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Abstract:
In Nostalghia, Andrei Tarkovsky's refusal of narrative and use of long, slow takes distinguish him from Soviet realism and postmodern culture. His striking visuals provide a fresh treatment of the beautiful and create spatial-temporal correlatives to nostalgia and loss. The film contributes to suture theory, as well, and models a complex politics.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (1983) opens with a misty black-and-white shot of the Russian countryside, where a boy and three women move down toward water. As the credits roll, die film cuts to another foggy landscape in Italy, where a Volkswagen travels across a hilly countryside. Viewers will become accustomed to this movement between Andrei Gorchakov's (Oleg Yankovsky) memories of his Russian home and his present sojourn in Italy, where he suffers from nostalgic malaise. Accompanied by his translator Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), Andrei has come to Italy to research the life of the Russian serf composer, Pavel Sosnovsky. Despondent in his Italian exile and more so upon his return, Sosnovsky committed suicide. The trauma of being pinned between nostalgic exile and oppressive return was also a central concern for Tarkovsky as he contemplated his own plans to leave the Soviet Union.1
In this, his penultimate film, Tarkovsky's resistance to Soviet social realism and Hollywood's glamorized styles inclines him toward an unusual, cinematic treatment of "the beautiful." Here, beauty is often neither nor conventionally pleasing, nor is it sexualized as a locus of desire,2 Instead, Tarkovsky's mise-en-scène and Giuseppe Land's cinematography create a haunting visual effect, a desolate beauty reflecting rupture, crisis, and melancholic stasis.3 These are not glamorized spaces and bodies. Not even Giordano's suggestively draped figure, smooth open face, and cascade of golden hair can steal die scene from Yankovsky's internal brooding and the spaces of damp decay and growth dial mirror his emotion.4 As a potential figure of desire, Eugenia is usurped by the Russian landscape, by family, and by the dacha - home, for Andrei, as it is embed' ded in the fecundity of soil, forests, grass, and rain. As Chris Marker notes, "There is nothing more earthy, more carnal than the work of this reputed mystical filmmaker," attributing this earthy carnality to Russian Orthodox respect for nature, as a place where "the creator is revered through his creation."5...