Mirror & The Sacrifice

Through a Glass Darkly

To burn posthumously, like a word.

– Arseny Tarkovsky

Mirror, 1975: The camera focuses on a mirror. In the glass, we see two children standing side by side on the front porch. Their backs are turned to us. With identical shaven heads, they are two words that rhyme. A fire roars before them, a barn ablaze. 

The Sacrifice, 1986: The ambulance, containing Alexander, winds down the driveway. It passes the house, burned down to its bones and licked with tongues of fire.

It rains inside Tarkovsky’s houses. It also snows. Gusts of wind blow through open windows and linen curtains billow, filled with some strange, alien presence. Tarkovsky’s houses burn—two of them. Svetlana Boym asks, “How is it possible to distinguish between good and bad repetition? How do we draw the line between the conventions that constitute our cultural situation, and the trivialization that creates culture’s malignant doubles?”¹ Good repetition builds meaning. Good repetition is a snowball rolling down a hill collecting matter until it forms an avalanche. Bad repetition is something called poshlost’.

I first encountered poshlost’ in a class on Vladimir Nabokov, who popularized the word to American audiences. He had a keen nose for sniffing it out. In his monograph on Nikolai Gogol, Nabokov glossed poshlost’ as “not only the obviously trashy, but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.”² Poshlost’ is slippery. Detecting it requires shrewdness. Nabokov writes, “what Russians call poshlust is beautifully timeless and so cleverly painted all over with protective tints that its presence (in a book, in a soul, in an institution, in a thousand other places) often escapes detection.”³ Poshlost’ is not only an inadequate substitute for the real thing, but it is especially vicious when it is considered to belong to a level of high art or thought.⁴ Ever since I encountered this word some years ago, I’ve been learning to follow a poshyli scent.

Nabokov’s definition of poshlost’ is cruel and cutting. With a single utterance of the word, a work of art can be torn to shreds. Slavicist Svetlana Boym takes a gentler approach. She notes its tender charms, writing, “Poshlost’ and poetry, poshlost’ and love, are not always on opposite poles; in fact, poshlost’, like love and poetry, has to be continuously redefined and reframed; the old-fashioned frames can acquire a charming aura while the institution of ‘good taste’ can itself turn into a worn-out cliché.”⁵ Unlike Nabokov, who insists on the singularity of the word to Russian culture, Boym notes poshlost’ is the twin sister of a German word, kitsch.⁶ She writes, “In the words of Theodor Adorno, it is a ‘parody of catharsis,’ a secondhand epiphany.”⁷ 

Let us return to Tarkovsky and our moment from Mirror (1975). 

And the sky spread out before our eyes,
While fate followed behind in our footsteps,
Like a madman with a knife

Maria weeps. Arseny Tarkovsky, in voiceover, reads the final stanza to his poem, “First Meetings.” A kitten squeaks. A voice outside cries, “Dunya! Dear Lord.” Maria approaches the window. “Dunya!” Dogs bark. “Pasha!” a female voice yells. Maria flips through a notebook, perhaps containing her absent husband’s poems. “Pasha! What’s going on?” Two bald heads huddle together at the kitchen table whispering. Maria steps outdoors, looks, and reenters. “There’s a fire, but don’t start shouting!” The children rise from the table and run outside. The pitter patter of bare feet on hardwood and the tinny bark of a dog fill the room. The camera lingers inside. A glass bottle rolls off the kitchen table. It falls to the floor but does not shatter. Pasha’s voice seeps inside, “That son of a—just wait till I catch him!” Dunya replies, “Maybe it wasn’t our Vitya, he might still be in there! He could be burned alive!” The camera focuses on a mirror. We see the children in its reflection, Aleksei and his sister, standing side by side on the porch. A fire blazes in front of them.

“And where’s Klanka?” Pasha, in a drawn out cry, calls his name. A young boy emerges from behind the mirror, answering Pasha’s call “What?” We follow him to the front porch. It is raining. Two figures: a man and a woman, Pasha and Dunya, stand in the garden watching the barn ablaze. Raindrops fall from the roof in front of the camera, a layer between us and them, between the porch and the fire. Klanka runs to join his parents. We cut to Maria, standing, arms crossed, looking. She approaches a well. We hear the crackle of burning wood. She tips the bucket and washes her face. Maria sits on the edge of the well. Pasha runs to the burning barn.

When I close my eyes and think of Mirror, I see the dacha. I see the children, bald-headed doubles, standing on the front porch of their grandfather’s house. The barn burns furiously before them, its skeleton visible in the flames. This image has staying power. It is not necessarily the central set piece of the film, although it is remembered by many. Its symbolic power is subtle rather than didactic. Each time I watch Mirror, I linger on that scene, rewinding and looking for clues. I find rhymes instead. 

Looking back on Mirror, Tarkovsky wrote of the dacha, “All I knew was that I kept having the same dream about the place where I was born. I dreamt of the house.”⁸ We can imagine these images—the dacha, the sugar sprinkled on the black cat, the barn fire—in dreams and memories. The blazing barn seems to get at something true and consuming about the past and its power to change us; it is a moment that cannot be undone. It rhymes with the spilling of milk on the table and the absence of the father. Tarkovsky writes, “I had the greatest difficulty in explaining to people that there is no hidden, coded meaning in the film, nothing beyond the desire to tell the truth.”⁹ This rings true. The burning barn is evasive. It gives every indication it means something, but exactly what is out of reach. The image invites interpretation but resists decoding. In other words, the barn is a true symbol. The symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote on the wholeness of the artistic image. Tarkovsky cites his quote in Sculpting in Time, 

A symbol is only a true symbol when it is inexhaustible and unlimited in its meaning, when it utters in its arcane (hieratic and magical) language of hint and intimation something that cannot be set forth, that does not correspond to words. It has many faces and many thoughts, and in its remotest depths it remains inscrutable…It is formed by organic process, like a crystal…Indeed it is a monad, and thus constitutionally different from complex, reducible allegories, parables and similes…Symbols cannot be stated or explained, and, confronted by their secret meaning in its totality, we are powerless.¹⁰ 

This seems to be the case with the burning barn. Try as I might, the flames remain inscrutable. Yet, the experience of watching them produces a noetic understanding. These are flames of memory, of something true and real, even if they are presented to us, the spectator, as artifice. 

The house was built in the image of Tarkovsky’s childhood home. The barn is presumably a part of his dream memory. There is an element of realism to the image. It produces the experience of viewing something original. The poshlyi repetition will come 11 years later. For now the flames are important and beautiful. For now, they “burn, posthumously, like a word.”¹¹

It’s spring of 1985. At a press conference in Milan the year before, Tarkovsky announced he would not—could not—return to the Soviet Union. He goes to Sweden to film The Sacrifice. He will be diagnosed with cancer by the end of the year.¹² The Sacrifice is, to me, Tarkovsky’s most unabashed display of romanticism. Structurally, it is the most decipherable parable. In the words of Robert Bird, in the film’s finale “fire transforms the desolate home into a natural shrine to itself.”¹³ This final set piece is a lengthy, unforgettable sequence. It burns in the mind. 

Alexander wears a black silk robe with a yin and yang symbol centered on its back. He walks through white lace curtains onto the front porch, placing Victor’s medical supply bag, containing the gun, in his car. Trembling, he clears dishes, books, and a vase of dead flowers from the table. Alexander stacks chairs atop the table. We hear the labored sound of his breathing and the intermittent chirping of birds. He drapes a white tablecloth over his pyre. 

He moves the car. We still have not cut. He looks in the other car, then paces around the porch, “I don’t understand,” he pats his pockets, “What have I done with them?” We cut to a closeup of the table cloth. We hear the rustling of a box of matches. Alexander lights a match and carefully lifts it to the white cloth. It extinguishes. He strikes another, cupping the flame in his palms. The cloth ignites. Flames crawl up the fabric. We cut to a stereo receiver. We see Alexander’s reflection in a mirror. He turns on the stereo. The Japanese flute returns. We cut to Alexander, the nape of his neck. We hear the clanging of metal objects and the crackling of the fire as he turns to face us. His skin is illuminated with the warm glow of flame. He stands on the balcony, the marshland stretching out toward infinity below.

 The sound of the flute intensifies. Alexander climbs over the balcony railing onto a ladder. He stops, takes a drink, and knocks an egg off the table. It does not crack. The birds return. Alexander climbs down the ladder and vanishes. We cut to the house, burning but not yet consumed. Alexander is sprawled on the grass, looking. We hear the sound of glass shattering and the crackle of roaring flames. He stumbles through the half-flooded fields. From the horizon, his family emerges, running toward him. Alexander turns away. Adelaide cries “Alexander!” He sinks to the ground. The women flail and fall. “I did it. Don’t be upset! Listen to me, Victor, I’ve got something very impor…No! Silence!” Alexander covers his mouth with his hands. “Say nothing! Ask nothing!” Adelaide falls to the ground and embraces Alexander. We hear the continual shattering of their home but do not see it. A phone rings. It is coming from inside the house. Alexander runs toward the sound. We see the house, now engulfed in the fire’s fury. 

Plumes of black smoke blow in the wind. 

Maria stands watching with her arms crossed. Alexander falls to his knees in front of her. He holds her hands and venerates her with kisses. Victor and Adelaide pull Alexander up from the ground. “Come, Alexander! You can’t stay here!” Alexander is escorted away from Maria. The car explodes. Alexander breaks from their grasp and runs, limping, back to Maria. He is recaptured. Maria runs toward him, “Let him be! What are you doing to him?” Adelaide pushes Maria off, “Don’t touch him!” Alexander is escorted to an ambulance, which has appeared in the fields, as if out of nowhere. He struggles, running, limping, evading capture. He submits, finding himself embraced in Adelaide’s arms. He gets in the trunk of the ambulance, then gets out to hug Victor, then enters again, pushing Adelaide away. The ambulance drives off, passing the house, burned down to its bones. It drives past Maria, who takes off in a sprint, then grabs a bicycle. She does not follow the ambulance; she pedals out of the frame. The ambulance winds down the driveway. The house burns as Adelaide collapses into a puddle. They watch the house collapse, too.

Mark Hederman in “Cinema and the Icon” writes, “The artist of the Old Testament was one who had sacrificed his whole being to the consuming presence of the divine power. The Hebrew word for ‘sacrifice’ means ‘to come near’, to approach God, who is a consuming fire.”¹⁴ The sequence from The Sacrifice, when Alexander burns his home, is an act of sacrifice to approach God. Tarkovsky writes of the film, “[it] was to be not only a parable about sacrifice but also a story of how one individual is saved.”¹⁵ He later adds,“I see Alexander as a man chosen by God.”¹⁶

The image of the burning house is familiar. It calls upon our memory. The burning house is an expanded, heightened version of the image from Mirror. Upon a closer inspection, there are distinct visual rhymes. In our moment from Mirror, a glass bottle falls off the table and onto the floor. It does not shatter. In The Sacrifice, Alexander knocks an egg off the table. It too falls but does not crack. In broader strokes, in both moments we have a collection of onlookers looking helplessly as their property is completely undone. In Mirror, Pasha has a suspicion that a character named Vitya, presumably his son, started the fire. In The Sacrifice, we watch Alexander set the house ablaze. The camera follows him going through the physical act of the burning. The first failed attempt of lighting the cloth is resonant. And then there is that pesky punctum, the rib like wooden frame of the house visible in the flames. Insistently, Tarkovsky captures that moment of the fire and presents it to us in its raw, animalistic ferocity. 

In Elements of Cinema, Robert Bird categorized the three spaces that dominate Tarkovsky’s filmography: the natural world, the home, and the shrine/cathedral. He wrote,  “When these homes are inevitably reclaimed by nature – whether flooded by rain, engulfed in flame or simply worn down by time – their ruins continue to stand as loci of memory and places of epiphany.”¹⁷ In Mirror, we see the burning barn as a locus of memory. In The Sacrifice, we see the burning house transformed from a home to a shrine, from a locus of memory to a site of epiphany. The production history adds layers of meaning to this moment.

Take 1: Tarkovsky reflects in Sculpting in Time, “Suddenly, in the scene in which Alexander sets fire to his house—a single take lasting six and a half minutes—the camera broke down. We discovered it only after the entire building was ablaze, burning to the ground as we looked on.”¹⁸ Helpless, not unlike the onlookers in the diegesis, Tarkovsky and his crew watched the fire rage. It could not be undone. They wept. Then they rebuilt. Take 2: “As we shot that scene for the second time we were filled with apprehension until both cameras had been turned off […] Then we all let go; almost all of us were weeping like children, and as we fell into one another’s arms I realized how close and indissoluble was the bond that united our team.”¹⁹ Repetition, not only in the repeated motif of the house ablaze, but in the very mechanics of capturing the moment. 

Unlike the moment from Mirror, the burning house in The Sacrifice does not work for me. It is not, as Vyacheslav Ivanov would put it, a true symbol. In part, this is due to the vessel that contains this moment, the film as a whole. The Sacrifice is a parable. Tarkovsky has said this outright.²⁰ As a parable, the film is meant to be decoded to reveal its inner meaning. In a parable, everything signifies. The rules of engagement with a parable like The Sacrifice are unlike those of Mirror. In Mirror, Tarkovsky privileges the relationship between memory and realism. The spectator—navigating dreams, memories, and disparate spaces and times—understands noetically. In The Sacrifice, the spectator is encouraged by the structure of the parable to understand intellectually. Mirror is felt whereas The Sacrifice is understood. 

In The Rustle of Language, Roland Barthes coined the term “the reality effect” to describe the mysterious resonance of “real” details.²¹ The details he describes as “real” are those images, like the burning barn in Mirror, which refuse to signify in an intelligible way. These images, unable to be reduced, become in my viewing experience a hierophany and produce the ineffable experience of the cinephiliac moment. Conversely, intelligible moments, like the burning house from The Sacrifice, become an exercise in decoding and are subsequently demystified. They become a secondhand epiphany. 

In The Sacrifice, Tarkovksy becomes a preacher. He turns from exhibiting life and memory to discussing it. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky cites a letter Nikolai Gogol wrote to the poet Vasily Zhukovsky in January 1848, “…it’s not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life.”²² In The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky returns to his repertoire of poetic grammar and intensifies images, themes, and motifs. This time, however, he is a man at the end of his life. He is looking to be legible. He turns to the parable. In the end, he is heard and understood. However, he sacrifices something more pure for that legibility; the essence of the true symbol is lost. To me, Alexander’s arson falls to the level of poshlost’. 

I return to Svetlana Boym and the question we began with: how is it possible to distinguish between good and bad repetition? As we have established, Tarkovsky’s filmography can be understood as a poem built line by line. Repeated themes and images weave each film together. Largely, this repetition is not poshlyi. Something about the burning house at the end of The Sacrifice is different. Perhaps this is because it was designed as a monumental set piece. Perhaps this is because it was the recreation of that lost first take. More likely, the poshlost’ crept in because the moment was designed to be decoded. 

Meeting Tarkovsky at the end of his life, we meet Tarkovsky the prophet delivering his final homily.²³ Whereas the younger Tarkovsky we meet in Mirror insists upon the absence of a hidden meaning, the Tarkovsky we meet in The Sacrifice relies upon the spectator’s intellectual decoding of the image to communicate. The moment is no longer known and felt noetically, but understood intellectually. Something great is lost in this shift.

In the end, Tarkovsky is seduced by nostalgia. Boym writes in The Future of Nostalgia, “Nostalgia tantalizes us with its fundamental ambivalence; it is about the repetition of the unrepeatable, materialization of the immaterial.”²⁴ He falls victim to repeating the unrepeatable and materializing the immaterial, seeking clarity of message over purity of image. In the end, we are left with poshlost’, perhaps of a gentler kind than Nabokov’s. This poshlost’ is more like Boym’s, sentimental and earnest, but nevertheless somehow false. Tarkovsky leaves us with an epiphany, sincere and deeply felt, even if secondhand. We cannot fault him for wanting to speak and be understood.

1.  Svetlana Boym, Common Places (Harvard University Press, 1995), 46. ↩︎
2.  Vladimir Nabokov, “Our Mr. Chichikov.,” in Nikolai Gogol (New Directions, 1961), 70. ↩︎
3. Ibid, 64. ↩︎
4. Ibid, 68. ↩︎
5.  Boym, Common Places, 56. ↩︎
6.  Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, New York: Basic Books, 2001), 279. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8.  Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1987), 135. ↩︎
9. Ibid, 113. ↩︎
10.  Vyacheslav Ivanov quoted in Tarkovsky,Sculpting in Time, 47.  ↩︎
11. Arseny Tarkovsky, “My Sight, Which Was My Power, Now Blurs,” in I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, trans. Philip Metres and Dmitri Psurtsev (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2015), 181. ↩︎
12.  John Gianvito, ed., Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), xxvi. ↩︎
13.  Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 66. ↩︎
14.  Mark Patrick Hederman, “Cinema and the Icon,” The Crane Bag 8, no. 2 (1984): 90. ↩︎
15.  Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 220. ↩︎
16.  Ibid, 227. ↩︎
17.  Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema, 53. ↩︎
18.  Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 225.  ↩︎
19. Ibid, 226. ↩︎
20. Ibid, 219. ↩︎
21. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986), 148. ↩︎
22.  Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 49.  ↩︎
23.  “it is easy to parody Tarkovsky, it is equally easy—and dangerous—to venerate and revere him. Toward the end of his life he set himself up in business, quite self-consciously, as a prophet and oracle and, by means of interviews, talks, films such as those made by Donatella Baglivo, and his book Sculpting in Time (especially the final, posthumously published chapter on The Sacrifice), succeeded to a remarkable extent in creating a framework whichensured that his films would be discussed and understood in terms largely established by him. […] He was not, however, without flaws, as either a man or an artist. The mythmaking that accumulated around him, first of all, and during his lifetime, in the West, and then, since his untimely death and the coming of glasnost, in the Soviet Union, has made it difficult to look at his work objectively…” Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), xiii. ↩︎
24.  Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xvii. ↩︎