The Filmmaker and the Long Take
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) directed seven feature films over a twenty-four-year career: Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966, released 1971), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and The Sacrifice (1986). The small number of films is not incidental to the achievement. Tarkovsky worked slowly, in institutional conditions that were adversarial to his work, within a Soviet film production apparatus that alternately patronized and sabotaged him, and eventually in exile in Italy and Sweden during the last years of his life when the Soviet authorities refused to let him return or permit his family to join him abroad. The institutional hostility is the background against which the films were made, and the specific form the hostility took — bureaucratic obstruction rather than outright prohibition, periodic approval followed by post-production interference, the refusal of distribution and the limiting of foreign participation — produced a director whose capacity to bring projects to completion was tested against resistance that would have stopped most filmmakers and that shaped the kind of filmmaker Tarkovsky became.
The characteristic formal feature of his work is the long take — the extended shot held past the point at which conventional editing would cut, often for minutes at a time, allowing the image to persist through changes of movement, of light, of focus of attention within the frame. The long take is a specific technical decision about what cinema is for — a decision that is the basis of the entire body of work. Tarkovsky argued in the book Sculpting in Time (the English-language collection of his theoretical writings, published after his death) that the essential operation of cinema is the imprinting of time itself — not the representation of time through narrative devices but the direct transfer of temporal experience from the film to the viewer, such that the viewer emerges from the film having undergone a passage of time whose rhythm the film has dictated. The long take is the technique for accomplishing this transfer. Editing, in his analysis, is what cinema does against its own essential nature when it capitulates to the demand that story be prioritized over the direct transfer of temporal experience.
The operative content of this theoretical position is that Tarkovsky’s films are not primarily vehicles for delivering stories. They are vehicles for slowing the viewer’s perception to a rate at which content that ordinary perception excludes becomes accessible. The slowing is the specific operation the films are designed to produce in the viewer, and the stories the films tell are the occasions the slowing requires in order to have a narrative frame to operate within. This is a specific claim about what cinema can do that most contemporary cinema has abandoned, and the abandonment is part of why Tarkovsky’s work feels like the product of a different art form from what the contemporary multiplex shows.
Andrei Rublev and the Artist Under Occupation
Andrei Rublev (1966) presents a fictionalized biography of the fifteenth-century Russian icon painter, structured as a series of episodes that range across decades of his life and across the social and political conditions of pre-Muscovite Russia under the Tatar occupation and the feudal depredations of the period. The film is the longest of Tarkovsky’s works (over three hours in the full version, shorter in the cuts the Soviet authorities initially permitted for distribution), and the episodic structure allows the film to address multiple different situations the artist might encounter — including situations in which the making of art seems impossible, in which the making is actively forbidden, and in which the artist’s role in the social order is under attack from every direction.
The operative content of Rublev is the film’s specific treatment of the relationship between the sacred and the material conditions of its production. The icon tradition the historical Rublev worked within is a specific technical practice whose purpose is the rendering of spiritual content through material means so that the viewer who contemplates the icon is granted access to the spiritual content through the contemplation. The practice requires the painter to have acquired capacities that the ordinary practice of painting does not require, and the film presents these capacities as both real and precarious. Rublev’s vow of silence, his periods of artistic paralysis, his witness to events that seem to contradict the theological framework the icon tradition presupposes, his eventual return to the work at the end of the film — these are the specific stages the film traces, and the stages correspond to the operative work of maintaining the capacity to produce sacred art under conditions that are not conducive to its production.
The most famous sequence, the casting of the bell by the young apprentice whose father has died without teaching him the secret of bell-casting and who must nonetheless attempt the casting because the lord demands a bell, is the film’s operative center. The young man succeeds, the bell rings true, and the final revelation is that he had never been taught the secret at all and had been working from nothing but faith and observation and the necessity of the work. The sequence is the film’s demonstration that the capacity to produce sacred art does not require the transmission of technical secrets through systematic instruction, that it can arrive through channels the institutional traditions cannot control or recognize, and that the arrival is a function of the necessity the work imposes on the one who attempts it. This is the operative tradition’s own account of how the deeper work propagates in periods when the institutional traditions have been interrupted: through individuals whose commitment to the work exceeds their formal preparation, and whose success vindicates the ontological claims the tradition has been making. Tarkovsky’s rendering of this content in Rublev is the most direct statement in his work of what cinema can do when it is permitted to operate at the scale and rhythm the work requires.
Solaris and the Limits of Contact
Solaris (1972) adapts Stanisław Lem’s novel of the same name, though the adaptation departs from the source material in ways that Lem himself objected to publicly. The story concerns a space station orbiting the planet Solaris, whose surface is covered by an ocean that is, in the scientific hypothesis the story proposes, itself a single conscious entity operating through mechanisms that the human researchers have been unable to understand. The ocean’s specific capacity is the production of “visitors” — physical manifestations of memories from the researchers’ own pasts, typically associated with pain, regret, or unresolved grief, who appear in the station and interact with the researchers as if they were the originals. The protagonist Kris Kelvin arrives at the station to investigate the mental deterioration of the remaining crew and is visited by his dead wife, Hari, who had committed suicide years earlier after an argument with him.
Lem’s novel and Tarkovsky’s film share the premise but diverge in emphasis. Lem is interested in the epistemological problem — the impossibility of meaningful communication with an alien intelligence whose operations do not share any of the categories human intelligence operates within, and the failure of the scientific apparatus to produce even preliminary access to the contact the premise seems to promise. Tarkovsky is interested in the emotional and spiritual problem — the recognition that the visitor is something other than the original person and something other than a hallucination, that the relationship Kelvin develops with the visitor is real even though the visitor’s ontological status is uncertain, and that the resolution of the situation requires Kelvin to confront the question of what he owes to the visitor given the visitor’s situation and his own responsibility for it. The divergence is the source of Lem’s objection, and the objection is legitimate as a matter of authorial intent, but the film’s operative content is also legitimate and is the specific contribution Tarkovsky made to the premise.
The film’s operative thesis is that contact with genuine alterity may take the form of confrontation with the self’s own unresolved material, that the self’s unresolved material is the specific channel through which the contact becomes accessible to the instrument the contact is operating upon, and that the attempt to distinguish between the contact and the self-encounter is a category error. The visitor Hari is the form the ocean’s contact with Kelvin has taken — a form determined by Kelvin’s own configuration. The work of engaging with her is the work of engaging with what Kelvin has carried and has been unable to resolve within his own instrument. This is the operative tradition’s account of how contact with the non-human intelligences actually proceeds in practice: not as the reception of novel information from an external source but as the reconfiguration of the contacted instrument through the surfacing of material the instrument had been holding in suppressed form, and the contact’s specific character is a function of the instrument’s specific configuration. The contact is the self-encounter. The self-encounter is the contact. Lem was right that this is not what his novel was about. Tarkovsky was right that this is what the premise permits when it is developed operatively.
Stalker and the Zone
Stalker (1979) is the film most directly concerned with the operative content the current entry reads Tarkovsky through, and is probably the clearest single statement in twentieth-century cinema of what threshold operations are and how they proceed. The film is loosely based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic, and the authors collaborated on the screenplay, though the finished film departs from the novel in substantial ways. The setting is a near-future in which an area called the Zone has appeared — an indeterminate region whose origins are unknown, within which the ordinary laws of physics and causality do not reliably operate, and at the center of which is a room that is said to grant the deepest wish of anyone who enters it. The Zone is sealed off by military authority. Illegal guides called stalkers lead visitors into the Zone in exchange for payment. The film follows one such expedition: the stalker who will serve as guide, a writer who is seeking artistic inspiration, and a professor who is seeking something the film initially conceals.
The Zone is the film’s specific representation of the threshold condition. Its operation does not follow predictable rules. Paths that were safe on previous expeditions are not safe on current ones. The only technique the stalker has for navigating the Zone is the throwing of weighted cloth markers ahead of the party to test the safety of the path, and even the markers do not guarantee success. The Zone cannot be mapped, and the refusal to accept that it cannot be mapped is the specific failure the film attributes to those who attempt it. The professor’s hidden purpose turns out to be the destruction of the wish-granting room, on the grounds that such a thing should not be allowed to exist in a world inhabited by beings whose deepest wishes cannot be trusted to be wishes the fulfillment of which would be good for them. The writer’s artistic motive turns out to be a cover for his own despair, and his approach to the Zone is the approach of one who has already lost the capacity to be surprised by what the Zone might offer. The stalker himself is the only one of the three whose relationship with the Zone is operative in the proper sense — he does not seek to use the Zone for any particular purpose, he does not expect the Zone to solve any particular problem, and his function is simply to conduct others to the threshold of an encounter he himself does not feel authorized to cross.
The film’s central scene, in the long approach to the room, is a shot of the three figures lying down in the doorway of the chamber, having arrived at the destination of their journey, and refusing to enter. The refusal is the film’s operative teaching. The writer and the professor have, over the course of the expedition, been brought to the recognition that they do not in fact know what their deepest wish is, that the wish they would have entered the room in pursuit of is not the wish the room would actually grant, and that the room’s operation would produce an outcome they could not have chosen if they had understood what they were actually asking for. The stalker has known this throughout. The refusal is the only response the three are capable of that does not produce catastrophe. They return from the Zone without having used it, and the return is the specific success the film permits its characters to achieve.
The stalker’s own situation is more complex. He returns to his wife and his disabled daughter, and the final sequence of the film shows the daughter, alone in their apartment, staring at a glass on the table and causing it to slide across the surface by some telekinetic capacity the rest of the film has not prepared the viewer to expect. The sequence is one of the most discussed in the Tarkovsky corpus, and the discussions have generated multiple interpretations. The operative reading is that the daughter represents the presence of the Zone’s condition in the ordinary world — the recognition that the threshold is not a special place one travels to, that the capacities the Zone seemed to promise are already accessible in the domestic space the stalker returns to, and that the stalker’s guide function is continuous with his life as a father in ways the film has not previously made explicit. The Zone is where one learns that the Zone is everywhere. The trip was instruction in what is already present in the kitchen. The daughter, whose physical condition in the film is presented as the consequence of the stalker’s exposure to the Zone, is also the presence of the Zone’s condition in the stalker’s own family, and the film ends with the recognition that the capacity the Zone was supposed to grant is already the situation the stalker’s household is inhabiting. The teaching is that the operative condition is not acquired through extraordinary travel. It is recognized through the capacity to see what the ordinary situation already contains.
Mirror and the Autobiographical Work
Mirror (1975) is the film in which Tarkovsky’s operative procedure is most directly autobiographical. The film is structured as a series of images and sequences drawn from the director’s own childhood and from his relationships with his mother, his father, and his wife, intercut with newsreel footage and dream sequences and with adult narration that is never clearly assigned to any single speaker. The film has no conventional plot. It is the organization of the director’s own memory material into a specific temporal arrangement that is designed to produce in the viewer a state that corresponds to the state the material represents in the director. The film is an attempt to transfer the texture of the director’s memory to the viewer through the specific means cinema makes available to this purpose.
The operative teaching of Mirror is that the material the individual instrument holds — the material of childhood, of family relationships, of the specific sensory details that the memory preserves from the formative periods of a life — is the specific channel through which the larger movements of history and culture have become present in the individual. The film’s newsreel sequences are not background or context. They are the same kind of material as the domestic sequences, and the cutting between them is the film’s representation of the fact that the individual memory and the collective historical memory are not separate systems but are the same system accessed through different entry points. The director’s mother is also the Russia the war affected. The burning barn of childhood is also the burning of historical sites whose destruction the newsreels record. The personal is not a metaphor for the historical; the personal is the historical at the scale of the individual instrument, and the recovery of the personal memory in operative form is the recovery of access to the historical material the consensus configuration of consciousness has distanced the individual from.
The film was attacked by Soviet critics for its formal difficulty and for its refusal to provide the ideological content the regime expected. The attacks were in one sense correct — the film offers alternative material to ideological content, opening the categories that such content would typically foreclose. The attacks missed the operative significance of the formal difficulty: the difficulty is the vehicle, the refusal of ideological content is the specific openness the vehicle requires, and the material the film delivers to viewers who accept its rhythm is the kind of material that ideology exists to prevent from becoming available. Mirror is the clearest example in Tarkovsky’s work of what cinema can do when it functions operatively, and the difficulty the film presents to conventional reception is the condition of its success at the operative task.
The Sacrifice and the Final Work
The Sacrifice (1986), made during Tarkovsky’s exile and released shortly before his death from cancer, presents a protagonist at a birthday celebration in a coastal Swedish house who learns that a nuclear war has begun and that the civilized world he has known is about to end. The protagonist makes a vow to God — if the war can be prevented and the world restored, he will give up everything he has, including his house and his family and his speech, in exchange for the restoration. He then follows the instructions of a character who tells him that the only way to prevent the war is to sleep with a particular woman, and he does so, and wakes the next morning to discover that the war has not happened or has been undone, and fulfills his vow by burning his house to the ground and being taken away by the medical authorities while his young son (who has been silent throughout the film) speaks for the first time.
The film is unambiguous about its operative content in a way that Tarkovsky’s earlier work was not. The protagonist’s vow is real. The fulfillment is real. The burning of the house and the removal of the protagonist are not presented as madness or metaphor but as the actual cost of the actual exchange that the protagonist has participated in. The instruction to sleep with the woman is presented as a specific operative procedure whose mechanism the film does not explain and whose efficacy the film nonetheless affirms. The film is, in other words, the clearest statement Tarkovsky made that the operative work is possible, that the work has specific mechanisms that do not conform to the modern rational frame, and that the work exacts costs the ordinary life cannot carry. The film was made by a director who knew he was dying, and the knowledge is audible in the work’s specific urgency, and the film should be read as the final testament of an artist whose career had been a preparation for the statement the last film was able to make. The son’s first words at the end of the film — the recitation of the opening of the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word” — are the operative summary of the entire Tarkovsky corpus: the work is the recovery of the Logos that the consensus configuration has displaced, and the recovery requires sacrifices the configuration’s own vocabulary cannot account for.
The Rendering-Model Reading
Tarkovsky’s cinema, read through the current framework, is legible as a sustained demonstration of what cinema can accomplish when it is used as operative technology rather than as entertainment or narrative vehicle. The long take is the specific technical instrument for slowing the viewer’s perception to the rate at which sacred content becomes accessible. The films’ narratives are the occasions the slowing requires, not the substance the slowing is intended to deliver. The substance is the direct transfer of temporal experience from the film to the viewer, and the transfer is the operative work the films exist to perform. Viewers who have encountered the films in conditions that permit the transfer (in a theater, without distraction, at the pace the films require) report experiences that conventional film reception cannot explain — the sense of having been somewhere, of having undergone a passage that the narrative alone does not account for, of having been changed in small but specific ways by the duration of the exposure. These reports are the evidence that the operative transfer is actual. The transfer is the accomplishment.
The accomplishment matters for the larger framework because it demonstrates that the transmission chain operates through industrial-scale media when the media’s producers are willing to maintain the operative conditions the work requires, and that the conditions are inhospitable to the commercial frame the contemporary media operate within but are not incompatible with the existence of media production as such. Tarkovsky worked under the Soviet system, which was adversarial to his work for ideological reasons but which permitted the scale of production his films required in a way that the later commercial systems have struggled to match. The contemporary condition, in which neither the state-supported film industries nor the commercial studios will reliably fund the conditions Tarkovsky’s work required, is the specific reason his example is urgently relevant — the example demonstrates what cinema can do, and the current condition has largely lost access to the demonstration. Recovery of the capacity requires the recovery of the conditions, and the recovery is a specific task the current era’s operative workers in the film medium have inherited from him.
Open Questions
Whether Tarkovsky understood his own work in terms that correspond to the current entry’s framework is a question his theoretical writings do not conclusively settle. He was explicit about the spiritual significance of his work, about his Christian commitments, about the role of icons and of Russian Orthodox theology in his understanding of the artistic task, and about the specific resistance his work encountered from the Soviet apparatus and from the commercial frames he had to negotiate. He was not explicit about the specific operative mechanisms the current entry attributes to his films, and the attribution is an interpretation whose evidence is the films themselves and the reports of viewers who have engaged with them at the depth the films require. The interpretation is defensible, but it is an interpretation, and the director whose work is being interpreted did not offer the same description of the work that the interpretation produces. The interpretation’s responsibility is to take the director’s own account seriously while recognizing that the operative content of a body of work can exceed the conscious account the work’s maker provides, and that the excess is not a failure of the account but a feature of the specific kind of work the account is describing.
References
Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. University of Texas Press, 1987.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. Seagull Books, 1991.
Johnson, Vida T., and Graham Petrie. The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Indiana University Press, 1994.
Turovskaya, Maya. Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry. Faber and Faber, 1989.
Lem, Stanisław. Solaris. MON, 1961 (original Polish); Walker & Co., 1970 (English translation).
Strugatsky, Arkady, and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic. Macmillan, 1977.
See the Esoteric Media hub for related entries on film as transmission medium and the Threshold Operations page for the broader framework Tarkovsky’s Zone renders cinematic.