eisenstein declared, a
"feelable" rhythm. However, it seems that for Formalists
there still remains a quality of timely "organicalness"
that they are anxiously trying to perceive even in the most
verfremdete kinds of films. A restricted logic of cinematic
time reveals here also the limits of the concept of
ostranenie as it has been used by the Formalists. This is
the reason why Piotrovski finds that the "time of dream"
that is produced through a dreamlike stylization on the
time level of a film can soon become "irritating" for the
spectator. This irritation is, clearly, a matter of feeling
or Einfühlung into the logical organism of different time
levels in film. Formalist film (in spite of its theoretical
elaborations of the principle of contrast and
juxtaposition) still clings to an organic concept of time
that is based on the clear definition of ("normal")
temporal levels and their respective deviations.
Tarkovsky's innovation consists in a deconstruction of
even this concept. In the dialogue that Tarkovsky has
recorded, the "logic of the character's movements," and
"the feeling" do not exist in regard to an organic whole;
the rhythm that Tarkovsky perceives so clearly in these
dialogues does not exist in regard to any "normal" or
"non-normal" time. It exists as such, all alone, creating
its own rhythm and "feeling". In this sense Tarkovsky
claims that "rhythm" as a temporal quality has not been
produced through montage but that it is a kind of rhythm
of no-rhythm that produces an original quality of cinematic
time; "Rhythm, then, is not the metrical sequence of
pieces; what makes it is the time-thrust within frames. And
I am convinced that it is rhythm, and not editing, as
people tend to think, that is the main formative element
of cinema." (op. cit., p. 119) It remains to say that the
Formalist approach to the "strange" has survived up to
modern semiotics' ambitions to undertake a systematical
research into the "fantastical". Still Yuri Lotman, as a
theoretician who depends, when it comes to the explanation
of aesthetic phenomena, to a great extent on the concept
of ostranenie, sees the "fantastical" as a case of
"redistribution of the system" of the real world by means
of unexpected combinations. For Lotman the semiotic web of
the expression of the strange possesses a higher degree of
complexity which provides us with the experience of the
strange as the one of the "unexpected", representing like
this a "transgression of a norm of convention". However,
Lotman is also tempted by the deeper insight of Todorov who
depicts the fantastical as an intermediary between the
logic of the real world and the non-logic of the supra
natural. So, also Lotman points to the timely character of
the fantastical which for Todorov takes place within a
"temporal space of undecidedness" between the logical
language of the real world and it's counterpart, the
irrational. This means that within this temporal space is
written the new logic of the fantastical.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.55
2. Poetics of Dream
I have shown that the phenomenon
of "dream" is not reached in its depth as long as it is
only seen as an ostranenie of non- dreamed reality. It is
well known that in 20th century theory the definition of
"poetic language" as opposed to a "non-poetic language"
created enormous difficulties; it goes without saying that
the definition of a "poetics of dream" as a deviation from
non-dreamlike expressions is even more problematical.
Gerard Genette pointed once to the complexity (and
insolvability) of this task when writing about the
aesthetically self-sufficient state that we are confronted
with when we encounter the phenomenon of dream its
particular strangeness: "Du langage poétique (...), qu' il
vaudrait peut-être mieux nommer le langage à l'état
poétique, ou l'état poétique du langage, on dira sans trop
forcer la metaphore, qu'il est le langage à l'état de
rêve, et l'on sait bien que le rêve par rapport a la veille
n'est pas un écart, mais au contraire... mais comment dire
ce qu'est un écart?" (Genette, 1969, p. 152) Dream creates
its own laws which belong fully to the domain of neither
man's conscious - nor his unconsciousness. They belong
neither to reality nor to what man might call the sphere
verfremdete, irrational non-logic. Strictly speaking, dream
is not even "strange", Bergson has said that "c'est la
veille, bien plus que le rêve, qui réclame une
explication." (Bergson, 1922, p. 136) Compared to the
chaotic everyday life of the wake, dream is not strange but
rather clear and candid; it is like the water that
Tarkovsky, in his films, uses incessantly. This should
remind us some thoughts of Gaston Bachelard who is not at
all the wrong person to quote here. Bachelard found that
"les miroirs sont des objects trop civilisés, trop
maniables, trop géometriques; ils sont avec trop d'évidence
des outils de rêve pour s'adapter d'eux-mêmes à la vie
onirique." (Bachelard, 1942, p. 32)
This is why Bachelard
finds that we need the even stranger reflection of the
water. The mirror's reflection of our own face evokes, just
because of its scientific clearness, our irritated
scepticism and makes us disinclined to accept the mirror
image as "real". However, it is remarkable how much more
we are inclined to accept our face's image when it is
reflected by water. Having been made "strange", our face
appears suddenly less strange and we are ready to accept
it as a representation of reality itself. In this sense,
the reflection of water as a mirror without a tain, makes,
like the dream, reality less strange by making it stranger.
"The dream" is, as said Maurice Pinguet, source of all
lies," but dreamers like writers "feel guilty only of the
lies of the others because their own lies have the
innocence of a game." (Pinguet, 1973, p. 50). In this
sense, Tarkovsky's use of water as an artistic device,
which helps to transform reality into dream, appears also
in accordance with the dream's concept of time. The liquid
element expresses the flow of time, which becomes a dream
itself. Also Bachelard writes that "the being given to
water is a being in vertigo. It dies every minute." (op.
cit, p. 9). We have seen that dream is unthinkable without
its intimate time, dream is a temporal phenomenon. When
Bachelard says, "one sees with aesthetic passion only those
landscapes that one has first seen in dream," (p. 6) this
means that we can experience these landscapes now, after
we have seen them in a dream, also as temporal phenomena.
From the strangeness that is produced through the
experience of dream arises an aesthetic passion. Bachelard'
idea about dreamed landscapes (which reads like a comment
of Tarkovsky's work!) provides a decisive moment for
cinematic aesthetics. Dream tells us a landscape "in time"
- and so does film. Bachelard's philosophy which recognizes
only "earth, air, water and fire" as elements of imaginary
experience, has once been opposed by Todorov to the
structuralist "structure" which would reduce itself to "a
disposition in space." (Todorov, 1970, p. 22).
AS/SA nº 15,
p.56
Completely
opposed to what the metaphysical tradition once thought,
"time" is the element which imagination needs in order to
leave the domain of the abstract! It finds this element in
the sphere of dream. "Logic of the dream" means for
Tarkovsky that every scene produces its own temporal laws,
its own time or, as he calls it, its own "time truth" (p.
120). A timely rhythm is not produced through a scene's
logical relationship with other scenes. The temporal laws
of the scene are absolutely "true" in the sense that they
are absolutely "necessary" in regard to the material
itself. Tarkovsky says that the artistic expression "has
to come from inner necessity, from an organic process going
on in the material as a whole." (ibid.) The organic whole
of the material from which this necessity arises and which
Tarkovsky puts forward in his argument is not the
abstract, structural, organism of a film that has been
produced by montage. It is an organic whole formed by
artistic necessity, an "inner necessity", (p. 121) which
arises out of the "inner dynamic of the mood of the
situation" (p. 74). For Tarkovsky there is no "free"
combination of raw material like in Formalism, whose
ostranenie is, as we have seen, free and unfree at the same
time because, in spite of its freedom in regard to any
contents, it still follows the structural rules of an
abstract organism. Being based on such a structural,
abstract organicalness but lacking the inner timely
organicalness, cinematic action becomes unnatural.
In this
sense Tarkovsky finds that Eisenstein's combination of
sconces in Alexander Nevski produces a formally perfect,
abstract, quality of cinematic time. However, he thinks
that "what is happening on the screen is sluggish and
unnatural. This is because no time-truth exists in the
separate frames." (p. 120) "Dream" as a phenomenon of
cinematic time arises out of this "inner", "temporal"
necessity since any "time pressure must not be gained
casually" (ibid.). Distortions of time as they appear in
the cinematic dream must try to mould time according to
this necessity; they should not be introduced as
"technical" time shifts that are destined to underline, for
example, the plot of a story. In this sense dream is a
matter of "sculpting in time." The belief that a director
can make, "like a sculptor", from a "lump of time (...) an
enormous, solid cluster of living facts" lets Tarkovsky
join the group of creators who strive to transform the
liquid and permanently flowing element of time into the
paste-like material of dreams. Bachelard has much meditated
upon a special kind of human creativity, which is nourished
by the conviction that "dream" must be a kind of "paste".
Bachelard writes: "Les objets du rêve mésomorphe [ne] prennent
que difficilement leur force, et puis ils la perdent, ils
s'affaissent comme une pâte. A l'objet gluant, mou,
paresseux, phosphorescent parfois - et non lumineux -
correspond croyons-nous, la densité ontologique la plus
forte de la vie onirique. Ces rêves qui sont des rêves de
pâte." (Bachelard, 1942, p. 144)
The organical nature of the
paste is not represented by a stable and abstract
structure. The paste is through and through concrete, in
the same way as the "paste of dreams" has no abstract
temporal frame: it is through and through time and also
through and through real. What is true for Tarkovsky's
conception of time applies to his entire cinematic language
As we have seen already, Tarkovsky's strongly metonymical
tendency, his use of close ups of details and pars pro toto
create neither signs nor symbols but only "reality". The
(semantic-artistic) relevance of his shots does not flows
out of its relationship with a larger semiotic web as do
the shots of Eisenstein (cf. Ivanov 1985, p. 304). Nor do
they symbolize or represent reality. They simply are the
objects and are reality.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.57
The deconstruction of the process
of presentation in Tarkovsky functions only because
Tarkovsky's anti-symbolist and anti-realist concepts of
the shot are accompanied by a theory of time that functions
accordingly. Were his detailed shots that insist so much
on their non-symbolical quality not supplemented by a
parallel theory of time, Tarkovsky would have remained
there where the Formalists had arrived: at a cinema of
signs that are held together through the abstracting work
of montage.
3. Cinéma de la Cruauté
Tarkovsky's cinema
relies on the principle that every scene can produce its
own time. The "dream" is one of the means of carrying out
this project. Being convinced that "sometimes the utterly
unreal comes to express reality itself," (p. 152)
Tarkovsky designs an aesthetic of "making things strange"
that develops and at the same time overcomes the principle
of ostranenie. We could say that it accomplishes Formalism
in a way similar to that in which so called
post-structuralism accomplishes structuralism. The time of
the dream communicates reality as something "unreal" which
affects us nevertheless at least as harshly as could
reality itself. Formalists, on the other hand, thought of
dreamlike reproduction of reality as a reality that is
"softened" and stylized into an image, which is vague and
obscure. However, for Tarkovsky the reality that pervades
the time of the dream speaks to us in a clear language. Its
linguistic rules are even so clear and logical that they
produce pictures of "cruelty' It is in cruelty especially
that time gains the absolutely self-sufficient state that
it usually has in dreams. In this context Tarkovsky refers
to two scenes that appear to him model scenes for cinematic
expression. The first one reads as follows:
A group of soldiers is being shot for treason in front
of the ranks. They are waiting among the puddles by a
hospital wall. Its autumn. They are ordered to take off
their coats and boots. One of them spends a long time
walking about among the puddles, in his socks which are
full of holes, looking for a dry place to put down the coat
and boots which a minute later he will no longer need. (op.
cit., p. 26)
This scene is expressive because its action follows the
impulses of a strong inner necessity. The necessity we feel
here is not one created by a plot, nor has it anything to
do with the montage of elements. Action seems here to
create here its own rules; no "exterior" power to dictate
how the scene "must" be can be perceived. There is, in this
scene, "fatality" or "irony of destiny" and this is why it
appears to us as cruel. We can make the same observations
(even more clearly) in the second scene:
A man is run over by a tram and has his leg cut off.
They prop him up against the wall of a house and he sits
there, under the shameless gaze of a gaping crowd, and
waits for the ambulance to arrive. Suddenly he can't bear
it any longer, takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and
lays it over the stump of his leg. (ibid.)
Also here, what Tarkovsky terms the "absurdity of the
` mise en scene'" catches our imagination. (p. 24) However,
it is pushed into a particular direction. Because of the
utmost expressivity of the scene we could "sympathize" with
the victim; but this makes the scene even crueler. Cruelty
reposes here in the fact that we watch the scene as
cold-blooded observers, as a scene - and not as a tragic
event. The event becomes cruel because it has been turned
into a scene. This means also that it is produced through
the scene and not transferred from reality to the scene.
Since "in reality" the scene is tragico-dramatic, a
dramatic staging would attempt to reproduce, within the
scene, a certain amount of this tragic expression. It is
also clear that here too much cruelty would be irritating.
Tarkovsky's scene, however, functions through a paradox:
the scene only evokes cruelty because it is freed from
tragic expression through the director's cool observance.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.58
In Tarkovsky's films the motive of cruelty occurs often
and, (especially in regard to Andrei Ryublev) has brought
him the charge of being too naturalist; however, as he
says, there is never any "aesthetization for its own sake."
(cf. Tarkovsky, p. 184) Tarkovsky's cruelty manifests
itself especially at moments when he tries to purify the
scenes of both tragic and symbolic elements, when he tries
to let actions speak through an unpathetic realism. The
peasant in Andrei Ryublev "who has made himself a pair of
wings, climbs up on to the cathedral, jumps, and crashes
on the ground." (p. 79) Immediately Tarkovsky's
"straightforward and basic" realism becomes cruel: "The
scene had to show an ordinary, dirty peasant, then his
fall, his crash, his death. This is a concrete happening."
(p. 80) We find this scene cruel, especially in
Tarkovsky's realistic way of describing it. It is cruel
because of what we see happening in the scene; also, we
find it cruel because it is a scene (Tarkovsky's rhetoric
helps reduce it to that). Cruelty is not produced through
montage, nor does some other artistic device push us
towards an einfühlende re-experiencing of what the director
would imagine to be cruel. Tarkovsky's scene is a
"concrete happening" in the sense that it is a "unique
happening" (ibid.): and its expressive cruelty arises out
of this hermetic state. Some more considerations should
be raised concerning the "point of view". The point from
which the action is watched in the scenes mentioned is
restricted to the experience of the agent. However, all
associations are, so Tarkovsky insists, "perfectly
familiar to us" (ibid.). There is only the "concrete" and
"real" time of the scene since Tarkovsky wanted to answer
the questions: "What would this man have seen or felt as
he Hew for the first time? (...) The most he could have
known was the unexpected, terrifying fact of falling."
(ibid.). We can only observe, but though we watch the event
through this remarkably cool an unaffected distance, we are
not "outside" the scene. Or, vice versa, we observe the
scene from the "inside" without being affected in any way
by the strategy of Einfühlung.
The terms subjectivism or
realism are both out of place. Cruelty is produced through
the strangeness that we feel when we are "inside" an action
by observing it at the same time from the outside. And this
kind of cruelty is an effect produced by the logic of the
dream. At this stage of our examination of the aesthetic
value of cruelty, we almost inevitably turn to the thoughts
of Antonin Artaud. In his well-known work Le théâtre et son
double, Artaud suggests a "theatre where violent physical
images mill and hypnotize the spectator's sensitiveness."
(Artaud, 1964, p. 99) and whose idea of cruelty, once
pushed to an extreme, would lead to a complete renewal of
theatrical culture. In the first place, Artaud's "Théâtre
de la cruauté‚" is supposed to produce a theatrical reality
"in which one can believe." The central "representational"
models for such a kind of reality are supposed to be
cruelty and the dream. Certainly, in Artaud we are
confronted with the problem of "representation" in a highly
philosophical way. Jacques Derrida has postulated that
Artaud's theatre intends to transfer theatrical expression
to a state where it has overcome all attempts to represent
certain objects, life or the world.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.59
Derrida writes: "The
theatre of cruelty is not a representation. It is life
itself, in the extent to which life is non-representable.
Life is the non representable origin of representation."
(Derrida, 1967, p. 343; p. 234) We have seen that
Tarkovsky's idea of cinema as an "immediate art form"
which needs "no mediating language" (Tarkovsky, p. 176)
is that of cruelty which is life, without trying to
represent it. Artaud also declares in his first manifesto
of Le theatre et son double that he does not want to
abolish "articulated speech" in theatre (p. 112) but that
he intends to give words a new kind of "importance". This
new kind of "importance", so he explains, is the one that
words have in dreams'. "Le théâtre ne pourra redevenir
lui-mâme (...) qu'en fournissant au spectateur des
précipites véridiques de rèves." (p. 109) Both Tarkovsky
and Artaud refer to an aesthetic means of expression that
they call dream. Dream is the artistic phenomenon within
which (as Tarkovsky says about Bresson) all expressiveness
of the image has been eliminated and where only "life
itself" remains expressive. Artaud also asks the public to
believe "in dreams on the condition that he really takes
them for dreams and not for a copy of reality." (p. 103)
In this |sense dream is not an imprint of reality but an
"imprint of terror and cruelty." (Artaud, ibid.) Both
Tarkovsky's and Artaud's aim is to produce a "non
perverted pantomime" where, as Artaud puts it, "gestures,
instead of representing words (...) represent ideas,
attitudes of spirit, aspects of nature." (Artaud, p. 48)
This quotation shows that the gestures of aesthetic
expression (for example, of actors) are to be seen as
non-gestures which exist only in dreams; this means that
they cannot be recognized as gestures from a point of view
outside dream. Artaud evokes other, stranger, parallels
to characterize the particular, dreamlike quality that
gestures can have in theatre. One of these energies, which,
like his non- representing gestures, function as
intermediaries between dream and waking, is the plague, la
peste. The plague, so Artaud says, "prend des images qui
dorment (...) et les pousse tout à coup jusqu'aux gestes
extrèmes; et le theatre lui aussi prend les gestes et les
pousse à bout." (p. 34)
Artaud's imagery is strange in the
same way that it is cruel: the plague, which is not
representative of something existent (in concrete life),
creates images from an unordered, sleepy stock of "dream
images", p. 109) by making them more extreme. The parallel
with Tarkovsky is amazing, as we see in another of
Tarkovsky's suggestions of what he considers to be a model
scene. Being remarkably fascinated by a scene from Bunuel's
Nazarin in which "the plague" seems to have arisen out of
"nowhere" or to have been produced by dreamlike imagery,
Tarkovsky describes how, in the end, the plague should not
be seen as a symbol but that it appears more with the
harshness of a "medical fact". This is how Tarkovsky
describes the scene: The street is completely empty. Along
the middle of the road, from the depth of the frame, a
child is walking straight towards the camera, dragging
behind him a white - brilliantly white - sheet. The camera
slowly pans. And at the very last moment, just before
cutting to the next shot the field of the frame is suddenly
covered over, again with a white cloth, which gleams in the
sunlight. One wonders where it can have come from. Could
it be a sheet drying on a line? And then, with astonishing
intensity, you feel 'the breath of the plague', captured
in this extraordinary manner, like a medical fact. (p.
73)
AS/SA nº 15,
p.60
The dreamlike realism of Tarkovsky (which is so
closely linked to what was called in the sixties the
Russian "documentary aesthetics," cf. Mikhalkovich. 1989,
p. 6) turns cinematic reality into "medical facts. For
Tarkovsky it is based (as for Artaud) on a concept of
artistic stylization that creates expressions with "inner
necessity", and this becomes obvious in regard to the scene
quoted. As we have seen, Tarkovsky's "logic of the dream,"
that is produced through a "distortion of time" (p. 121),
is based on an artistic knowledge of "the material as a
whole". "Inner necessity" means here giving the artistic
expression the same degree of necessity that it usually has
in reality. From this comes the idea of speaking of the
plague as a "medical fact", arising from scientific
necessity. Also for Artaud, the shift from reality to art
takes place through a "profound stylization coming from a
profound understanding of elements, of necessity." 303) He
thinks "when I live I don't feel that I am living. But when
I play, this is when I feel that I exist. What could
prevent me from believing in the dream of theatre when I
believe in the dream of reality?" (p. 181) Here also, to
be "necessary" means to be part of a reality within which
manifestations of dream and "medical facts" cannot be
distinguished. Tarkovsky expresses the same idea when
writing that for him Chaplin "doesn't play. He lives those
idiotic situations, is an organic part of it. (p.151) The
non- distinction of facts and dreams finally is obtained
through the device of "making things strange" may remind
us of a thought by Bergson, who made an interesting
observation in an essay on the deja-vu ("fausse
reconnaissance"). A deja-vu takes place when we believe we
"remember" certain events that happen in the present, by
thinking that we have gone through them already in the
past.
First of all, Bergson here sees a connection with the
dream, saying that this illusion is followed "by a kind of
unanalysable feeling the reality would be a dream."
(Bergson, 1922, p. 157). Bergson then points to the fact
that "people who are subject to the deja-vu do often find
a familiar word strange." (p. 158) Bergson has in mind the
experience we all are familiar with, when a familiar word
becomes strange when we repeat it to ourselves an infinite
number of times. The interesting question is to define; in
which way the word has become "strange" by means of this
endless repetition. In fact, the word itself has not been
changed; it keeps its orthography as well as its
pronunciation. Still, after having been repeated so often,
the word has adopted a strange character. It is clear
that, through a particular kind of "defamiliarization, the
word has ceased to be a word, and, so I would claim, become
a fact. It is finally, only what it is, only a fact without
any symbolical (semantic) meaning. And only through this
"factness" has it become so strange. Bergson also likens
this phenomenon, as would probably also have done
Tarkovsky, to those experiences that we usually have in
dreams. Derrida has recognized the character of "inner
necessity" that Artaud attributes to aesthetic dreams, i.e.
dreams which play their game within an "espace clos" and
which, in the end, play nothing but themselves. These
dreams can even play their game of being to the point where
they become real and, necessarily, cruel. Derrida writes:
"For the theatre of cruelty is indeed a theatre of dreams,
but of cruel dreams, that is to say, absolutely necessary
and determined dreams, dreams calculated and given
direction, as opposed to what Artaud believed to be
empirical disorder of spontaneous dreams." (Derrida, p.
355; p. 242) It is the absolute strangeness of the dream,
of the dream which, finally, claims to be real; all this
is simply cruel.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.61
Very obviously, we have here moved away
from the concept of ostranenie as a simple device of making
things strange. The strangeness of the dream follows its
own rules, has its own necessity and is, as a consequence,
not strange at all. It is, as a kind of new reality, only
cruel. Consequently, Derrida is perfectly right when
concluding that the theatre of cruelty is against any form
of theatre of ostranenie (foreign... to all theatre of
alienation, p. 359; p. 2W. Derrida's intention of
reflecting Artaud's concepts of the dream against one of
the most fundamental ideas of Russian Formalism testifies
his shrewdness. We need to agree that it is not more than
true that dream is opposed to ostranenie. However, we
should (in a more constructive way) consider quite
attentively the fact that Tarkovsky's and Artaud's dreams
do show us how to rethink and to extend the concept of
ostranenie itself. "Logic of the dream" and "theatre of
cruelty" settle down within a space of absolute ostranenie
within which the "effet de distanciation - (French for
"Verfremdungeffekt"') produces a distance (of observation).
However, this distance does not at all make "spirit (...)
distinct of force" (Derrida, ibid.), as Derrida reproaches
the conventional theatre of ostranenie (of
"distanciation"). In Tarkovsky the observing distance of
the spectator projects the spectator (in a paradoxical way)
right inside the time of the film; in the same way for
Artaud the spectator resides "au milieu tandis que le
spectacle l'entoure." (Artaud, p. 98). When Derrida writes
that the Verfremdungseffekt has so far remained "prisoner
of a classical paradox" (ibid.) of European art, we can
state that Tarkovsky and Artaud have twisted the
Verfremdungseffekt out of this prison.
References
Artaud, A., 1964: Le théâtre et
son double (Oeuvres compl. IV (Paris: Gallimard)
Bachelard, G., 1942: L'Eau et les rê:ves (Paris: Corti)
Barthes, R., 1986: The Responsibility of Forms (Oxford. Blackwell)
Bakhtin, M., 1990: Art and Answerability (Austin:
University of Texas Press)
Bergson, H-, 1922: L'Energie spirituelle (Paris, Alcan)
Derrida, J., 1967: De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit)
Eagle, H., 1981: Russian Formalist Film Theory (Ann Arbior:
Michigan Slavic Publications)
AS/SA nº 15,
p.62
Eisenstein, S., 1988:
Writings 1 (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press)
Freud, S., 1945: Die Traumdeutung (Wien: 1945)
Genette, G., 1969: Figures 11 (Pans: Seuil)
Hamann, J.G-, 1921: Schriften (Leipzig:
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Ivanov, V., 1973: "The Category of time in
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(Tubingen: Narr)
Lemon, L. & Reis, M., 1965: Russian
Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press)
Pinguet, M., 1973: "L'écriture de rêve" in Revue des lettres modernes Nr. 336-339,
1973.
Tarkovskaja, M., 1990: About Tarkovsky (Moscow:
Progress Publishers)
Tarkovsky, A., 1986: Sculpting in
Time (London: The Bodley Head)
Todorov, T., 1970:
Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil)
Uspensky, B,, 1973 : A Poetics of Composition (Berkley:
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