Nostalgia

18/05/2025

Film    Download PDF  

Resisting the Denotative

One way of approaching art house cinema is to see it as inverting a semiotic regime. It tends to connote more than it denotes, or at least connotes far more often than commercial film. These might be big generalisations and vague notions: as if art cinema and commercial film can be so easily designated and the language of signs thrown around without explanation. So let us explain, and in the explanation hope to comprehend why while there is a world of similarities between the most generically commercial work and the most formidably aesthetic one, there are important differences that if ignored lead to the most predictable of attacks on the work of directors who fall under the latter category: Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman. These are all familiar names in the high art tradition but, to move us along, we will focus on Tarkovsky — and chiefly his penultimate film, Nostalghia. 

             In semiotics, denotation refers to the first order of meaning; connotation, the second. The former is direct; the second is implied. As James Monaco says, denotation is “the strict literal definition of an expression…”, connotation is “the suggestive or associative sense of an expression…” Monaco notes that “a film image or sound has a denotative meaning: it is what it is and we don’t have to strive to recognise it. This factor may be simplistic, but it should never be underestimated: here lies the great strength of film.” (How to Read a Film) However, what if a filmmaker wishes to work ‘against’ the medium and emphasise less the concrete action that denotation lends itself so well towards, but connotative meaning that creates images one meditates over, extracting from them thought that demands reflection over the anticipatory, which offers stillness over action? This doesn’t mean that the connotative won’t have a narrative function but, within that role, it will carry a far heavier implied rather than stated purpose.  

          This is clear with the candle that the central character receives from someone who may well be a madman. Our main figure is Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), a poet in Italy working on a book about a Russian composer who lived in the country for a while, and where Andrei befriends Domenico (Erland Josephson), a man who years earlier tried to save his family from the end of the world by locking them up inside the house. Dominico believes if he can carry a lighted candle from one end of a lengthy, ancient Tuscan bath to the other, the world will be saved. He gives the candle to Andrei, and later we see Domenico in Rome sitting atop an equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. Domenico rails against civilisation before dousing himself in petrol and setting himself alight. In turn, Andrei stops off at the baths, lights the candle and tries to keep it alight. It keeps going out; however, he eventually crosses the baths and places the lighted candle on a ledge. When Dominico takes his life, the film gives us a burst of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. When Andrei reaches the end of the baths the music becomes more gentle and uplifting, as though the sacrifice Domenico has made suggests the triumph of madness while the candle registers the possibility of spiritual hope. After Domenico is aflame, Tarkovsky shows us the city’s mad excited by the event and others apathetically looking on. He shows the crowd as if atomised,  distinct individuals in space, but nothing suggesting individuality of expression. Andrei is solitary as he crosses the baths, a private gesture with comic implications as opposed to Domenico’s futile attempt at radicalising the world that ends only in what amounts to a media event. It is at best an extreme happening of the sort practised in the 60s and 70s to shake people out of their torpor, like Gunter Bros, who covered his body with his faeces, masturbated and sang the Austrian national anthem. He was jailed. Tarkovsky proposes that to change the world, one needs faith in it, and faith in the deity that created it, or at least a sense of being that goes beyond the readily materialistic. “With the word ‘spirituality’, I first of all have in mind a person’s interest in what has been called the meaning of life.” The director adds, “we don’t attach much importance to the development of the soul.” (Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews) Clearly, we should. 

             Tarkovsky might not put it in such terms, but potentially the sort of action Gunter Bros offered wouldn’t be too far removed from Domenico’s final deed - it becomes a hysterical reaction to the world, while what is needed instead is the development of private gestures, small deeds or at least ambivalent ones. In Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, Erland Josephson again plays a character, Alexander, who reacts extremely to the state of the world by burning down his house; believing in doing so, he will save everyone from nuclear annihilation and the film offers the sacrifice ambivalently. Has he saved the world or ruined his life? What is unequivocal is that an ambulance awaits to take Alexander away. Not all sacrificial gestures are equal, and we may assume that while Domenico’s is negative, Alexander’s ambiguous, Andrei’s is surely positive. This doesn’t mean it will have consequences, and partly what happens when a filmmaker aligns his interest in the spiritual with the connotative. Cause and effect are rarely so categorical. 

            Imagine if we turned the film's chief connotative object into a more clearly denotative one. Both guns and candles are objects with a denotative function, yet some objects are more connotatively rich than others, and some filmmakers bring out the connotative more than most. It is why we have invoked Godard, Bunuel, Bergman and Antonioni too. When Antonioni cuts to a disused clock on the ground in La Notte, and Godard cuts in Pierrot le fou to an Esso sign and then into the two SSs that invokes the Nazis, they are playing up connotation in film form. The cutaway to the clock asks us to wonder about its meaning, not to recognise the time. The edit to the Esso sign isn’t because the characters are driving into some random petrol station; it is Godard insisting that we shouldn’t regard Exxon Mobil as innocent. Imagine if in Nostalghia,  Domenico gives Andrei a gun, explains the problem isn’t really with the state of the world. It is the manipulation of it by a huge corporation, and Andrei’s purpose is now to kill the head of the company and save the world from corporate tyranny. We wouldn’t be musing over the meaning of the gun; its primary function will be evident as offering a practical purpose. 

        Most images in film work on this denotative level, even if one can read all sorts of symbolic meanings into the objects utilised. When in Bonnie and Clyde Clyde is no longer impotent, the viewer may see in this prowess a correlation with his potency with a gun as the title characters rob various banks. That might be so, but its connotative meaning doesn’t leave us musing over its denotative one, or believing the film has deviated from its narrative purpose to focus on objects that are, if you like, denotatively weak but connotatively strong. In one scene, the camera tracks left as Andrei’s translator Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) asks Domenico if he will speak to Andrei. Domenico sits on a fixed bicycle pedalling away and after a few words with Eugenia as she says a writer has come from Moscow and would like to speak to him about his experiences, he gets off the bike, and the camera tracks back with Eugenia to Andrei. He persuades Eugenia to try again, and Eugenia returns in Domenico’s direction as the camera tracks back once more. After she returns without luck, and with Domenico back on the bike, and a brief argument between Andrei and Eugenia, Andrei tries himself as the camera tracks left one more time. Throughout the sequence, the camera remains at the same distance, refusing to move in any closer no matter how dramatic or otherwise the scene. The quarrel between Andrei and Eugenia would seem to merit a close-up, but Tarkovsky holds to the form. When Andrei speaks to Domenico, he presses his hand against the tyre - yet the film allows us only to see this in the distance, a detail easily missed. The bike itself seems an absurd object as Dominico cycles without any objective. This isn’t quite an exercise bike, which for all its stillness reveals an objective as the person wishes to get fit and/or lose weight and is often used in Hollywood for dramatic or comedic effect: Easy Money, Bridget Jones' Diary, I Feel Pretty. Its motionlessness reflects the character’s singular absurdity, not his drive. The bike’s stillness is countered by the camera’s movement, making the bike’s fixed presence all the more felt than if it were travelling and the camera moving with it. It seems a connotative bike, not a denotative one. 

        This suggests to us two things. Certain objects sometimes lend themselves more to the connotative than others; and most if not all objects can be given a connotative over a denotative purpose depending on how they are used in the film or how the filmmaker films them. With the bike it is both used and filmed in a manner that brings out its abstract role. The candle as an object is perhaps more connotative than denotative if we think of its shift from necessary to augmentative, from the source of evening light in a time before electricity, to its purpose chiefly as a romantic or religious object in the modern era. Nevertheless, in most films, it might be a thing that connotes but it is used within the narrative as an object that needn’t be a cause of reflection. Whether it is Leonardo Di Caprio allowing a dominatrix to drop candle wax on him in The Wolf of Wall Street, a birthday in Sixteen Candles or numerous romantic dinner scenes, the purpose is clear enough and doesn’t ask the candle to do any more than its expected duty. 

          Reviewing Nostalghia, David Thomson states he has seen the film three times and still muses over what it is about. He says he first saw it in 1983 at Telluride Film Festival, with Tarkovsky and Richard Widmark two of those present being honoured. On one night, Tarkovsky “read (in Russian) a diatribe against America. Widmark was one who heard it. The next night was Widmark’s tribute and he begs indulgence by saying that whatever the faults of the United States, it had a tradition of trying to make movies that an audience could understand.” (Have You Seen…?)  It was a fair point but one that hardly required indulgence: if Widmark was right, making films that audiences comprehended would be the opposite of the self-indulgent cinema Tarkovsky was often accused of making. But rather than seeing self-indulgence as one that indulges the self of the filmmaker, it can equally be a cinema that indulges in the self of the viewer. If Thomson is coreect when he says he isn’t sure what it is about “but that I have grown accustomed to films where I’m not always sure what they’re about”, nevertheless, there is a difference between films that are confusing and films that are baffling. A Christopher Nolan film may be an example of the former, a movie that is full of purposeful action, which can nevertheless leave one a little unsure about what is going on. A re-viewing often helps, and an explanation by the director will remove the confusion. But re-viewing Nostalghia will be unlikely to clarify much of anything, and Tarkovsky would be resistant to explaining what is going on in his films, no matter if he wrote a brilliant book analysing his and others’ works, and the importance of the temporal, in Sculpting in Time. 

       However, if we accept the importance of connotation over denotation, if we see that the images have a hovering secondary function over a purposeful primary one, the type of cinema Tarkovsky makes becomes clearer, while retaining its bafflement. This also explains why we can distinguish between spiritual filmmakers (Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Sokurov and early Bruno Dumont, for example) and religious films. The latter would include Cecil B. De Mille’s The 10 Commandments, John Huston’s The Greatest Story Ever Told and Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings. These aren’t just films that have religious subjects (Moses, Jesus etc), while usually the spiritual film does not, as the latter often incorporate the spiritual into the ordinary, relying on characters like a mother and son in Sokurov’s film of that title, an impoverished girl in Mouchette, an unemployed teen epileptic in La vie de Jesus), or a member of a farming community believing he is Jesus Christ (Ordet). It is also, and more importantly, that the form absorbs the secondary function that leaves meaning in a suspended state rather than a categorical one. Jesus may in various religious epics be capable of miracles, but the loaves and the fishes become denotatively explanatory. We might doubt the possibility of the miraculous in our own lives, but we don’t doubt it as diegetic content in the films. 

      In contrast, the spiritual seeks belief over the miraculous, so if a miracle does occur (as in Ordet) or is left suspended (as in The Sacrifice), it rests on securing a belief in faith and not chiefly the empirical evidence for it.  Sure, WWIII seems to have been averted in The Sacrifice, but is this because the central character in his pact with God has burnt his own house down in return for saving humanity? Is this the nonsense thought of a man who has lost his home and, as far as his family is concerned, lost his mind, or is it a minor sacrifice next to what he has secured? One doesn’t know because the film isn’t interested in telling us what to think but in showing how one man believes - and leaving the viewer to choose to go with that belief or to resist it. Nobody can deny the loaves and the fishes as one suspends disbelief in a manner not so very different from the most heroic of deeds in a war film or the most outlandish of technological developments in a science fiction movie. But in the spiritual film belief is in a state of suspension, held between the miraculous and the moronic, the incredible and the incredulous, and is available partly because of the willingness to play up the connotative and play down the denotative. It is a place perhaps capable of representing the soul, and certainly for Tarkovsky this was important: “I don’t acknowledge what I believe everybody should resist acknowledging: how it is possible to entrust your soul to someone else and to live happily [with western promises of prosperity] without a soul, like a slightly crazy person in an insane asylum…” (Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews) Better it seems the potential craziness of the individual who believes in the nebulous than those who insist on the concrete.

      One may agree or disagree with Tarkovsky, but the point rests on how he manifests this question in film form. In the film’s closing scene, Andrei may have eradicated the nostalgia he feels for the Russia he is far away from and the Italy he wishes to explore, as Tarkovsky offers us a geographic impossibility. He shows us the magnificence of an enormous Italian ruin containing the dacha he has been missing for much of the film. While the camera slowly zooms out as it initially shows us Andrei and Domenico’s dog, he appears to be back in Russia as we see the house behind him. But the camera continues its zoom and an Italian cathedral dwarfs the Russian home. Is he back in Russia and yearning for Italy, or is he still in Italy yearning for Russia? Has he perhaps married the impossibility of locations that are geographically distinct in a world his gesture with the candle has allowed him to transcend, or is this a dream state already involved early in the film? The viewer doesn’t quite know, and that is partly the beauty of a connotative form pushed to the point of manifold ambiguity. 

   

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Nostalgia

Resisting the Denotative

One way of approaching art house cinema is to see it as inverting a semiotic regime. It tends to connote more than it denotes, or at least connotes far more often than commercial film. These might be big generalisations and vague notions: as if art cinema and commercial film can be so easily designated and the language of signs thrown around without explanation. So let us explain, and in the explanation hope to comprehend why while there is a world of similarities between the most generically commercial work and the most formidably aesthetic one, there are important differences that if ignored lead to the most predictable of attacks on the work of directors who fall under the latter category: Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman. These are all familiar names in the high art tradition but, to move us along, we will focus on Tarkovsky — and chiefly his penultimate film, Nostalghia. 

             In semiotics, denotation refers to the first order of meaning; connotation, the second. The former is direct; the second is implied. As James Monaco says, denotation is “the strict literal definition of an expression…”, connotation is “the suggestive or associative sense of an expression…” Monaco notes that “a film image or sound has a denotative meaning: it is what it is and we don’t have to strive to recognise it. This factor may be simplistic, but it should never be underestimated: here lies the great strength of film.” (How to Read a Film) However, what if a filmmaker wishes to work ‘against’ the medium and emphasise less the concrete action that denotation lends itself so well towards, but connotative meaning that creates images one meditates over, extracting from them thought that demands reflection over the anticipatory, which offers stillness over action? This doesn’t mean that the connotative won’t have a narrative function but, within that role, it will carry a far heavier implied rather than stated purpose.  

          This is clear with the candle that the central character receives from someone who may well be a madman. Our main figure is Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), a poet in Italy working on a book about a Russian composer who lived in the country for a while, and where Andrei befriends Domenico (Erland Josephson), a man who years earlier tried to save his family from the end of the world by locking them up inside the house. Dominico believes if he can carry a lighted candle from one end of a lengthy, ancient Tuscan bath to the other, the world will be saved. He gives the candle to Andrei, and later we see Domenico in Rome sitting atop an equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. Domenico rails against civilisation before dousing himself in petrol and setting himself alight. In turn, Andrei stops off at the baths, lights the candle and tries to keep it alight. It keeps going out; however, he eventually crosses the baths and places the lighted candle on a ledge. When Dominico takes his life, the film gives us a burst of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. When Andrei reaches the end of the baths the music becomes more gentle and uplifting, as though the sacrifice Domenico has made suggests the triumph of madness while the candle registers the possibility of spiritual hope. After Domenico is aflame, Tarkovsky shows us the city’s mad excited by the event and others apathetically looking on. He shows the crowd as if atomised,  distinct individuals in space, but nothing suggesting individuality of expression. Andrei is solitary as he crosses the baths, a private gesture with comic implications as opposed to Domenico’s futile attempt at radicalising the world that ends only in what amounts to a media event. It is at best an extreme happening of the sort practised in the 60s and 70s to shake people out of their torpor, like Gunter Bros, who covered his body with his faeces, masturbated and sang the Austrian national anthem. He was jailed. Tarkovsky proposes that to change the world, one needs faith in it, and faith in the deity that created it, or at least a sense of being that goes beyond the readily materialistic. “With the word ‘spirituality’, I first of all have in mind a person’s interest in what has been called the meaning of life.” The director adds, “we don’t attach much importance to the development of the soul.” (Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews) Clearly, we should. 

             Tarkovsky might not put it in such terms, but potentially the sort of action Gunter Bros offered wouldn’t be too far removed from Domenico’s final deed - it becomes a hysterical reaction to the world, while what is needed instead is the development of private gestures, small deeds or at least ambivalent ones. In Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, Erland Josephson again plays a character, Alexander, who reacts extremely to the state of the world by burning down his house; believing in doing so, he will save everyone from nuclear annihilation and the film offers the sacrifice ambivalently. Has he saved the world or ruined his life? What is unequivocal is that an ambulance awaits to take Alexander away. Not all sacrificial gestures are equal, and we may assume that while Domenico’s is negative, Alexander’s ambiguous, Andrei’s is surely positive. This doesn’t mean it will have consequences, and partly what happens when a filmmaker aligns his interest in the spiritual with the connotative. Cause and effect are rarely so categorical. 

            Imagine if we turned the film's chief connotative object into a more clearly denotative one. Both guns and candles are objects with a denotative function, yet some objects are more connotatively rich than others, and some filmmakers bring out the connotative more than most. It is why we have invoked Godard, Bunuel, Bergman and Antonioni too. When Antonioni cuts to a disused clock on the ground in La Notte, and Godard cuts in Pierrot le fou to an Esso sign and then into the two SSs that invokes the Nazis, they are playing up connotation in film form. The cutaway to the clock asks us to wonder about its meaning, not to recognise the time. The edit to the Esso sign isn’t because the characters are driving into some random petrol station; it is Godard insisting that we shouldn’t regard Exxon Mobil as innocent. Imagine if in Nostalghia,  Domenico gives Andrei a gun, explains the problem isn’t really with the state of the world. It is the manipulation of it by a huge corporation, and Andrei’s purpose is now to kill the head of the company and save the world from corporate tyranny. We wouldn’t be musing over the meaning of the gun; its primary function will be evident as offering a practical purpose. 

        Most images in film work on this denotative level, even if one can read all sorts of symbolic meanings into the objects utilised. When in Bonnie and Clyde Clyde is no longer impotent, the viewer may see in this prowess a correlation with his potency with a gun as the title characters rob various banks. That might be so, but its connotative meaning doesn’t leave us musing over its denotative one, or believing the film has deviated from its narrative purpose to focus on objects that are, if you like, denotatively weak but connotatively strong. In one scene, the camera tracks left as Andrei’s translator Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) asks Domenico if he will speak to Andrei. Domenico sits on a fixed bicycle pedalling away and after a few words with Eugenia as she says a writer has come from Moscow and would like to speak to him about his experiences, he gets off the bike, and the camera tracks back with Eugenia to Andrei. He persuades Eugenia to try again, and Eugenia returns in Domenico’s direction as the camera tracks back once more. After she returns without luck, and with Domenico back on the bike, and a brief argument between Andrei and Eugenia, Andrei tries himself as the camera tracks left one more time. Throughout the sequence, the camera remains at the same distance, refusing to move in any closer no matter how dramatic or otherwise the scene. The quarrel between Andrei and Eugenia would seem to merit a close-up, but Tarkovsky holds to the form. When Andrei speaks to Domenico, he presses his hand against the tyre - yet the film allows us only to see this in the distance, a detail easily missed. The bike itself seems an absurd object as Dominico cycles without any objective. This isn’t quite an exercise bike, which for all its stillness reveals an objective as the person wishes to get fit and/or lose weight and is often used in Hollywood for dramatic or comedic effect: Easy Money, Bridget Jones' Diary, I Feel Pretty. Its motionlessness reflects the character’s singular absurdity, not his drive. The bike’s stillness is countered by the camera’s movement, making the bike’s fixed presence all the more felt than if it were travelling and the camera moving with it. It seems a connotative bike, not a denotative one. 

        This suggests to us two things. Certain objects sometimes lend themselves more to the connotative than others; and most if not all objects can be given a connotative over a denotative purpose depending on how they are used in the film or how the filmmaker films them. With the bike it is both used and filmed in a manner that brings out its abstract role. The candle as an object is perhaps more connotative than denotative if we think of its shift from necessary to augmentative, from the source of evening light in a time before electricity, to its purpose chiefly as a romantic or religious object in the modern era. Nevertheless, in most films, it might be a thing that connotes but it is used within the narrative as an object that needn’t be a cause of reflection. Whether it is Leonardo Di Caprio allowing a dominatrix to drop candle wax on him in The Wolf of Wall Street, a birthday in Sixteen Candles or numerous romantic dinner scenes, the purpose is clear enough and doesn’t ask the candle to do any more than its expected duty. 

          Reviewing Nostalghia, David Thomson states he has seen the film three times and still muses over what it is about. He says he first saw it in 1983 at Telluride Film Festival, with Tarkovsky and Richard Widmark two of those present being honoured. On one night, Tarkovsky “read (in Russian) a diatribe against America. Widmark was one who heard it. The next night was Widmark’s tribute and he begs indulgence by saying that whatever the faults of the United States, it had a tradition of trying to make movies that an audience could understand.” (Have You Seen…?)  It was a fair point but one that hardly required indulgence: if Widmark was right, making films that audiences comprehended would be the opposite of the self-indulgent cinema Tarkovsky was often accused of making. But rather than seeing self-indulgence as one that indulges the self of the filmmaker, it can equally be a cinema that indulges in the self of the viewer. If Thomson is coreect when he says he isn’t sure what it is about “but that I have grown accustomed to films where I’m not always sure what they’re about”, nevertheless, there is a difference between films that are confusing and films that are baffling. A Christopher Nolan film may be an example of the former, a movie that is full of purposeful action, which can nevertheless leave one a little unsure about what is going on. A re-viewing often helps, and an explanation by the director will remove the confusion. But re-viewing Nostalghia will be unlikely to clarify much of anything, and Tarkovsky would be resistant to explaining what is going on in his films, no matter if he wrote a brilliant book analysing his and others’ works, and the importance of the temporal, in Sculpting in Time. 

       However, if we accept the importance of connotation over denotation, if we see that the images have a hovering secondary function over a purposeful primary one, the type of cinema Tarkovsky makes becomes clearer, while retaining its bafflement. This also explains why we can distinguish between spiritual filmmakers (Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Sokurov and early Bruno Dumont, for example) and religious films. The latter would include Cecil B. De Mille’s The 10 Commandments, John Huston’s The Greatest Story Ever Told and Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings. These aren’t just films that have religious subjects (Moses, Jesus etc), while usually the spiritual film does not, as the latter often incorporate the spiritual into the ordinary, relying on characters like a mother and son in Sokurov’s film of that title, an impoverished girl in Mouchette, an unemployed teen epileptic in La vie de Jesus), or a member of a farming community believing he is Jesus Christ (Ordet). It is also, and more importantly, that the form absorbs the secondary function that leaves meaning in a suspended state rather than a categorical one. Jesus may in various religious epics be capable of miracles, but the loaves and the fishes become denotatively explanatory. We might doubt the possibility of the miraculous in our own lives, but we don’t doubt it as diegetic content in the films. 

      In contrast, the spiritual seeks belief over the miraculous, so if a miracle does occur (as in Ordet) or is left suspended (as in The Sacrifice), it rests on securing a belief in faith and not chiefly the empirical evidence for it.  Sure, WWIII seems to have been averted in The Sacrifice, but is this because the central character in his pact with God has burnt his own house down in return for saving humanity? Is this the nonsense thought of a man who has lost his home and, as far as his family is concerned, lost his mind, or is it a minor sacrifice next to what he has secured? One doesn’t know because the film isn’t interested in telling us what to think but in showing how one man believes - and leaving the viewer to choose to go with that belief or to resist it. Nobody can deny the loaves and the fishes as one suspends disbelief in a manner not so very different from the most heroic of deeds in a war film or the most outlandish of technological developments in a science fiction movie. But in the spiritual film belief is in a state of suspension, held between the miraculous and the moronic, the incredible and the incredulous, and is available partly because of the willingness to play up the connotative and play down the denotative. It is a place perhaps capable of representing the soul, and certainly for Tarkovsky this was important: “I don’t acknowledge what I believe everybody should resist acknowledging: how it is possible to entrust your soul to someone else and to live happily [with western promises of prosperity] without a soul, like a slightly crazy person in an insane asylum…” (Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews) Better it seems the potential craziness of the individual who believes in the nebulous than those who insist on the concrete.

      One may agree or disagree with Tarkovsky, but the point rests on how he manifests this question in film form. In the film’s closing scene, Andrei may have eradicated the nostalgia he feels for the Russia he is far away from and the Italy he wishes to explore, as Tarkovsky offers us a geographic impossibility. He shows us the magnificence of an enormous Italian ruin containing the dacha he has been missing for much of the film. While the camera slowly zooms out as it initially shows us Andrei and Domenico’s dog, he appears to be back in Russia as we see the house behind him. But the camera continues its zoom and an Italian cathedral dwarfs the Russian home. Is he back in Russia and yearning for Italy, or is he still in Italy yearning for Russia? Has he perhaps married the impossibility of locations that are geographically distinct in a world his gesture with the candle has allowed him to transcend, or is this a dream state already involved early in the film? The viewer doesn’t quite know, and that is partly the beauty of a connotative form pushed to the point of manifold ambiguity. 

   


© Tony McKibbin