Of Tarkovsky and the uncanniness of history

We are in the midst of a strange time in history. Well, perhaps this isn’t strictly true, at least not in as much as every time in history is a strange time. A sense of history, of history in the making – that is what’s truly strange. What’s changed for, then, what lies behind me write such an entry, is that I am beginning more and more to feel a sense of history in everything I see. A sense of removal from current events and of an outside perspective looking in. Not quite complete, of course. Not enough, that is, that I can see the precise motivations behind every act and tribulation taking place or that I could have the answer to the world’s problems. Even the best history books, no matter with how much hindsight they are written and how well documented their subject matter it, cannot help but try and impose some sort of sensible narrative on past events. Simply put, I get an overwhelming sense of us hurtling blindly through time, tentatively grasping for some sure-footedness and certainty in what the future holds for us and - for those of us fortunate enough to be involved in such matters – trying to steer history and the fate of empires in one direction or another. Maybe it’s reading history books that puts one in this mind-frame of a sense of history. Adam Curtis’s recent 3 part documentary for the BBC is a good example of something that might instil this sense of history, which is also a sense of awe, and of horror. Regardless of how accurate or insightful his presentation actually is, it performs a magical service by injecting a chain of events from the past 60 years with the same distance and sense of history as learning about the Roman Empire or the two World Wars. It takes huge events, events so large that occur on an unfathomable international scale, events so large, complex and all-pervasive we barely even notice them as events, and breaks them down into digestible components, draws lines between them, makes connections and links dots, so that suddenly we believe we can see something that has actually been in the making for at least a few decades. We suddenly believe that we can spot ideological shifts over the past few decades and actually make narrative sense of them. In an uncanny way (uncanny in the Heideggerian sense), it makes me feel as though I’m watching the machinations of human society reduced to a nature documentary about insects, with David Attenborough explaining their behaviour as part of a dance of life that simply must be so, with every insect falling into a predetermined role and having its behaviour dictated from the start. It makes me feel, when I watch mankind, that no-one understands their own debt to history, to the circumstances and context in which they make their decisions, and that it can only ever be so. Things could never have been any other way.
More so, however, what Curtis’s programme does is not merely leave us at a specific point in the past, as though history has stopped there. Slowly, without us realising it, the events which he is trying to analyse gush forth and spill right into the present. Suddenly, we are shaken and jolted out of our everyday existence, only to look around us and understand that we are in the midst of something that’s taking place right now, something that’s been building up throughout time, that has not yet ended, and that will not end for a while. The uncanny invades our everyday existence and our relationship to our own present and future. It is the historian’s role to piece together the past, but it is the philosopher’s role to both take apart and piece together the past, future and present.


Is it the philsopher’s role, though? Perhaps it is the artist’s. Themes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Much like my above ruminations on the nature of history and of nostalgia, Tarkovsky here appears to operate in a similar fashion. We have memories of the past interspersed in the present, flashes of images, all silent, flaring up indeterminately and with no real chronological sense. Even in scenes of conversation, the camera never focuses on a particular speaker but drifts slowly through the house, from detail to detail, as though to suggest that the significance of the memory haunts the totality of one’s environemtn, every object in the room rather than being concentrated in one person. No, not the totality, for that word would suggest a closed circle. Rather, every object and every instance has the potential of entering and making up a memory or a narrative, itself an open and inexhaustible field of signification.
The preoccupation with the meaning of the film is a mistake, as Grigory Yavlinsky notes. The film is so deliberately opaque that even if some of the scenes are in fact based on Tarkovsky’s childhood memories, they do not actually refer to or represent these memories as such. If anything, the structure of the film tells us that even those memories upon which the film is supposedly based are not Tarkovsky’s own, in as much as he has no direct access to his memories or to a coherent sense of the narrative of his own life. The film, in that respect, becomes something else the moment it is put on film. It resists meaning and interpretation so strongly that it can’t help but become one’s own film as soon as one watches it. The powerful emotions it might stir in some are new each time, as it can only provoke feelings of awe and wonderment, of mystery, and of the overwhelming realisation that we are lost and insignificant in the endless gush of history, which never stops changing and exerting its force on us, and which has always already moved on to pastures new while we still try to make sense of what’s just happened.

No matter how many different names Tarkovsky toyed with during the making of the film, the fact that he settled on Mirror is telling. The film itself might act as a mirror to whomever watches it, not in the sense that someone might suddenly be confronted with themselves as they are, but in our inability to ever fully grasp ourselves. This is not the only time a mirror has played a part in Tarkovsky’s films. Solaris, too, sees a planet attempting to communicate with a space station’s inhabitants by entering their subconscious and replicating what it finds. More than an attempt at self-healing, it perhaps depicts the manner in which we are confronted with the inevitable return of themes, dreams and memories that play a role for us throughout our lives and which are ultimately unassailable.