During 1984 famed Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky left Russia for good. For years he had fought with Goskino, the USSR State Committee for Cinematography, who forced him to drastically cut his 1965 film Andrei Rublev (it official release in the Soviet Union came in 1971) and in 1975 undermined his autobiographical film The Mirror by limiting its release it to third class cinemas and workers clubs. At the time of his announcement Tarkovsky was living in Italy and was preparing to shoot his next film, The Sacrifice. It would be his last film as he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and died in December of 1986. In the early 1990s the theory, later supported by evidence, surfaced that Tarkovsky did not die of natural causes and had in fact been assassinated by the KGB.
The Sacrifice is in part a tribute to Tarkovsky’s love of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. It was shot in Sweden with Bergman’s frequent cinematographer Sven Nykvist, starred Erland Josephson, who had also collaborated with Bergman on numerous occasions and featured the work of production designer Anna Asp, who had won an Academy Award for her work on Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. But it is also distinctively still a Tarkovsky picture with all the philosophical and religious metaphysics that were present in his earlier films.
The film tells the story of Alexander (Josephson), an actor turned psychologist and writer in his sixties, who is forced to share his birthday party with the announcement of World War III and the impending doom of a nuclear holocaust. Alexander bargains with God that he will give up everything that he possesses if only life for those he loves could return to how it was only a few hours before.
The Sacrifice blends reality with dreams. The film’s visuals stray from a soft color palette to a dark black and white where the darkness seems poised to snuff out the light. The temptation is to separate what is fantasy from what is real but in doing so the film can become needlessly complicated (as if the philosophical ideas that are openly discussed aren’t enough to intellectually chew on). A more appropriate way to view the film is to witness it through Alexander’s eyes. For him, at least on this occasion, there is no distinction between the experiences he accumulates while asleep or awake.
Tarkovsky was investigating what it is to be human and often this means a journey without a traditional plot structure. Terrence Malick works in a similar way, particularly in his most recent film The Tree of Life and his World War II film The Thin Red Line. Tarkovsky is interested in the soul, not the body, and there are many that find the results to be pretentious and boring. Those looking to cinema as a way to escape, rather than examine, themselves will most likely find little enjoyment in The Sacrifice or any of Tarkovsky’s films.
Included with the Blu-ray release of The Sacrificeis a DVD copy of Michal Leszczylowski’s film Directed By Andrei Tarkovsky. Leszczylowsk worked as the editor on The Sacrifice and his feature-length documentary features an amazing collection of deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with those that worked closely with Tarkovsky, archive interview footage with the director himself as well as passages from Tarkovsky’s books. The film is nothing short of a master class on filmmaking. It offers a view into Tarkovsky’s psychology without getting weighted down by the politics that could have easily derailed his career. Because the film is in standard definition it also gives audiences a good idea of how poorly The Sacrifice looked before it was remastered for Blu-ray. The remastered picture isn’t flawless but is such a dramatic improvement in clarity that unless you are an absolute perfectionist there is little here to complain about.
Films from Andrei Tarkovsky in the Criterion Collection
Ivan’s Childhood (1962) Spine #397
Andrei Rublev (1969) Spine #34
Solaris (1972) Spine #164
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