The Child as Figure for the Cinematic Presentation of Trauma
The
wounds of war, to use Schweizer’s words, “will not close despite the sutures,
scarring, and bandaging, the patchwork and layering of literary [or what I would
like to call in this case, cinematic] language” (1).
Andrei Tarkovsky’s childhood trauma of an absent father that
coincides with WWII defines his vision of children from his first film Ivan’s
Childhood (1962) until his last The
Sacrifice (1986). “Childhood always determines our future especially
when our work is linked to art or to internal psychological problems” says
Tarkovsky. Doubtlessly, childhood emerges as the most important period of his life, “the one that
marked [him] in [his] adult life.”
Interview With Andrei Tarkovsky-Childhood
Ivan’s Childhood is filled with images of the protagonist’s mother and
merry memories of her presence before she was killed in war. In one of his interviews
he clearly describes his childhood
anxieties while waiting endlessly for his father’s return form war. Even though his
father poet Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky
left his family prior to the war, waiting for his
return made its footprint on his son Andrei’s psyche. One unforgettable scene in Mirror (1975) occurs when Ignant holds tight to his uniformed father
just back from war. This vivid cinematic
creation of anxiety, childhood longing, and emotion reveals a boy desperately
in need of his father.
That Tarkovsky’s father
returned from war, injured with one leg, profoundly impacted his son. “If asked what fantasies I had as a
child? I could only answer: I was waiting for the war to end. Only two were my
thoughts” he says, “the end of war, and my father’s return.” The longings,
loneliness, and all his dire living circumstances subsequently haunted his art.
Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky-War
In Tarkovsky’s artistic creation, a child figure becomes the cinematic representation of trauma, whether from a specific war trauma or a traumatized psyche scarred by existential questions and fear of death in a nuclear threat. Both create a non-coherent dreamlike narrative in which the distinction between reality, memory and dream is extremely blurred. The style in which Tarkovsky internalized his cinematic art often corresponds with the narrative of a trauma survivor. By citing Tarkovsky’s two interviews, I intend to show how the effects of his childhood experiences and his interpretation of war clearly projected the direction of his cinematography.
By exploring Tarkovsky’s trauma narrative in cinematic art and focusing on the image of a child in both his first and last feature films, Ivan’s Childhood
and The Sacrifice, I shall compare and contrast his evocative narrative
with images of their specific resemblance and differences. In these two films,
he is able to transcend the reality of war to a deeper level of meaning. The
child figure becomes the director’s representation of war trauma and violence. His
narrative through the child figure becomes a grief/trauma narrative that engages
the viewer’s emotions at its deepest level. As opposed to Ivan who is the real
victim both in mental and physical terms, the “little man” in The Sacrifice emerges as a potential victim of an apocalyptic nuclear war while at the same
time symbolizing the neglected side of human spirit burdened by material
tendencies. Through the father’s fear of his
child’s death, the cinematic narrative in this film portrays Alexander’s inner anxieties, resulting in the total annihilation of man’s compassion and spiritual existence
on earth. The consequences of
horrific trauma in Ivan’s Childhood result in the total destruction of a
little boy’s identity. Growing dark in an innocent child’s body is the image of a hateful, bloodthirsty adult figure. Conversely, in The
Sacrifice, Tarkovsky turns from a total dead end, bleak destiny
to a more optimistic fate for his son. The
“little man” in the last scene relaxes under the tree he and his father planted.
Finally he cares for this hopeful symbol by watering it and looking towards the sky as his father is taken
away to a mental hospital.
Perhaps,
the importance of the continuing effects of war on the individual psyche had
its beginnings in a study of mass mobilization during WWI. Jay
Winter and Blaine Bagget, in The Great
War and the
Shaping of the 20th Century, give a vivid description of the cataclysmic effect of WWI, an
event that changed history: "The Great War was without precedent ...
never had so many nations taken up arms at a single time. Never had the
battlefield been so vast… never had the fighting been so gruesome..." (The Great War). Further,
Paul Fussell, in calling
the attention to this extraordinary effect of war on people’s lives, mentions that once World War
I (1914-1918), with its unprecedented human suffering in European
history, was over, many assumed they could simply leave it behind (325).
Stanley Casson describes himself in 1920, “I was deep in my [archeological] work again, and
had, as I thought, put the war into the category of forgotten things…” (325). However, he soon realized how wrong he was: “The war’s
baneful influence controlled still all our thoughts and acts, directly or
indirectly” (qtd. in Fussell 325). Accordingly, modern writing and art post-WWI, Friedman writes, “recorded the emotional aspect of this
crisis; despair hopelessness, paralysis, angst, and a sense of meaninglessness,
… chaos, and fragmentation of material reality.” (qtd. in Authenticity and
Art 102)
Within this context of
how global war influenced twentieth-century man, pressure
of recurring memories invades the territory of present time in Ivan’s Childhood.
It is a poetic journey through the ruins and shadows of one boy’s war-ravaged
youth. Moving back and forth between the traumatic realities of World War II
and peaceful moments of family life before the conflict began, Tarkovsky’s film
remains one of the most jarring and unforgettable depictions of the impact of
war on children. The Sacrifice on the other hand is a depiction of the
most innocent victim of an upcoming conflict that could be WWIII and the catastrophic consequences in the future
of history. Through the characterization of “little man” and the father’s anxieties
that he may lose him, Alexander becomes a projection of Tarkovsky in The
Sacrifice. This fear of war dramatically exists due to the director’s familiarity
with actual war. The effects of living in fear continue to exist in Tarkovsky’s
own consciousness so that his own childhood memory persists in Alexander’s thoughts. The
war still prevails, and
he understands that the world may experience another calamity that could
be even worse than the previous ones.
While
expressing Alexander’s faith in God in an atypical complex manner, the tale of The Sacrifice is about a man who is
ready to sacrifice all that is precious to him
if he can prevent a nuclear disaster. That fear of apocalyptic war becomes the
source of a narrative that has much resemblance to trauma narrative.
In Ivan’s
Childhood, Tarkosky’s WWII not only effectively addresses the reality of a
historical war but pays enormous attention to its underlying emotional and
psychological effects through step by step depiction of
Ivan’s psychological decline. Tarkovsky’s representation of trauma in Ivan’s
psyche is depicted first in his differentiated and altered facial expressions and
his altered ego from a vibrant beautiful happy boy in the content of his dreams
to a gloomy contemplative vengeance-seeking adult. As a successful cinematic method of
narrative trauma, Tarkovsky uses dream imagery to portray sudden unexpected
flashbacks to Ivan’s childhood. The destruction of Ivan’s catastrophic childhood
continuously reappears. To make sense of it, he undergoes a crisis of incomprehensible
change.
Jean Paul Sartre, in his discussion on
the criticism of Ivan's Childhood talks about those moulded by massacres
and states that “they had been killed, they would have wanted to kill and to
get used to killing. Their heroic determination was, above all, a hatred and
escape in the face of unbearable anguish. If they fought, they fled the horror
in the combat; if the night disarmed them and if, in their sleep, they returned
to the tenderness of their age, the horror was reborn and they relived the
memory they would want to forget.” (Nostalghia)
Every shot of Ivan in this film has a long story to say, but Tarkovsky lets us
see the damage as though it were our own experience without hearing the story
in words.
Trauma, as described by
Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience, can be an “overwhelming experience
of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in
the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and
other intrusive phenomena.” (Unclaimed 11). In this definition, the
recurring interruptions and confused perception of time become two fundamental
characteristics of a traumatized psyche. Caruth brilliantly explores the
relationship between pain and language or the wound that becomes a voice after
some time, since the occurring trauma is incomprehensible and only can be narrated
in its delayed return to the person. This belated narrative of wounded psyche
that Caruth mentions is referential but not in a straightforward way. In the
traumatized mind, like Ivan’s, past and present fuse together, and there is
almost no future since the mind is interrupted by intrusive memories and
flashbacks to the shocking traumatic past events. And even remembering for a
traumatized psyche does not occur in a conventional, chronological, and coherent sense.
Traumatic experience alters the individual’s “self-recognition, relational
life, and psychological, biological, and social equilibrium to such a degree
that memory of one particular event comes to taint all other experiences”
(Vickroy11).
Posttraumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) is a reference to this delayed and repeated return to the
traumatic experience. In a comment on this fixation and confusion of time,
Judith Greenberg mentions that: “trauma stops the chronological clock and fixes
the moment permanently in memory and imagination, immune to the vicissitudes of
time” (Greenberg 321). Tarkovsky’s trauma narrative brilliantly mirrors the minds
of trauma survivor in their disorientation and despair just as the survivor, Ivan,
struggles to construct his vision of reality of life after trauma.
Tarkovsky’s
Ivan’s Childhood constructs a bridge from the horrors of World War II to
the most vulnerable target – the imposed violence on a child, recalling the
psychic damages of war and the changes it transports to the interiors of a youngster’s psyche, acting like a constant remembrance of an
unforgettable catastrophe. Tarkovsky’s
representation of the psychological decline manifests itself in
the decayed little boy’s waning perceptions of humanity, love, compassion, and sympathy during war. Through
the subjective experiences and memories of its central character, Tarkovsky portrays
a trodden, grey, and decayed interior psyche of individuals. His use of black and white as the sole
colors of this movie envelopes the past and present all in gray. This represents the gradual sinking and wasting away of mind followed by the
body of those confronted by war. The decay of the individual transforms from the
psychological to the physical deformity of characters as Ivan’s boyish joy ends in death. Death becomes an unavoidable truth and the only
reality available to the dehumanized psyches during the atrocities of WWII.
To illustrate the dissociated traumatized psyche, Tarkovsky’s cinematic narrative intertwines with his characters’ internal recurring thoughts, emotions, and repetitive dreams. Repetition, as pointed out, is one of the major symptoms of PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder often can be recognized by symptoms such as recurrent and persistent recollections of the traumatic event and of recurring dreams of the event. For Tarkovsky, repetition is a powerful device to narrate a war-traumatized mind and, in severe cases of war trauma, death becomes a meaningful symbol. Tarkovsky’s trauma narrative juxtaposes the landscape full of sunshine, trees, water, flying butterfly, and gazing goat that propel the floating and flying Ivan to join his mother with the barren and gloomy landscape in real life to which he awakens.
Not only does Tarkovsky use the repetitious dream technique to visualize a
traumatized psyche, but also, within the context of dreams and nightmares, he
depicts the abyss of Ivan’s dark emotions left alone at the bottom of a well. In
his second dream, Ivan sleeps in a military camp, and from his fingertips,
water drips down so that it appears as
though he is sleeping at the bottom of
a well. The camera moves up from his dripping fingertips to the top of the well
where Ivan is seen with his mother looking down the well, talking about star at
the bottom of the well they are looking at.The happy moments are shown at the
top while the sleeping, dreaming Ivan is ironically seen at the bottom of a
military camp abyss, foreshadowing future events. Exactly when he dreams of his mother’s death, he wakens to bleak reality. Happy and tranquil conversations in
dreams are sharply interrupted by an abrupt cutting shooting sounds and an
altered facial expression that forces Ivan back to reality.
Another
significant tool Tarkovsky is shooting recurring arboreal images
of nature. Ivan’s Childhood starts with the boy flying over trees
merrily glowing and running to join his mother among the surrounding branches. The image of nature and, most specifically, trees start to change
and begin to die as soon as we are informed that a tragic incident has happened. It seems that nature is deeply
interconnected with the characters’ pain and suffering. When Ivan finally reaches out his hand while
running along the seashore, the figure of a dying, burned tree appears. This dead
tree is strongly associated with Ivan’s lost childhood and all his misery and
pain as opposed to the lively representation of his initial dream. Donato Totaro associates the
nature with “comfort zone” for Tarkovsky’s characters: “each of Ivan’s four (or
five if you count Galstev’s) dream sequences are in effect, instances of nature
as ‘comfort zone.’ The dreams have that function for Ivan: they give him an
illusionary respite from his war-time adult responsibilities by allowing him to
delve back to (or into) an idealized childhood, one which may or may not have
existed as depicted” (Off Screen). The nature appears at the two ends of life
and death simultaneously with the beginning of Ivan’s psychological death to
his physical.
The Sacrifice also starts
with a tree being planted by the main character and the “little man” on the
seashore. By telling the story of the monk and his son, Alexander clearly emphasizes
the necessity of keeping the tree alive. If the tree dies, human compassion, hopes, and spirit die for Tarkovsky. Having seen
the tree’s destiny in Ivan’s story one might wonder what will happen to this
one at the end of The Sacrifice.
Here, child and the single tree alongside the seashore symbolize perhaps the most important shared features of the two films. Tarkovsky
intentionally uses them to portray life as opposed to death. The Sacrifice plot unravels, and Alexander’s dark dreams or visions project shadows on the beautiful and colorful nature of the
opening scenes. As the threat of nuclear war and Armageddon breaks out, the landscape of his dream/imagination becomes a dead
terrain. Thus the directors cinematic language depends
on using colors and trees for his personal message.
Finally,
the Tree of The Sacrifice appears at least temporarily the same since
the apocalypse is supposedly postponed or may never happen. This, of course,
depends on the possibility that every effort is expended to preserve goodness
in human nature - again visualized in Tarkovsky’s ever-present child and his
tree.
The
child figure, appearing at first as a speechless and passive listener,
disappears to his room in loneliness and isolation and
remains there till the final scene. We
only occasionally go back to his room along with Alexander to check on him
while he calmly sleeps shirtless under white sheets and a white bandage around
his neck. The use of white in this setting and his naked little body intensifies
the guard-less, helpless, peace seeking nature of a child while the bandage
refers to his speechless purity.
Isolation
and silence of “little man” becomes a strong character in Tarkovsky’s
representation of Alexander’s traumas and fears. What will happen to “little
man” if war breaks out? “Go get the little man” his mother cries out in the
moment of her breakdown after news about the approaching inevitable war. Alexander
constantly returns to his son’s room to check on him. Alexander’s ego shatters
when in a violent act he pushes back “little man” who has jumped on him from behind. The “little man” bleeds from the nose and looks at his father who
faints to the ground. His fears of loosing “little man” are vividly personified
22 minutes into the film in a black and white dream appearing after his fainting
fall, “Little man’s” bloody nose is directly chained to the traces of blood in
Alexander’s dream/vision of apocalypse that leads to the point where later on,
we discover in another dream the spot where “the little man” is sleeping/dead
with his face down.
Kyeong Hwangbo mentions that,
“One of the striking characteristics of trauma is the salient visual aspect of
its ‘episodic’ memory, which, unlike the general “semantic” memory, is highly
emotionally charged and stays in an activated, ‘primed’ state without being
integrated with other memories” (Hwangbo, 3)
Trauma of death and fears of a world coming to end prevail in Alexander’s
mind. In each and every of his dreams he desperately searches for “little man”.
The scene of apocalypse is repeated and the search for him continues. Tarkovsky
noticeably visualizes the disoriented and depressed Alexander’s psyche:
“Alexander, an actor who has given up the stage, is perpetually crushed by
depression. Everything fills him with weariness: the pressures of change, the
discord in his family, and his instinctive sense of the threat posed by the
relentless march of technology. He has grown to hate the emptiness of human
speech, from which he flees into a silence where he hopes to find some measure
of truth.” (Sculpting, 222) The moment
of his total breakdown is when he meets Maria. His cries, fears, and agitation are
heard over the views of this apocalyptic scene right when we are getting close to the image of "little man". When the audience expects Alexander’s
encounter with Maria to be reality, the dream/vision of the end the world appears
and makes everything a dream again. Johnson points to this fact that “we have
to believe and not believe simultaneously” there is no logical explanation for
the order of events. It is not possible to distinguish real from imaginary and
this is Tarkovsky’s successful attempt in visualization of a mind in trouble. (Johnson,
178)
The
boy in The Sacrifice with all the
surrounding themes of his existence and characterization presented in a
wordless, non-speaking absent-presence is how Tarkovsky mourns over a deep
depression of spirit. This emptiness of life in a nostalgic way defines a totally materialistic world devoid of human compassion and
spirituality, a world that has lost its innocence.
This
concern evolves throughout the dialogue. He turns his mourning for humanity’s lost
innocence from a tired psyche in the form of “little man”, a speechless
innocent figure obviously the center of attention but spending his time in
isolation and silence. “Little man” serves as the medium to highlight the
materialistic brutal ignorance of inner peace and harmony. Alexander’s anxiety
in looking after “little man” is not just a mere personal father-son
relationship. It ventures beyond and serves a more universal meaning. Johnson
also points to the fact that “little man” is “emblematic rather than realistic
figure” and “Alexander speaks far more directly for Tarkovsky” (Johnson, 173) Gabriel
Giralt in his discussion of the images of war in The Sacrifice mentions that
in its explicit level of meaning, Tarkovsy’s emphasis is on the dramatic effects
of the actual events: “a narrative that elaborates on the effect of the action
for the purpose of heightening the dramatic exposition. Because of the
abstraction taken at this point, the film makes it clear that the concern is
not to follow the pre-established classical formulas of war representation but
to make a serious and personal statement of war. As a result, Tarkovsky
elevates the imagery of war to a more subjective level of representation. From
actual representation of war to a consequential representation of a world in
crisis.” (Giralt, 2)
“Little
Man” is the innocence, faith, and hope of human nature that must be preserved
and cared for. He must stay alive if man wants to survive. This “little man”
becomes the unique central figure or idea that is constantly paramount in the other
actors’ consciousness. In the scene of Adelaide’s hysteric breakdown we
continuously hear the doctor, Victor, saying that the boy is sleep, we
shouldn’t wake him. And the most unforgettably touching scene of all is when, 1:10
minutes into the film, Julia the servant strongly stands up against her lady
and refuses to wake “little man”, saying, “I’m not going to wake him, I have no
intention of doing it, and I won’t allow anyone else to either.” This illustrates
the extraordinary emphasis on preserving his peace, his sleep and his innocence.
His silence clearly depicts “little man” as a figure more important than just a
little boy in an ordinary everyday life. He is the embodiment of all anxieties
and fears of the traumatized family psyche. He serves as a universal truth to
the question of what will happen to the most innocent of creatures in case of
nuclear war.
Wordless
“little man” and Alexander’s vow to silence at the end characterizes a mind
under pressures of emotional and traumatic experience:
What
I wanted was to pose questions and demonstrate problems that go to the very
heart of our lives, and thus to bring the audience back to the dormant, parched
sources of our existence. Pictures, visual images, are far better able to
achieve that end than any words, 228 particularly now, when the word has lost
all mystery and magic and speech has become mere chatter, empty of meaning, as
Alexander observes. We are being stifled by a surfeit of information, yet at
the same time our feelings remain untouched by the supremely important messages
that could change our lives. (Sculpting, 228-229)
Tarkovsky admits
to the psychological problems of his characters and human beings in general due
to the emptiness of their lives when saying:
We
promptly turn to the services of the psychiatrist or, better still, the
sexologist, who has taken over from the confessor, and who, we imagine, eases
our minds and restores them to normality. Reassured, we pay him the going rate.
Or if we feel the need for love, we go off to a brothel and again pay cash—not
that it necessarily has to be a brothel. And all this despite the fact that we know
perfectly well that neither love nor peace of mind can be bought with any
currency. (Sculpting, 223)
Alexander’s quest for peace of
mind and happiness is intertwined with his fear of nuclear disaster, a war yet
to come, and the anxiety of loosing “little man”. All these fears create disjointed
incidents where the distinction between reality and dream is blurred. As it is
the case with a traumatized psyche, the realities of life mix into the
recurrent dreams and recall horrific events.
Tarkovsky’s
narrative exemplifies a shattered ego that cannot hold itself together. The
director refers to the severe effects of war trauma that turn sane human beings
to insane and to madness that becomes the metaphor for shattered and fragmented
egos that experience war and violence: The experience of trauma causes
separation of the sufferer from the normal and rational self and the body.
Victims try to resist losing agency and want to maintain the sense of self by
rejecting fragmentation. But often haunting memories and the violent reality of
their fears never entirely disappear leaving the victims in a chaotic state
feeling that they would go mad and live in a state that “abandons the ordering
logic of grownups” (qtd. in Greenberg 323). Alexander’s fearful vow alone in
the dark reveals and out-pours all his fears:
"Lord,
deliver us in this terrible hour. Do not let my children die, my friends, my
wife... I will give you all I possess. I will leave the family I love. I shall
destroy my home, give up my son. I shall be silent, will never speak with
anyone again. I shall give up everything that binds me to life, if You will
only let everything be as it was before, as it was this morning, as it was
yesterday; so that I may be spared this deadly, suffocating bestial state of
fear." ( The Sacrifice, 1:14)
Alexander is
also living in a sort of exile, a physical and spiritual one that leads both to
his disorientation and despair. Barghuthi’s terms beautifully sum up the
condition of exile: “Exile is like a chronic disease, once one gets it, one is
never cured” (Conflict of Voices
126). He is suffering from his own fatal fears and is exhausted by his
nightmarish dream/visions. A state of mind that perhaps every traumatized mind
with such uneasy thoughts and experiences would wish the same, if only they
could break free from captivity in their circular repetitive thoughts.
Tarkovsky’s
own traumas in childhood and all his anxieties along with his quest for inner
peace and spiritual growth in the realities of a brutal and materialist world
is beautifully captured in non-chronological sequences of dreams, flashbacks,
and blurry distinction of illusion/reality. To portray the lost innocence in
human nature and the ugliness of the all materialistic world that has brought
upon people the destruction of soul, he uses children with their pure
conscience and juxtaposes their tender image with the unbearable anguish of war
and violence trodden world. Finally, in his Discussion
on the criticism of Ivan’s Childhood, Jean Paul Sartre brilliantly analyzes
Tarkovsky’s ravaged childhood experience that synthesizes the philosophy behind
that director’s memorable films: And I think it is necessary to praise Tarkovsky for
having shown so well how for this child, pitched towards suicide, there is no
difference between day and night. In any case, he does not live with us.
Actions and hallucinations are in close correspondence.” (Nostalghia)
Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, Maryland: John
Hopkins University Press, 1996. Print.
Fussell,
Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1975. Print.
Gilart, Gabriel. “Images of War in Andrei
Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice: Four Levels of Meaning. ”
Film-Historia, Vol. IX, No.1 (1999): 55-70
Hwangbot,
Keyeong. “Trauma, Narrative, and the Marginal Self in Selected Contemporary
American Novels.” Dissertation, University of California, 2004.
http://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/uf/e0/00/73/02/00001/hwangbo_k.pdf.
web.
Johnson, Vida T. and Graham Petrie. The Films of Andrei
Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Indiana UP, 1994. Print.
Randa, Abou-bakr. The Conflict of Voices in the Poetry of
Dennis Butrus [Brutus] and Mahmud
Darwish: A Comparative Study. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004. Print.
Robinett, Jane.
“The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience.” Literature and Medicine, 26. 2 (2007): 290-311.
Print.
Sartre, Jean
Paul. “Discussion on the criticism of Ivan's Childhood” The French letters, no 1009. Nostalghia.
<http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Sartre.html>.Web
Schweizer,
Harold. Suffering and the Remedy of Art: Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1997. Print.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time. Trans. Kitty
Hunter-Blair. Texas UP, 1987. Print.
Totaro, Donato. “Nature as ‘Comfort Zone’ in the Films of Andrei
Tarkovsky” Offscreen. Vol. 14.12 (December 2010).
< http://www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/nature_as_comfort_zone/>.
Web.
Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction.
University of Virginia Press, 2002. Print.
Winter, Jay, and Blaine Bagget. The Great War and the Shaping of the
20th Century, KCET/BBC co-production
in association with The Imperial War Museum. 1996 – 2004. <http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/thenandnow/> . Web.
The
wounds of war, to use Schweizer’s words, “will not close despite the sutures,
scarring, and bandaging, the patchwork and layering of literary [or what I would
like to call in this case, cinematic] language” (1).
Andrei Tarkovsky’s childhood trauma of an absent father that
coincides with WWII defines his vision of children from his first film Ivan’s
Childhood (1962) until his last The
Sacrifice (1986). “Childhood always determines our future especially
when our work is linked to art or to internal psychological problems” says
Tarkovsky. Doubtlessly, childhood emerges as the most important period of his life, “the one that
marked [him] in [his] adult life.”
Interview With Andrei Tarkovsky-Childhood
Ivan’s Childhood is filled with images of the protagonist’s mother and
merry memories of her presence before she was killed in war. In one of his interviews
he clearly describes his childhood
anxieties while waiting endlessly for his father’s return form war. Even though his
father poet Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky
left his family prior to the war, waiting for his
return made its footprint on his son Andrei’s psyche. One unforgettable scene in Mirror (1975) occurs when Ignant holds tight to his uniformed father
just back from war. This vivid cinematic
creation of anxiety, childhood longing, and emotion reveals a boy desperately
in need of his father.
That Tarkovsky’s father
returned from war, injured with one leg, profoundly impacted his son. “If asked what fantasies I had as a
child? I could only answer: I was waiting for the war to end. Only two were my
thoughts” he says, “the end of war, and my father’s return.” The longings,
loneliness, and all his dire living circumstances subsequently haunted his art.
By exploring Tarkovsky’s trauma narrative in cinematic art and focusing on the image of a child in both his first and last feature films, Ivan’s Childhood and The Sacrifice, I shall compare and contrast his evocative narrative with images of their specific resemblance and differences. In these two films, he is able to transcend the reality of war to a deeper level of meaning. The child figure becomes the director’s representation of war trauma and violence. His narrative through the child figure becomes a grief/trauma narrative that engages the viewer’s emotions at its deepest level. As opposed to Ivan who is the real victim both in mental and physical terms, the “little man” in The Sacrifice emerges as a potential victim of an apocalyptic nuclear war while at the same time symbolizing the neglected side of human spirit burdened by material tendencies. Through the father’s fear of his child’s death, the cinematic narrative in this film portrays Alexander’s inner anxieties, resulting in the total annihilation of man’s compassion and spiritual existence on earth. The consequences of horrific trauma in Ivan’s Childhood result in the total destruction of a little boy’s identity. Growing dark in an innocent child’s body is the image of a hateful, bloodthirsty adult figure. Conversely, in The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky turns from a total dead end, bleak destiny to a more optimistic fate for his son. The “little man” in the last scene relaxes under the tree he and his father planted. Finally he cares for this hopeful symbol by watering it and looking towards the sky as his father is taken away to a mental hospital.
Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky-War
In Tarkovsky’s artistic creation, a child figure becomes the cinematic representation of trauma, whether from a specific war trauma or a traumatized psyche scarred by existential questions and fear of death in a nuclear threat. Both create a non-coherent dreamlike narrative in which the distinction between reality, memory and dream is extremely blurred. The style in which Tarkovsky internalized his cinematic art often corresponds with the narrative of a trauma survivor. By citing Tarkovsky’s two interviews, I intend to show how the effects of his childhood experiences and his interpretation of war clearly projected the direction of his cinematography. By exploring Tarkovsky’s trauma narrative in cinematic art and focusing on the image of a child in both his first and last feature films, Ivan’s Childhood and The Sacrifice, I shall compare and contrast his evocative narrative with images of their specific resemblance and differences. In these two films, he is able to transcend the reality of war to a deeper level of meaning. The child figure becomes the director’s representation of war trauma and violence. His narrative through the child figure becomes a grief/trauma narrative that engages the viewer’s emotions at its deepest level. As opposed to Ivan who is the real victim both in mental and physical terms, the “little man” in The Sacrifice emerges as a potential victim of an apocalyptic nuclear war while at the same time symbolizing the neglected side of human spirit burdened by material tendencies. Through the father’s fear of his child’s death, the cinematic narrative in this film portrays Alexander’s inner anxieties, resulting in the total annihilation of man’s compassion and spiritual existence on earth. The consequences of horrific trauma in Ivan’s Childhood result in the total destruction of a little boy’s identity. Growing dark in an innocent child’s body is the image of a hateful, bloodthirsty adult figure. Conversely, in The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky turns from a total dead end, bleak destiny to a more optimistic fate for his son. The “little man” in the last scene relaxes under the tree he and his father planted. Finally he cares for this hopeful symbol by watering it and looking towards the sky as his father is taken away to a mental hospital.
Perhaps,
the importance of the continuing effects of war on the individual psyche had
its beginnings in a study of mass mobilization during WWI. Jay
Winter and Blaine Bagget, in The Great
War and the
Shaping of the 20th Century, give a vivid description of the cataclysmic effect of WWI, an
event that changed history: "The Great War was without precedent ...
never had so many nations taken up arms at a single time. Never had the
battlefield been so vast… never had the fighting been so gruesome..." (The Great War). Further,
Paul Fussell, in calling
the attention to this extraordinary effect of war on people’s lives, mentions that once World War
I (1914-1918), with its unprecedented human suffering in European
history, was over, many assumed they could simply leave it behind (325).
Stanley Casson describes himself in 1920, “I was deep in my [archeological] work again, and
had, as I thought, put the war into the category of forgotten things…” (325). However, he soon realized how wrong he was: “The war’s
baneful influence controlled still all our thoughts and acts, directly or
indirectly” (qtd. in Fussell 325). Accordingly, modern writing and art post-WWI, Friedman writes, “recorded the emotional aspect of this
crisis; despair hopelessness, paralysis, angst, and a sense of meaninglessness,
… chaos, and fragmentation of material reality.” (qtd. in Authenticity and
Art 102)
Within this context of
how global war influenced twentieth-century man, pressure
of recurring memories invades the territory of present time in Ivan’s Childhood.
It is a poetic journey through the ruins and shadows of one boy’s war-ravaged
youth. Moving back and forth between the traumatic realities of World War II
and peaceful moments of family life before the conflict began, Tarkovsky’s film
remains one of the most jarring and unforgettable depictions of the impact of
war on children. The Sacrifice on the other hand is a depiction of the
most innocent victim of an upcoming conflict that could be WWIII and the catastrophic consequences in the future
of history. Through the characterization of “little man” and the father’s anxieties
that he may lose him, Alexander becomes a projection of Tarkovsky in The
Sacrifice. This fear of war dramatically exists due to the director’s familiarity
with actual war. The effects of living in fear continue to exist in Tarkovsky’s
own consciousness so that his own childhood memory persists in Alexander’s thoughts. The
war still prevails, and
he understands that the world may experience another calamity that could
be even worse than the previous ones.
While
expressing Alexander’s faith in God in an atypical complex manner, the tale of The Sacrifice is about a man who is
ready to sacrifice all that is precious to him
if he can prevent a nuclear disaster. That fear of apocalyptic war becomes the
source of a narrative that has much resemblance to trauma narrative.
In Ivan’s
Childhood, Tarkosky’s WWII not only effectively addresses the reality of a
historical war but pays enormous attention to its underlying emotional and
psychological effects through step by step depiction of
Ivan’s psychological decline. Tarkovsky’s representation of trauma in Ivan’s
psyche is depicted first in his differentiated and altered facial expressions and
his altered ego from a vibrant beautiful happy boy in the content of his dreams
to a gloomy contemplative vengeance-seeking adult. As a successful cinematic method of
narrative trauma, Tarkovsky uses dream imagery to portray sudden unexpected
flashbacks to Ivan’s childhood. The destruction of Ivan’s catastrophic childhood
continuously reappears. To make sense of it, he undergoes a crisis of incomprehensible
change.
Trauma, as described by
Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience, can be an “overwhelming experience
of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in
the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and
other intrusive phenomena.” (Unclaimed 11). In this definition, the
recurring interruptions and confused perception of time become two fundamental
characteristics of a traumatized psyche. Caruth brilliantly explores the
relationship between pain and language or the wound that becomes a voice after
some time, since the occurring trauma is incomprehensible and only can be narrated
in its delayed return to the person. This belated narrative of wounded psyche
that Caruth mentions is referential but not in a straightforward way. In the
traumatized mind, like Ivan’s, past and present fuse together, and there is
almost no future since the mind is interrupted by intrusive memories and
flashbacks to the shocking traumatic past events. And even remembering for a
traumatized psyche does not occur in a conventional, chronological, and coherent sense.
Traumatic experience alters the individual’s “self-recognition, relational
life, and psychological, biological, and social equilibrium to such a degree
that memory of one particular event comes to taint all other experiences”
(Vickroy11).
Jean Paul Sartre, in his discussion on
the criticism of Ivan's Childhood talks about those moulded by massacres
and states that “they had been killed, they would have wanted to kill and to
get used to killing. Their heroic determination was, above all, a hatred and
escape in the face of unbearable anguish. If they fought, they fled the horror
in the combat; if the night disarmed them and if, in their sleep, they returned
to the tenderness of their age, the horror was reborn and they relived the
memory they would want to forget.” (Nostalghia)
Every shot of Ivan in this film has a long story to say, but Tarkovsky lets us
see the damage as though it were our own experience without hearing the story
in words.
Posttraumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) is a reference to this delayed and repeated return to the
traumatic experience. In a comment on this fixation and confusion of time,
Judith Greenberg mentions that: “trauma stops the chronological clock and fixes
the moment permanently in memory and imagination, immune to the vicissitudes of
time” (Greenberg 321). Tarkovsky’s trauma narrative brilliantly mirrors the minds
of trauma survivor in their disorientation and despair just as the survivor, Ivan,
struggles to construct his vision of reality of life after trauma.
Tarkovsky’s
Ivan’s Childhood constructs a bridge from the horrors of World War II to
the most vulnerable target – the imposed violence on a child, recalling the
psychic damages of war and the changes it transports to the interiors of a youngster’s psyche, acting like a constant remembrance of an
unforgettable catastrophe. Tarkovsky’s
representation of the psychological decline manifests itself in
the decayed little boy’s waning perceptions of humanity, love, compassion, and sympathy during war. Through
the subjective experiences and memories of its central character, Tarkovsky portrays
a trodden, grey, and decayed interior psyche of individuals. His use of black and white as the sole
colors of this movie envelopes the past and present all in gray. This represents the gradual sinking and wasting away of mind followed by the
body of those confronted by war. The decay of the individual transforms from the
psychological to the physical deformity of characters as Ivan’s boyish joy ends in death. Death becomes an unavoidable truth and the only
reality available to the dehumanized psyches during the atrocities of WWII.
To illustrate the dissociated traumatized psyche, Tarkovsky’s cinematic narrative intertwines with his characters’ internal recurring thoughts, emotions, and repetitive dreams. Repetition, as pointed out, is one of the major symptoms of PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder often can be recognized by symptoms such as recurrent and persistent recollections of the traumatic event and of recurring dreams of the event. For Tarkovsky, repetition is a powerful device to narrate a war-traumatized mind and, in severe cases of war trauma, death becomes a meaningful symbol. Tarkovsky’s trauma narrative juxtaposes the landscape full of sunshine, trees, water, flying butterfly, and gazing goat that propel the floating and flying Ivan to join his mother with the barren and gloomy landscape in real life to which he awakens.
Not only does Tarkovsky use the repetitious dream technique to visualize a
traumatized psyche, but also, within the context of dreams and nightmares, he
depicts the abyss of Ivan’s dark emotions left alone at the bottom of a well. In
his second dream, Ivan sleeps in a military camp, and from his fingertips,
water drips down so that it appears as
though he is sleeping at the bottom of
a well. The camera moves up from his dripping fingertips to the top of the well
where Ivan is seen with his mother looking down the well, talking about star at
the bottom of the well they are looking at.The happy moments are shown at the
top while the sleeping, dreaming Ivan is ironically seen at the bottom of a
military camp abyss, foreshadowing future events. Exactly when he dreams of his mother’s death, he wakens to bleak reality. Happy and tranquil conversations in
dreams are sharply interrupted by an abrupt cutting shooting sounds and an
altered facial expression that forces Ivan back to reality.
Another
significant tool Tarkovsky is shooting recurring arboreal images
of nature. Ivan’s Childhood starts with the boy flying over trees
merrily glowing and running to join his mother among the surrounding branches. The image of nature and, most specifically, trees start to change
and begin to die as soon as we are informed that a tragic incident has happened. It seems that nature is deeply
interconnected with the characters’ pain and suffering. When Ivan finally reaches out his hand while
running along the seashore, the figure of a dying, burned tree appears. This dead
tree is strongly associated with Ivan’s lost childhood and all his misery and
pain as opposed to the lively representation of his initial dream. Donato Totaro associates the
nature with “comfort zone” for Tarkovsky’s characters: “each of Ivan’s four (or
five if you count Galstev’s) dream sequences are in effect, instances of nature
as ‘comfort zone.’ The dreams have that function for Ivan: they give him an
illusionary respite from his war-time adult responsibilities by allowing him to
delve back to (or into) an idealized childhood, one which may or may not have
existed as depicted” (Off Screen). The nature appears at the two ends of life
and death simultaneously with the beginning of Ivan’s psychological death to
his physical.
The Sacrifice also starts
with a tree being planted by the main character and the “little man” on the
seashore. By telling the story of the monk and his son, Alexander clearly emphasizes
the necessity of keeping the tree alive. If the tree dies, human compassion, hopes, and spirit die for Tarkovsky. Having seen
the tree’s destiny in Ivan’s story one might wonder what will happen to this
one at the end of The Sacrifice.
Here, child and the single tree alongside the seashore symbolize perhaps the most important shared features of the two films. Tarkovsky
intentionally uses them to portray life as opposed to death. The Sacrifice plot unravels, and Alexander’s dark dreams or visions project shadows on the beautiful and colorful nature of the
opening scenes. As the threat of nuclear war and Armageddon breaks out, the landscape of his dream/imagination becomes a dead
terrain. Thus the directors cinematic language depends
on using colors and trees for his personal message.
Finally,
the Tree of The Sacrifice appears at least temporarily the same since
the apocalypse is supposedly postponed or may never happen. This, of course,
depends on the possibility that every effort is expended to preserve goodness
in human nature - again visualized in Tarkovsky’s ever-present child and his
tree.
The
child figure, appearing at first as a speechless and passive listener,
disappears to his room in loneliness and isolation and
remains there till the final scene. We
only occasionally go back to his room along with Alexander to check on him
while he calmly sleeps shirtless under white sheets and a white bandage around
his neck. The use of white in this setting and his naked little body intensifies
the guard-less, helpless, peace seeking nature of a child while the bandage
refers to his speechless purity.
Isolation
and silence of “little man” becomes a strong character in Tarkovsky’s
representation of Alexander’s traumas and fears. What will happen to “little
man” if war breaks out? “Go get the little man” his mother cries out in the
moment of her breakdown after news about the approaching inevitable war. Alexander
constantly returns to his son’s room to check on him. Alexander’s ego shatters
when in a violent act he pushes back “little man” who has jumped on him from behind. The “little man” bleeds from the nose and looks at his father who
faints to the ground. His fears of loosing “little man” are vividly personified
22 minutes into the film in a black and white dream appearing after his fainting
fall, “Little man’s” bloody nose is directly chained to the traces of blood in
Alexander’s dream/vision of apocalypse that leads to the point where later on,
we discover in another dream the spot where “the little man” is sleeping/dead
with his face down.
Kyeong Hwangbo mentions that,
“One of the striking characteristics of trauma is the salient visual aspect of
its ‘episodic’ memory, which, unlike the general “semantic” memory, is highly
emotionally charged and stays in an activated, ‘primed’ state without being
integrated with other memories” (Hwangbo, 3)
Trauma of death and fears of a world coming to end prevail in Alexander’s
mind. In each and every of his dreams he desperately searches for “little man”.
The scene of apocalypse is repeated and the search for him continues. Tarkovsky
noticeably visualizes the disoriented and depressed Alexander’s psyche:
“Alexander, an actor who has given up the stage, is perpetually crushed by
depression. Everything fills him with weariness: the pressures of change, the
discord in his family, and his instinctive sense of the threat posed by the
relentless march of technology. He has grown to hate the emptiness of human
speech, from which he flees into a silence where he hopes to find some measure
of truth.” (Sculpting, 222) The moment
of his total breakdown is when he meets Maria. His cries, fears, and agitation are
heard over the views of this apocalyptic scene right when we are getting close to the image of "little man". When the audience expects Alexander’s
encounter with Maria to be reality, the dream/vision of the end the world appears
and makes everything a dream again. Johnson points to this fact that “we have
to believe and not believe simultaneously” there is no logical explanation for
the order of events. It is not possible to distinguish real from imaginary and
this is Tarkovsky’s successful attempt in visualization of a mind in trouble. (Johnson,
178)
The
boy in The Sacrifice with all the
surrounding themes of his existence and characterization presented in a
wordless, non-speaking absent-presence is how Tarkovsky mourns over a deep
depression of spirit. This emptiness of life in a nostalgic way defines a totally materialistic world devoid of human compassion and
spirituality, a world that has lost its innocence.
This
concern evolves throughout the dialogue. He turns his mourning for humanity’s lost
innocence from a tired psyche in the form of “little man”, a speechless
innocent figure obviously the center of attention but spending his time in
isolation and silence. “Little man” serves as the medium to highlight the
materialistic brutal ignorance of inner peace and harmony. Alexander’s anxiety
in looking after “little man” is not just a mere personal father-son
relationship. It ventures beyond and serves a more universal meaning. Johnson
also points to the fact that “little man” is “emblematic rather than realistic
figure” and “Alexander speaks far more directly for Tarkovsky” (Johnson, 173) Gabriel
Giralt in his discussion of the images of war in The Sacrifice mentions that
in its explicit level of meaning, Tarkovsy’s emphasis is on the dramatic effects
of the actual events: “a narrative that elaborates on the effect of the action
for the purpose of heightening the dramatic exposition. Because of the
abstraction taken at this point, the film makes it clear that the concern is
not to follow the pre-established classical formulas of war representation but
to make a serious and personal statement of war. As a result, Tarkovsky
elevates the imagery of war to a more subjective level of representation. From
actual representation of war to a consequential representation of a world in
crisis.” (Giralt, 2)
“Little
Man” is the innocence, faith, and hope of human nature that must be preserved
and cared for. He must stay alive if man wants to survive. This “little man”
becomes the unique central figure or idea that is constantly paramount in the other
actors’ consciousness. In the scene of Adelaide’s hysteric breakdown we
continuously hear the doctor, Victor, saying that the boy is sleep, we
shouldn’t wake him. And the most unforgettably touching scene of all is when, 1:10
minutes into the film, Julia the servant strongly stands up against her lady
and refuses to wake “little man”, saying, “I’m not going to wake him, I have no
intention of doing it, and I won’t allow anyone else to either.” This illustrates
the extraordinary emphasis on preserving his peace, his sleep and his innocence.
His silence clearly depicts “little man” as a figure more important than just a
little boy in an ordinary everyday life. He is the embodiment of all anxieties
and fears of the traumatized family psyche. He serves as a universal truth to
the question of what will happen to the most innocent of creatures in case of
nuclear war.
Wordless “little man” and Alexander’s vow to silence at the end characterizes a mind under pressures of emotional and traumatic experience:
What
I wanted was to pose questions and demonstrate problems that go to the very
heart of our lives, and thus to bring the audience back to the dormant, parched
sources of our existence. Pictures, visual images, are far better able to
achieve that end than any words, 228 particularly now, when the word has lost
all mystery and magic and speech has become mere chatter, empty of meaning, as
Alexander observes. We are being stifled by a surfeit of information, yet at
the same time our feelings remain untouched by the supremely important messages
that could change our lives. (Sculpting, 228-229)
Tarkovsky admits
to the psychological problems of his characters and human beings in general due
to the emptiness of their lives when saying:
We
promptly turn to the services of the psychiatrist or, better still, the
sexologist, who has taken over from the confessor, and who, we imagine, eases
our minds and restores them to normality. Reassured, we pay him the going rate.
Or if we feel the need for love, we go off to a brothel and again pay cash—not
that it necessarily has to be a brothel. And all this despite the fact that we know
perfectly well that neither love nor peace of mind can be bought with any
currency. (Sculpting, 223)
Alexander’s quest for peace of
mind and happiness is intertwined with his fear of nuclear disaster, a war yet
to come, and the anxiety of loosing “little man”. All these fears create disjointed
incidents where the distinction between reality and dream is blurred. As it is
the case with a traumatized psyche, the realities of life mix into the
recurrent dreams and recall horrific events.
Tarkovsky’s
narrative exemplifies a shattered ego that cannot hold itself together. The
director refers to the severe effects of war trauma that turn sane human beings
to insane and to madness that becomes the metaphor for shattered and fragmented
egos that experience war and violence: The experience of trauma causes
separation of the sufferer from the normal and rational self and the body.
Victims try to resist losing agency and want to maintain the sense of self by
rejecting fragmentation. But often haunting memories and the violent reality of
their fears never entirely disappear leaving the victims in a chaotic state
feeling that they would go mad and live in a state that “abandons the ordering
logic of grownups” (qtd. in Greenberg 323). Alexander’s fearful vow alone in
the dark reveals and out-pours all his fears:
"Lord,
deliver us in this terrible hour. Do not let my children die, my friends, my
wife... I will give you all I possess. I will leave the family I love. I shall
destroy my home, give up my son. I shall be silent, will never speak with
anyone again. I shall give up everything that binds me to life, if You will
only let everything be as it was before, as it was this morning, as it was
yesterday; so that I may be spared this deadly, suffocating bestial state of
fear." ( The Sacrifice, 1:14)
Alexander is
also living in a sort of exile, a physical and spiritual one that leads both to
his disorientation and despair. Barghuthi’s terms beautifully sum up the
condition of exile: “Exile is like a chronic disease, once one gets it, one is
never cured” (Conflict of Voices
126). He is suffering from his own fatal fears and is exhausted by his
nightmarish dream/visions. A state of mind that perhaps every traumatized mind
with such uneasy thoughts and experiences would wish the same, if only they
could break free from captivity in their circular repetitive thoughts.
Tarkovsky’s
own traumas in childhood and all his anxieties along with his quest for inner
peace and spiritual growth in the realities of a brutal and materialist world
is beautifully captured in non-chronological sequences of dreams, flashbacks,
and blurry distinction of illusion/reality. To portray the lost innocence in
human nature and the ugliness of the all materialistic world that has brought
upon people the destruction of soul, he uses children with their pure
conscience and juxtaposes their tender image with the unbearable anguish of war
and violence trodden world. Finally, in his Discussion
on the criticism of Ivan’s Childhood, Jean Paul Sartre brilliantly analyzes
Tarkovsky’s ravaged childhood experience that synthesizes the philosophy behind
that director’s memorable films: And I think it is necessary to praise Tarkovsky for
having shown so well how for this child, pitched towards suicide, there is no
difference between day and night. In any case, he does not live with us.
Actions and hallucinations are in close correspondence.” (Nostalghia)
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