Religion, nihilism, faith, and the movies
Cinema really is a broad church
At the beginning of this year, the Ritz in Randwick ran a retrospective of Andrei Tarkovsky films. I saw Stalker and The Sacrifice for the first time. (I was away at Easter, when they screened Nostalghia, which is a shame, because I’ve never seen that before, either. At least the break gave me time to read Zona, Geoff Dyer’s rather wonderful, inventive book about Stalker.) I saw Andrei Rublev for the second time, and for the first time on the big screen. I walked away from each of these films shaken, by each in different ways.
Two things might help add some context to the rant that follows. The first is that I went to film school. I hold that most useless of things, a Bachelor of Film and Television. (I also hold that second most useless of things, a Masters of Journalism. I mean, seriously, you couldn’t make my life choices up.) For the two years I was at university, I watched at least two feature films a day, often more. I started and ran the university’s “film journal,” Cinephilia, and was an active part of the then-marvellous film blogosphere. (Please follow Zach Campbell if you don’t already.) I later moved to Melbourne to undertake my Honours in Cinema Studies, but gave that up on on the grounds that academic film criticism bored me, and, worse, was slowly turning me into a bad writer. (It often seemed to me that people would come in with a theory or school of thought they liked—Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism—and find films that roughly illustrated those beliefs. They did not seem to me to be theorising off the back of the films themselves, the way someone like Nicole Brenez does. This is perhaps an argument for another time.)
The other thing to know is that I was raised Catholic. I’ve been lapsed since I was about ten, chose Felix as my Confirmation name because of the cartoon cat, and haven’t actively taken part in the Mass since I was in Mexico City in 2010 and needed to get my hands on some wine. But I can still perform call-and-response with the best of them, and for some reason followed the recent conclave closely.
That’s the context. Your mileage on the rest of this piece may vary.
Rublev is a young man’s film. I don’t think I understood this when I first saw it twenty-something years ago. It has a young man’s bluster about it, and is to some extent about a young man’s bluster. It is a bold little fellow who reckons he can remake both Alexander Nevsky and Seven Samurai at the same time, while also making a point about art-making in a totalitarian system. But Tarkovsky was a bold little fellow. It’s a bold little fellow, too, in the case of Rublev as depicted in the film, who believes that his art is, not a direct conduit to God, but rather an actual manifestation of Him. (To be fair, Eisenstein made Nevsky to outdo Walt Disney, so I guess we were all young and reckless once.)
There is no question in my mind that Rublev is a near-perfect film. It is certainly my favourite Tarkovsky. It took me a long time to admit that I love Lawrence of Arabia, with its big set pieces, just as much as I do Tati’s dollhouses of modernity, Hitchcock’s masturbation into mirrors, or Chris Marker’s Rubik’s cubes of disconnected imagery. But the sequence with the balloon at the beginning of Rublev, and the remarkable last passage with the smelting of a church bell, are as gripping and awe-inspiring as Lean’s cut to red or Feisal’s long loop around on the camel. Andrei Rublev is striking stuff to watch.
But we’re here to talk about religion. Oddly, though, given it’s a film about an icon painter, Rublev strikes me as the least religious of the three films I saw during the retrospective. (I’ve also seen Solaris and Mirror, but both were back in film school and I didn’t see them again this time around, so I’m not going to talk about them here on the grounds that my memory needs jogging.) That brings us, I suppose, to what “religious” means in this context. Having now watched three fairly representative Tarkovskys back to back, I think you have to admit that he is far less interested in belief than he is in faith. Ever the Orthodox Christian, Tarkovsky certainly believes in God. But, in Rublev, it’s only that: belief. God is kind of just a fact. Yes, He’s an almost entirely absent fact, which is why Tarkovsky primarily argues in Rublev for self-belief, but even His absence is taken to be a sign of His existence. There’s no demand to jump. That changes in the later films.
As far as the self-belief point goes, the most important artist in the film isn’t actually Rublev at all. It’s Boriska, the kid whose entire bell-making family has been murdered and so lies to the authorities, claiming that his bell-making father has told him the secret of bell-making. After the kid has acted like a jerk on set, including to his friends (foreshadowing my entire first year of film school), he reveals that, in fact, his father never told him anything about bell-making at all. He picked up bell-making by osmosis, and has, in this case, been very lucky. (There is real tension in the scene when they go to ring the thing for the first time. That the Italians they’re trying to impress are mostly just talking in Italian about how shit Russia is amuses me.) There is no suggestion, besides the fact that they’re making a bell for a church, that God has been involved in the kid’s success. But that success also causes Andrei to speak and paint again, after many years of ascetic silence. Is this God at work, or just an argument that artists are kind of great? (We are. Pay us.)
Stalker is a very different game.
Here, Tarkovsky is moving into much stranger and more unsettling territory, so much so that, at first, you don’t really know what argument he’s trying to make. Towards the end, he makes it pretty clear that the Stalker is a Christ figure, even though it’s the Writer who at one point fashions himself a crown of thorns. The Stalker is urging people with every fibre of his being to go into the room, and of course they never do because the leap of faith required to do so is difficult to the point of being impossible. They believe the Stalker is telling them the truth, but they are nevertheless terrified. Faith, in my conception of it, requires a bit of terror, because it requires more than belief: it requires abandon. The Stalker is not himself Christ, of course, though he certainly suffers enough to be. He more akin to Kafka’s man from the country, seeking entry to the Law. The man from the country is never admitted, despite the fact that the door exists only for him. (“I am now going to shut it,” says the doorkeeper at the end of the story.) Even that isn’t quite right, though, because, in Stalker, the Stalker is the doorkeeper, too, and wants nothing more than for his charges to enter. His story is tragedy from beginning to end.
I am, as I have said, in no discernible or relevant way a religious man. But I find the refusal of the Stalker’s guests to walk through the door about as painful a thing as I have seen in the cinema. But I know I wouldn’t walk through it, either. What is moving in Stalker is not the effect of their refusal on them—which is nothing—but rather its effect on the Stalker: it breaks his heart. It seems, at the end, to nearly kill him. Because he knows the room’s powers are real. Why, he wonders, desperate and inconsolable, does no one ever go inside, especially when they themselves believe what he’s telling them?
I disagree with what Tarkovsky is saying here on pretty much every level you can imagine. Certainty is obviously and of course a poison, as the news seems hell-bent on confirming for us on a day-to-bloody-day basis. I am by no means one of those weirdos who claim that they wish they had faith but don’t. On an aesthetic level, however, I could listen to Tarkovsky on the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of faith all day long. In the last scene of Stalker, he has the Stalker’s daughter, who wasn’t born in the Zone but was conceived after he had already spent a lot of time there, display psychokinetic abilities. This doesn’t make him Jesus, and it certainly doesn’t make her Jesus. It simply means that, if he cannot go through the door, and no one else he takes to the Zone ever does, none of us will never know what is on the other side of that door, or why the girl can move cups and glasses across the table with her mind. You have to have faith to know what is unknowable—or at least to be able to claim that you do—because you have to have faith to go through the door. Even then, you probably won’t know anything, because that is what faith is all about, too. (To go back to Lawrence, “the trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”)
Nearly everyone working on Stalker got cancer. I have written about this in the past, in my 2012 piece about Chernobyl. When they made Stalker, they were all wading about in rivers downstream from some chemical plant, and they all got sick. They all wound up dying as a result—Tarkovsky, his wife, the guy who played Andrei Rublev—and it remains a great irony that, only a few years later, the Soviet government would choose to name the area around Reactor No. 4 the Exclusion Zone. Godard, in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, said that cinema gives us a world. There were many more Black presidents in movies and on television before there was a single one in real life. The last season of The West Wing paved the way for Barack Obama (Matt Santos, though Latino, was explicitly based on Obama), as did the entire career of Morgan Freeman. Unfortunately, Stalker gave us both the visual and even literal language of 1986. I do not believe Tarkovsky to be a prophet, but we make and remake the world based on what we’ve seen. We may not walk through the door to the room, but the world, to its detriment, walked through the door of Stalker.
Stalker grows reflective. When a man thinks of the past he becomes kinder, he says. A lovely idea, but manifestly untrue. There comes a point in your life when you realise that most of the significant experiences—aside from illness and death—lie in the past. To that extent the past is far more appealing than the future. The older you get the more time you spend thinking about the past, the things that have happened. Old people spend almost all of their time thinking about the past. But if their faces are anything to go by, this past fills them with bitterness as often as tenderness. The past becomes a source of regret; you think of hopes that were unrealised, disappointments, betrayals, failures, deceptions, all the things that led to this point which could be so different, so much better, but which, however you reshuffle the deck, always ends up at this point, leaves you holding—and lacking—the same cards.
— Geoff Dyer, Zona
Hollywood, den of sin though it may be, is pretty Catholic. Not only is it a deliberately broad church, it’s also obsessed with guilt and shame. Hollywood makes Robert Bresson look like the happiest man who never danced a jig. It makes Bergman look like one of those dancing blow-up things outside a used car lot. Hollywood never declined to brutally punish someone, especially the viewer, for trespassing against us and leading us into temptation, even while doing so itself. Like Tolstoy with Anna or Flaubert with Emma, every cheating woman, and quite a few of the cheating men, eventually got theirs in Hollywood, especially during the classical era. Even Tarantino’s work has become, over time, about righting wrongs. He killed Hitler, murdered Uncle Tom, and let Sharon Tate live. (He chose more obvious targets, of course—people who absolutely should have felt guilt or shame but didn’t, so, in Tarantino’s mind, deserved to die—on the grounds that he really wants a Best Director Oscar and rewriting history as though it were a VHS library of films to which you can refer is easier to do than you would think.) But while Hollywood is a guilt machine, it is also, as in the Tarantino case, guilt’s release valve. As I said above, Godard said that cinema gives us a world. Hollywood, thinking itself the Messiah, tries at least some of the time to save it instead, usually by means of, well, Hollywood.
Here’s a tangent for you. I always found it kind of funny that any Hollywood filmmaker who wanted to make a point about the irrelevancy or nastiness of the Western, or who wanted to repurpose the genre to their own ends, always made their Westerns somewhere other than Monument Valley. They always picked somewhere where it rains or snows. (Dead Man and McCabe & Mrs. Miller are in both set in the Pacific Northwest, and The Hateful Eight is set in Wyoming during a blizzard. There are other examples.) I have similarly found it funny that most neo-classical Westerns (the remake of 3:10 to Yuma comes to mind, as does, to a lesser extent, the remake of True Grit) are set back in the sand, dirt, and sun. The tropes may be the same, but the conversation about the myth itself seems always to take place at the level of weather and landscape, not at the level of the whole thing being a lie.
If Hackman and Eastwood didn’t have the single best exchange about the Western in any Western I can name— “I'll see you in Hell, William Munny.” “Yeah.”—the best performance beat in Unforgiven would easily be Richard Harris’ English Bob losing his accent for a moment and catching himself to correct it. It says more about the West, as an idea, than any other moment I can think of outside the most obvious and famous one (“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” which comes at the end of Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance). The West is a lie that America has always told itself. Manifest Destiny was a crime. Every Western worth its salt, at least since Unforgiven and perhaps even to some extent since The Searchers, has been a film about, or about avoiding, guilt. Which is rather saying something, when you think about it, because neither Eastwood nor Ford really gave a red-hot damn.
I don’t think you could call Unforgiven a film about Original Sin, but Morgan Freeman winding up visibly dead in a box, and this turning Eastwood into an Avenging Angel of Death, would suggest that it at least may be. But this also the essential difference between America and practically anywhere else, between Hollywood’s idea of salvation and Tarkovsky’s. There is no salvation—and certainly no revenge—in Tarkovsky’s cosmology. God doesn’t care about you paying Him back. The only thing He cares about is submission.
The Sacrifice is a self-described parable. It is a simple story, simply told, full of very simple, yet very real, character motivations. A not particularly good or likeable man, Alexander, sees the threat of nuclear destruction coming down upon him and his family and makes a deal with the big man in the sky. He doesn’t know he’s making a deal when he makes it. He’s just desperately praying, despite not really believing. But he’s also promising to give everything up: his wife, his son, his home. He’s scared. (There are, as they say, no atheists in foxholes.) But then Alexander’s neighbour, the quirky and slightly unhinged postman Gossen, comes around and tells him that, should he really wish to avoid the end of the world, he can do so by sleeping with the witch down the road. The witch in question also happens to be Alexander’s maid. This, in strictly Christian terms, will obviously be a sin. It tends, in my experience, to be frowned upon in secular circles, too. But Alexander comes to believe that it may be the only thing that can save his family, and his terror in the face of nuclear annihilation convinces him to give it a good college try.
Let’s remember that, by this point, Tarkovsky had already made Stalker and so was already quite considerably sick. He had also left the Soviet Union. (The Sacrifice was made in Sweden. Tarkovsky, who was obsessed with Bergman, got Bergman’s great collaborator, Sven Nykvist, to shoot it. Nykvist nailed the brief and then some.) Alexander’s deal with God does not, I think, come out of nowhere. Tarkovsky, too, was scared. Our lead duly beds his maid, in one of the most unsettlingly beautiful sex scenes in cinema—it turns out that she may actually be a witch—and of course the next morning nuclear war has been averted. Everything goes back to normal.
Except that it doesn’t, and can’t, because of the deal. What do you do when you’ve made a deal with God and God has kept his end of the bargain? Whether or not you believe that He’s real, and whether or not you believe that He’s answered your prayer, you keep your end of the bargain, too, if you know what’s good for you. That’s what faith is. Alexander burns the house down and gets himself sent off to an insane asylum. This is very much in line with Sarah’s behaviour in Greene’s The End of the Affair, one of those great but still kind of nasty Anglo-Catholic novels, always written by converts, that argued that, while you may not believe in God, God very much believes in you. If you make Him a promise, both Greene and Tarkovsky argue, you’d better believe—or rather have faith—that He is going to collect. I never thought of the Catholic God as a particularly Old Testament kind of God, but it turns out that the jealous God is the one you have to believe in if you’re going to believe at all. The Sacrifice is called The Sacrifice for a reason. If you believe in Him, He is coming for you. You make your bargain, and then you beg. Nevertheless, a few years later, Tarkovsky was dead as a result of Stalker.
William Munny does not pray to God, but he thinks a lot about the things that he did, and is always on the look out for a confessor. “Ned, you remember that drover I shot through the mouth and his teeth came out the back of his head? I think about him now and again.” Munny is racked with guilt, and quite rightly so, but he isn’t making any deals with any saviour. This strikes me as rather American. When Ned goes into town and gets murdered, Munny starts drinking again on the spot, and then in one of those great dark moments in American film he kills everyone in the room just because he can. This is nihilism rather than Catholicism, let alone Christianity more broadly. Alexander gives up his own life. Munny takes everyone else’s. But the latter also knows, the moment he drinks the kid’s liquor—let alone when he enters that saloon to find Little Bill—that he is about to nullify every good piece of work that he’s done since he stopped being a bastard all those years ago. “I'll see you in Hell, William Munny” is just about the most Catholic line I know, and “Yeah” just about the most Catholic answer. This is the difference between the two cosmologies: Tarkovsky believes in God and sacrifice. Eastwood—an atheist by his own account—believes in sin, and in its eternal return.
Tarkovsky does not have a vision of Hell, or strictly speaking a conception of sin. He has faith and is scared of it: like Greene, or even Waugh, he wants you to enter the room, but is also not very sure that you should. Would you make Alexander’s deal, or would you be William Munny, who doesn’t believe that such deals are possible? Asking a much harder question, would you rather have faith, as Tarkovsky insists you must, or do things in service of a god in whom you do not believe, on the basis of things that you’ve done? Obviously, my answer to both questions is no, but the question itself is an interesting one.
I’m not even sure what point I’m trying to make, except that I believe this to be a question worthy of art. I don’t believe that faith or belief will get you though this life unscathed, or that guilt and shame will, or murder. Cinema certainly won’t. But when I watch these films—about men who claim divinity for their works, who steadfastly refuse grace when it’s offered to them, who make last-minute bargains in veritable Pascal’s wagers, who realise there’s nothing left for them but blood—I am made to see the face of God. The face of God is our own. I do believe it a face that we should fear.
I too had the good fortune to attend some of Tarkovsky retrospective at the Ritz. It was probably the closest I’ll get to a religious experience.