By Lynn Cruz

Tarkovsky remarks that part of the impetus behind 'Nostalgia' is to show the impossibility of living side-by-side with others without becoming acquainted with and addressing the problems of this knowledge of one another: it is easy to get to know someone, but difficult to break off that relationship. A fine picture directed by Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia is a well crafted picture that should definitely appeal to fans of his work, this is a powerful picture one that is.

HAVANA TIMES – Thirty-seven years later, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983) is also the story of an island stranded in the Caribbean sea. Poet Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), the madman Domenico (Erland Josephson) who is compared to Fidel Castro, and his wife Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) are the protagonists of this movie.

Gorchakov travels through Italy to discover the details of a Russian composer’s life in the 18th century, who killed himself after returning to Russia. He is accompanied by a translator, Eugenia.

Recently, during days of protests in Havana against police brutality and the dollarization of essential items, this movie has been like an oasis in the middle of a desert. Two friends, visual artist Samuel Riera and his colleague, biochemist Derbis Campos, spent a Sunday afternoon with us after three months of seeing very few friends because of the lockdown and the risk of catching COVID-19.

The mist in the fields appears on-screen, in black and white. A dark-haired and dark-eyed woman enters the shot. A blond child wearing a man’s jacket also appears. The jacket is too big for him. The child looks like a crow because of his unusual black clothing choice. In the background, there is a white horse that doesn’t move. A dog enters the frame, followed by a young woman who blends into the landscape. Finally, an old woman joins them. The house is in the background. This is how Nostalgia opens, a movie that draws the viewer in from the very beginning, in a shroud of memories and melancholy.

Gorchakov walks down Tuscany’s streets, where he runs into Domenico, known as the “town’s madman”. Tmnt raph s rampage 2. Gorchakov takes an interest in him, he asks Eugenia to translate for him because he wants to invite him out for lunch. Domenico becomes a kind of obsession not only for the poet, but also for me. He pedals a static bicycle and says: “I am who I am.”

Gorchakov visits him. Domenico’s house is full of leaks and it reminded me of my grandmother’s house. I was somewhat fascinated by my grandmother. She was like the fairy in every fairytale. She had rosy cheeks right up until she was 86 years old, the age her journey on this Earth came to an end.

Domenico says that a drop followed by another aren’t two drops, but a larger drop. You can see 1+1=1 written on the wall. Domenico gives Gorchakov a candle as a gift and gives him a challenge: cross the thermal baths where old people in the town go, with the candle lit.

Combining fire and water, but there is a third element that intervenes on the way: air. Gorchakov takes on this great feat. He ends up telling Domenico he was right. People in the town look at Gorchakov in the same way they look at Domenico, with a kind of fascination mixed with uneasy and distress.

In the meantime, Domenico climbs the sculpture in the middle of Piazza Roma, giving a speech. Eugenia laughs in a mocking tone, while she tells Gorchakov over the phone about what Domenico is doing. Domenico shouts out that the world is very mistaken thinking that a madman has to ask others to be embarassed by his selfishness. Domenico will go up in flames. He ends his speech and falls from the “podium” to the ground. The audience is made up of poor people and the mentally-ill.

Domenico has hit the nail on the head. He argues that the world has succumbed to the “normal” people and that space needs to be given so that sick people can live with the healthy.

The movie ends just as it began, with the house. The home that goes with you everywhere you go, and the place you want to go back to. He has a Heideggerian view of the world, “man’s life is a never-ending return home.” This is an idea that is best expressed with Cuban emigres’ experience. Gorchakov reflects: “Borders should vanish”, Eugenia (Italian) replies with a question: “What borders?”.

Nostalgia is a movie where the camera scans every corner, texture, face, emotion. Tarkovsky picks up on his obsessions again: the father poet, the land you yearn for, elements of Nature, this time with fire and water taking center stage. Fire is linked to a person’s individual revolution, the one Domenico embarked on and who Gorchakov follows.

Resistance because the fire doesn’t die out, something that Gorchakov sees with the candle Domenico gave him, also representing utopia, enduring in the fight for an ideal, even if it only manifests in poetry. The impossibility of transferring this to our physical reality with Domenico’s death in flames, also talks about the failure of social experiments such as the October Revolution, and the Cuban Revolution now for me.

It is a movie loaded with powerful symbolism too. Gorchakov returns to Russia in his dreams, or from the nightmare of his own death? There are many details in the story that are never explained. However, his mind will take him to what is really important… the search for his essence, truth, even if he has to die trying.

Nostalghia^[1] (UK: Nostalgia) is a 1983 Soviet-Italiandrama film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and starring Oleg Yankovsky, Domiziana Giordano, and Erland Josephson. Tarkovsky co-wrote the screenplay with Tonino Guerra.^[2]

The film depicts a Russian writer (Oleg Yankovsky) who visits Italy to carry out research about an 18th-century Russian composer, but is stricken by homesickness.^[3] The film utilizes autobiographical elements drawn from Tarkovsky's own experiences visiting Italy, and explores themes surrounding nostalgia and the untranslatability of art and culture.^[4]

The film won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, the prize for Best Director and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival.^[5] It received generally positive reviews from critics. The film received nine total votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made.^[6]

Plot[edit]

The Russian writer Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky) travels to Italy to research the life of 18th-century Russian composer Pavel Sosnovsky, who lived there and committed suicide after his return to Russia.^[7] He and his comely interpreter Eugenia travel to a convent in the Tuscan countryside, to look at frescoes by Piero della Francesca. Andrei decides at the last minute that he does not want to enter.

Back at their hotel Andrei feels displaced and longs to go back to Russia, but unnamed circumstances seem to get in the way. Eugenia is smitten with Andrei and is offended that he will not sleep with her, claiming that she has a better boyfriend waiting for her.

Andrei meets and befriends a strange man named Domenico (Erland Josephson), who is famous in the village for trying to cross through the waters of a mineral pool with a lit candle. He claims that when finally achieving it, he will save the world. They both share a feeling of alienation from their surroundings. Andrei later learns that Domenico used to live in a lunatic asylum until the post-fascistic state closed them and now lives in the street. He also learns that Domenico had a family and was obsessed in keeping them inside his house in order to save them from the end of the world, until they were freed by the local police after seven years. Before leaving, Domenico gives Andrei his candle and asks him if he will cross the waters for him with the flame.

During a dream-like sequence, Andrei sees himself as Domenico and has visions of his wife, Eugenia and the Mary as being all one and the same. Andrei seems to cut his research short and plans to leave for Russia, until he gets a call from Eugenia, who wishes to say goodbye and tell him that she met Domenico in Rome by chance and that he asked if Andrei has walked across the pool himself as he promised. Andrei says he has, although that is not true. Eugenia is with her boyfriend, but he seems uninterested in her and appears to be involved in dubious business affairs. Later, Domenico delivers a speech in the city about the need of mankind of being true brothers and sisters and to return to a simpler way of life. Finally, he plays the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth and immolates himself. Meanwhile, Andrei returns to the mineral pool in Bagno Vignoni (Val d'Orcia) to fulfill his promise, only to find that the pool has been drained. He enters the empty pool and repeatedly attempts to walk from one end to the other without letting the candle extinguish. As he finally achieves his goal, he collapses. (This shot has a duration of 9:07.)

Cast[edit]

• Oleg Yankovsky as Andrei Gorchakov
• Erland Josephson as Domenico
• Domiziana Giordano as Eugenia
• Delia Boccardo as Domenico's Wife
• Patrizia Terreno as Andrei's Wife
• Laura De Marchi as Chambermaid

Production[edit]

This was Andrei Tarkovsky's first film directed outside of the U.S.S.R. It was to be filmed in Italy with the support of Mosfilm, with most of the dialogue in Italian. The film was in pre-production as far back as 1980. Initially the film was titled Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy), but since there was already the film Journey to Italy (1954) by Roberto Rossellini, starring Ingrid Bergman, that already bore that name, they searched for something else, eventually deciding upon Nostalghia. When Mosfilm support was withdrawn, Tarkovsky used part of the budget provided by Italian State Television and French film company Gaumont to complete the film in Italy and cut some Russian scenes from the script, while recreating Russian locations for other scenes in Italy. Luciano Tovoli was considered for director of photography, although ultimately Giuseppe Lanci shot the film, though Tovoli would take that role in Tarkovsky’s 1982 documentary Tempo di Viaggio, or Voyage in Time.^[4]

Donatella Baglivo filmed a ninety minute documentary on the making of the film titled Andrei Tarkovsky in Nostalghia (1984), providing a fascinating glimpse into the making of the film, including interviews with cast and crew.^[8]

Casting[edit]

Anatoly Solonitsyn was initially cast as Andrei Gorchakov, but died from cancer in 1982, forcing Tarkovsky to seek a new protagonist, eventually deciding upon Oleg Yankovsky who had appeared in his previous film The Mirror.^[4]

Locations[edit]

Several scenes of the film were set in the countryside of Tuscany and northern Lazio; as the Abbey of San Galgano, the spas of Bagno Vignoni, the Orcia Valley, in the Province of Siena, the mysterious crypt of the Chiesa di San Pietro (Tuscania) and the flooded Church of Santa Maria in San Vittorino of Cittaducale, in the Province of Rieti.^[9]

Style[edit]

Similarly to Tarkovsky's previous films, Nostalghia utilizes long takes, dream sequences, and minimal story. Of his use of dream sequences, to the question asked by Gian Luigi Rondi: “A realism of dream, like that of Mirror?” Tarkovsky answered: “There isn’t 'realism' on the one hand, and on the other hand (in contrast, in contradiction) 'dreams.' We spend a third of our life asleep (and thus dreaming): what is there that is more real than dreams?”^[10]

Andrei Tarkovsky The Mirror

Tarkovsky spoke of the profound form of nostalgia which he believes is unique to Russians when traveling abroad, comparing it to a disease, 'an illness that drains away the strength of the soul, the capacity to work, the pleasure of living', but also, 'a profound compassion that binds us not so much with our own privation, our longing, our separation, but rather with the suffering of others, a passionate empathy.'^[4][11]

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Tarkovsky's goal in Nostalghia, in terms of style, was to portray the soul, the memory, of Italy, of which it felt to him being there. When he visited Italy to begin studying the project of Nostalghia with Tonino Guerra, as they visited cities Tonino would show him Renaissance architecture, art, monuments, and he admired them, and would take notes, but what struck him the most was the sky, the blue sky, black sky, with clouds, with the sun, at dawn, at noon, in the evening. A sky, he said, is always simply just that, but a change in the hour of the day, the wind, climate, can have it speak to you in a different way, with love, violence, longing, fear, etc. Cinema, he said, can give these 'ways' back to you and that it must, with courage, and honest, always starting from the real.^[10]

Andrei Tarkovsky Nostalgia Opening Movie

According to Tarkovsky, while shooting the film he realized that he would be able to express 'something distinctive', which he believed he couldn't in his previous films – for only then he had become aware that 'a film can make the inner life of its author visible', and, thereby, he 'expanded into [himself].'^[12]

Music[edit]

The film features music by Ludwig van Beethoven, and Giuseppe Verdi (Requiem), as well as Russian folk songs. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is featured both during Andrei's visit at Domenico's home and during his demonstration in Rome.

Reception[edit]

Vincent Canby of The New York Times said that Tarkovsky 'may well be a film poet but he's a film poet with a tiny vocabulary. [..] Nothing happens.'^[13]Dave Kehr was mildly positive, considering it to be 'packed with imagery that seems at once hopelessly obscure and crushingly obvious' while also arguing that the work 'does succeed in inducing some kind of trance.'^[14] The film won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, the prize for Best Director and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival.^[5] Tarkovsky also shared a special prize called Grand Prix du cinéma de creation with Robert Bresson. Soviet authorities prevented the film from winning the Palme d'Or,^[15] a fact that hardened Tarkovsky's resolve to never work in the Soviet Union again.

It is today one of Tarkovsky's lesser-known works. In 2010, scholar Thomas Redwood wrote that 'critics on the whole have tended to ignore the film. Relatively little has been written about Nostalghia and even less has been understood of it.'^[16]Nostalghia has an approval rating of 86% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 22 reviews, and an average rating of 8.22/10. The website's critical consensus states, 'Nostalgia demands patience -- and rewards the investment with a hypnotic viewing experience that finds Tarkovsky in gratifyingly uncompromising form.^[17] The film received nine total votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made.^[6]

References[edit]

1. ^Nostalghia is an Italian transcription of the Russian word Ностальгия[nəstɐlʲˈɡʲijə], rather than the Italian nostalgia[nostalˈdʒiːa].
2. ^At one point, Domenico questions mathematics, displaying that '1+1≠2' with two drops of olive oil. This is a reference to one of Guerra's collaborations with Michelangelo Antonioni, Red Desert.
3. ^Fandor
4. ^ ^abcd'Nostalghia.com | The Topics :: Tarkovsky talks to Gian Luigi Rondi, 1980'. www.nostalghia.com. Retrieved 2018-07-11.
5. ^ ^ab'Festival de Cannes: Nostalghia'. festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-06-16.
6. ^ ^ab'Votes for NOSTALGHIA (1983)'. British Film Institute. Retrieved January 17, 2017.
7. ^Sosnovsky is modeled on Ukrainian composer Maksym Berezovsky.
8. ^Charles M (2014-09-21), Andreij Tarkovskij in Nostalghia Donatella Baglivo, 1984, retrieved 2018-07-11
9. ^Filming locations of Nostalghia at the Internet Movie Database
10. ^ ^ab'Talking with Andrei Tarkovsky'. A-BitterSweet-Life. Retrieved 2018-07-11.
11. ^'Nostalghia.com | The Topics :: Tarkovsky interviewed by Natalia Aspesi at Cannes, 1983'. www.nostalghia.com. Retrieved 2018-07-11.
12. ^Demant, Ebbo (Director) (1988). Andrej Tarkowskijs Exil und Tod [The Exile and Death of Andrei Tarkovsky] (Documentary).
13. ^Canby, Vincent (October 5, 1983). ''Nostalghia,' In Italian'. The New York Times. Retrieved January 17, 2017.
14. ^Kehr, Dave. 'Nostalghia'. Chicago Reader. Retrieved January 17, 2017.
15. ^Wagstaff, Peter (2004). Border crossings: mapping identities in modern Europe. Peter Lang. p. 169. ISBN978-3-03910-279-2. Retrieved 7 March 2011.
16. ^Redwood, Thomas (2010). Andrei Tarkovsky's Poetics of Cinema. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 161. ISBN144382240X.
17. ^'Nostalghia (2013)'. Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved January 17, 2017.

Tarkovsky Nostalghia Full Movie

External links[edit]

Andrei Tarkovsky Nostalgia

• Nostalghia on IMDb
• Nostalghia at AllMovie
• Nostalghia.com – An Andrei Tarkovsky Information Site, at Film Studies Program in the Department of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary

Andrei Tarkovsky Nostalgia Opening Film