The image of a house in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky was not afraid of repetitions. On the contrary, a persistent, almost obsessive return to the same images is an important element of his cinema. Perhaps the most important among these images is the house. He appears already in Ivan’s Childhood, where the little scout constantly sees in his dreams a village destroyed by the Germans, but this is only a prologue. A kind of tetralogy of the lost house consists of “Solaris”, “Mirror”, “Nostalgia” and “Sacrifice”. Igor Gulin tells how Andrei Tarkovsky returned to the same house year after year and how he dealt with him in the last film.

Sometimes it seems that Tarkovsky carries the same structure from film to film, from country to country, from era to era, changing slightly in form, but maintaining the general outline and surroundings: here is a veranda, here is a grove, here is a lake nearby, here a table with cups, here are art albums, here is a dog, here is a horse. These are the father’s house of the scientist Chris Kelvin in Solaris, located somewhere in the abstract future, the childhood village home of the hero of the Mirror Alexei, located in the past, the house in distant Russia of the poet Andrei wandering around Italy from Nostalgia, the house on the Swedish island of Gotland of the writer Alexandra in “Sacrifice”.

Despite the difference in genre – an adaptation of a science fiction novel and a confessional essay – “Solaris” and “Nostalgia” make a particularly striking pair. It’s almost the same story. The hero travels through some other world, beyond. In “Solaris” this is space, in “Nostalgia” it is abroad (for a Soviet person, abroad, however, is almost the same space). However, the outward journey turns into an inward journey. Remaining indifferent to the wonders of the Universe and the delights of great art, the hero, Chris/Andrey, enters into a battle with his own conscience. The inner world has a visible embodiment – a home to which the hero returns again and again in thoughts and dreams. The two films have the same ending: the appearance of the native in the alien. In “Solaris,” Chris’s father’s house appears as an illusion of an alien ocean; in “Nostalgia,” Andrei’s village house appears as a surreal mirage in the middle of an Italian cathedral.

By the early 1980s, when Nostalgia was published, Tarkovsky was already a universally recognized genius and there was no one to criticize him for this kitschy trick. 10 years earlier the situation was a little different. Stanislaw Lem was furious at the sentimentality added to his austere novel. Lem was especially outraged by Chris’s aunt, invented by the director – an intelligent lady with an expressive bob, played by Tatyana Ogorodnikova. Tarkovsky himself seemed to like his aunt so much that he moved her to the Mirror.

“Mirror” is the same odyssey, but it does not require real movements, unfolding entirely in the space of the soul. Its hero, a man of unclear but clearly artistic pursuits, who has no face but has the voice of Innokenty Smoktunovsky, constantly dreams of the same dream. He sees himself as a child, “happy because everything is still ahead,” he stands on the threshold of his childhood home, but cannot cross the threshold. It is impossible to return to the house of the past. The film is an attempt to build its imitation, a model from scattered fragments, shards of memory.

The entire work of Tarkovsky, a director with an extremely precise sense of space, can be described as the art of dream architecture. This image of the model is literally realized in “Sacrifice”: the real house is doomed, but the hero’s son, struck by muteness, builds a small copy of it from pieces of wood, and it seems to remain standing.

If Tarkovsky’s art is a house, then it is a house that belongs to a very specific literary and cinematic tradition. This is a haunted house. An unclear force is at work there, the wind is blowing, the curtains are swaying, as if something is falling by itself. Under the influence of this force, the house gradually falls apart, but it is also what holds it together. The inhabitants of this ruin are either alive or dead, they appear and disappear, sometimes changing faces – just like the hero of “The Mirror” still cannot distinguish between his wife and mother.

Cinema and ghosts in general are closely related. Cinematography creates the illusion of the physical presence of people who are not here, and often not alive. He plays with the material imprints of the light of the departed. Bergman felt this eerie nature of the medium most deeply of all. Tarkovsky was his faithful student here, but what Bergman left in hints, he carried to the extreme. The camera’s gaze in his films – anxiously wandering, following the characters, as in horror films, scouring the space – is the gaze of a ghost, an entity that has subjectivity without possessing a body. For the most part, his heroes are like that: like ghosts, they are creatures native to cinema. Knowing its nature, they violate conventions – for example, they look intently into the camera, letting us know that this is their world, not ours.

Tarkovsky was keenly interested in various kinds of paranormal phenomena, but in general it makes no difference whether to perceive ghosts mystically or as metaphors for psychic phenomena. There is only one meaning: restless souls appear when a person knows his guilt. Guilt is the main experience of Tarkovsky’s heroes: guilt before parents, women, children, themselves and all of humanity – a feeling so comprehensive that its objects seem almost random. What it consists of is often impossible to understand. We know that Chris is guilty before his father, Alexey – before his mother, but we will never know why. There is a frightening catch here: instead of finding a specific motive, and therefore material for forgiveness, reconciliation, and ultimately understanding, guilt turns out to be an ontological state of a person. Thus, there is no way out of it. A person remains forever locked in his family’s home – forever tormented by his loved ones and tormented by them.

What remains? Just commit an act of suicidal exorcism – burn down the house. This is what Tarkovsky does at the end of his life and his career. The sacrifice of the hero of the film of the same name is senseless and cruel (as, indeed, many of the actions of Tarkovsky’s heroes): Alexander leaves his family, consisting of people still alive, homeless. The motivation for the action – a vow to give up everything if the nuclear war seen in a bad dream does not happen – is selfish nonsense. The meaning of burning a house is pure self-denial. This is the end of the soul’s wanderings, a dying decision: I will not return here again.

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