A year with Andrei

‘There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.’

— Ecclesiastes 1:2

The darkness was so intense that July night that it seemed impassable and time might have stopped. Only the music streaming from the car radio and the monotonous sound of the engine were proof that time did flow. I found the Chalons-sur-Marne railway station in the nick of time. Clutching the book I was taking to Andrei and my small backpack, I got into the carriage with a sigh of relief. I asked the conductor to wake me at Stuttgart and began reading the other book I had with me. It was Buñuel’s autobiography, and I wanted to report on it to Andrei. I fell asleep after acquiring the information that the old Buñuel used to cheat, taking his second Martini before the hour appointed for this ritual. Trifles of this sort appeased the lust for laughter which had been such a feature of the year of my collaboration with Tarkovsky.

Stuttgart in the morning light was mainly glimpses in the rear mirror. I was in a hurry to reach Andrei and in that joyful haste came memories of our drive across Germany in September 1985. We drove so fast that it was hardly sensible, the car saturated with the music of Bach, Armstrong and Stevie Wonder, while we talked about faith, about politics. After five months hard work in the cutting room, we could afford to be carefree during our week’s trip from Stockholm to Florence. Among other things, we talked about Conrad, who in the preface to one of his books deals with the tasks of art. He said there that the actual beginning of a work of art means severing the ties between the merciless rush of time and the transient phases of life, to waken in the heart of readers an awareness of immediate community, the mystery of all our origins and the uncertainty of life.

So I was hurrying to meet Andrei. I reached the sanatorium at 9.30 a.m. The buildings were ‘modern’, as Andrei defined them disparagingly, for he could not stand them. The whole place was like a barracks for young, highly disciplined pioneers whose lives were deprived of any better designs. Everything was functional, in that range of drab plastic hues. The comforting thought was that the sanatorium had a good reputation for its medical care. When I reached his room, the Master was in bed and was, of course, talking on the telephone to his chief doctor, Professor Schwarzenberg in Paris. He smiled, waved me to a chair and invited me to help myself to a piece of cake. In his illness, his features were entirely dominated by the eyes: black as coals, with an impish spark, always moving. The moment he put down the receiver, a torrent of embraces, kisses and questions. I took the book out of my pack: Tarkovsky, Thoughts on Coming to Rest, a newly published anthology on his work. Andrei was not one of those conceited collectors of press cuttings, but I could see that he got satisfaction out of a book like this, and the awareness that his work was perceived and understood.

I hurriedly reported my battles with the French laboratories to ensure adequate quality for the prints of The Sacrifice destined for the French-speaking market. Andrei was highly demanding about technical quality, even during the bad periods of his illness. I remember the last three months of our collaboration, when he had to leave us to complete the soundtrack according to his design. He had been present during the dubbing of all the actors, except for the main female role, which was a particularly difficult one. The original was done in English by Susan Fleetwood. The Swedish dubbing would not have been too much of a problem, except for a scene of hysteria — sobs, choking cries, inarticulate screams rendered at such a pitch that it proved impossible to do the scene again at the same ‘temperature’ with another actress. Andrei had found an actress whose voice resembled Susan Fleetwood’s, which allowed us to use at least part of the scene’s original soundtrack. He didn’t, alas, have time to direct that unit. We did it on our own and in a great hurry, so that by mid-January 1986 the whole synchronised dialogue of the film could be shown to Andrei. It was then that, for the first time, we met him bedridden. He was obviously crushed by his illness, but the moment we put the video on, the Master propped up his pillows and resumed his professional role. Tides of energy suddenly surged in him. In that 10-hour working day, he gave us all the briefing for the next stage of the work.

Back in Stockholm, after talking with Erland Josephson, I decided to telephone Andrei and suggest having the role taken by another actress. His decision was matter of fact and immediate: whenever there is an opportunity for improvement, it should be taken unhesitatingly. So the dubbing of this part involved three actresses. And even I can’t be sure now which cue is done by whom: they have all melded into the character of Adelaide.

We went to Paris four times in all, showing the results of our work to our Master, racing against time to complete the film. His illness had come suddenly; none of us was prepared for it. I did know that in December 1985 he had not been feeling well and had had a thorough medical examination; but I was surprised when on Christmas Eve, before leaving for Florence, he asked me to take him to the airport. On the way, he began dictating the final version of the synchronised soundtrack, what should be the space and contrast in the sound image. He told me to change the dedication of the film: ‘To my son Andryusha, whom I am leaving to fight like that,’ it should read. He ignored my questions, simply saying that in all probability he would not be returning to Stockholm after Christmas and instructing me to see to the film’s completion. ‘Bring it to me in Italy,’ he said. The day after Christmas, I learnt that Andrei had cancer. We mobilised all our resources to finish the film precisely as Andrei instructed us, to have it ready to show him so that it was wholly and indisputably a Tarkovsky film.

But on that July day in 1986, in Germany, he seemed cured, with a period of recovery in front of him. We were in high spirits, joking as in the old days. I told him some gossip about Buñuel, whom Andrei admired and had always wanted to meet. In my halting Russian, I translated for him the passage on being old, in which Buñuel deplores the loss of appetite and the resignation that the perspective of a long life left behind. Andrei reached for the Bible which he kept on the little table by his bed and read from Ecclesiastes: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher. Vanity of vanities; all is vanity…’ He went through some more pages and resumed reading: ‘Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment.’

Religion played an important part in Tarkovsky’s life and he was always eager to meet religious people, to discuss with them problems of faith. He often felt the urge to make a film based on biblical texts, but thought himself too small a man to dare such a colossal endeavour. Who else, however, could have attempted it? We came to consider our future. Andrei’s next film was to have been Hoffmanniana, from an old scenario which he had written in Russia. During twenty years, he was allowed to make only five films there, devoting the rest of his time to teaching at the Film School and writing scenarios. We had planned to start Hoffmanniana in autumn 1986 — and Andrei was working at the same time on a Hamlet script.

He was a giant for work, and at the same time a highly disciplined man who hated disorder and would only come on the set after much preparation. Quite often I found it strenuous to keep up with his pace — which is not to say that Tarkovsky made inhuman demands on his collaborators, but to give an idea of his rhythm and that the whole team were happy to follow it. I could watch the system at work during the editing. The Sacrifice contains a mere 120 cuts, but each one was subject to deep critical scrutiny. Editing the film did not mean blindly following a pre-arranged set of concepts. It meant creative work carried out between the axis of a fixed vision and the inner dynamics of the material. The number of cuts gave no indication of the range of difficulties faced in the process. At the first projection, the film was 190 minutes. Further work reduced it by 40 minutes. But the only scene wholly eliminated was one in which Alexander is writing a letter to his family.

Tarkovsky held that film is the only art which can render reality in the dimension of time, taken literally. A film is a mosaic of time, and against this structure the rest of the film’s elements are cast, the choice being arbitrary on the part of the film-maker. Andrei was present at all times during work on set design, costume and editing.

The same detail characterised his collaboration with Sven Nykvist. The composition of the picture, length of shot, the actors’ movements within the frame were largely Tarkovsky’s realm. He was the first to operate the camera and correct the actors’ roles in the light of what it showed him. For Nykvist, this meant a new way of working, and he told me that it caused some conflict with the director until he realised that it did not amount to any vote of no confidence but was genuinely Tarkovsky’s working method. It is also an illustration of the kinds of demands Tarkovsky made on himself — which did not in any way affect his recognition that The Sacrifice depended on teamwork.

We talked about the problems of the film, about film-makers and about the American cinema. Andrei had been to America but had never felt comfortable there. To him, film was art, young and free from any burden or any ossified traditions, and he felt sorry for the talented American film-makers exposed to commercial pressures which left only a few of them unaffected. Tarkovsky’s European roots could not survive that kind of artistic emigration, though he looked for inspiration to the poetry and music of the Far East and dreamed of going to India and Japan. His own choice of literature and art was very sophisticated, and though he did watch a lot of films his evaluation of them was strict. The creative minds he talked about most often were Bresson, Antonioni, Fellini, Kurosawa, Wajda, Zanussi and Bergman.

In this connection, I remember an incident in November 1985, when Andrei and I were looking at an exhibition of film posters at the Film House in Stockholm. I spotted Bergman — whom Tarkovsky had never encountered, though they had wanted to meet — coming out of one of the film theatres there. This time, a meeting looked so natural that it was almost unavoidable. The two men could see each other at a distance of about fifteen metres. What followed staggered me: each made an about turn, as sharply as though following some elaborate drill, and each made off in his separate direction. Thus the two great ones of this world passed by without touching.

Reminiscences of this kind kept us busy for the rest of that July morning. The sick man was served a lunch of greyish soup, with some greyish cereal and a piece of overcooked meat. Andrei gave me a conspiratorial wink and smile. When the nurse had gone, he resignedly waved his hand over that nourishment which could in no way be called a meal. With a final gesture, he pushed the dishes out of sight. It was with a mixture of sadness and hope that I suggested our going to France, only sixty kilometres away, for a decent steak. Andrei’s eyes sparkled, but he suggested that in the circumstances he could ill afford such an extravagance. As if to make up for the wasted lunch, we took to remembering the raw fish ‘sashimi’ which we used to enjoy once a week at a Korean restaurant in Stockholm.

The ‘culinary orgies’ were part of our free time while working together, reaching their zenith in Italy where finding a good though simple restaurant was no problem. Part of the editing happened to be done in Florence. The Master, an honorary citizen of that city, treated it as his new home, and the cutting room was in the building where the Tarkovskys were staying. Meanwhile, his wife, Larissa, was controlling the practical aspects of their life, having the house prepared for them to move in when their son Andryusha was able to join them. Larissa’s inexhaustible energy helped the couple overcome obstacles both before and after they left their homeland. Some of their shared experiences found their way into Andrei’s films — witness the finding of a home by Alexander and Adelaide in The Sacrifice. It is the story of the Tarkovskys’ dacha, which they had left behind in the Soviet Union.

The afternoon stroll round the sanatorium was a ritual for Andrei. In the course of it, we talked about the complex nature of love described in the Book of Job, love put to such tests, such suffering, and at the same time a love that generates pain and misery. The walk took about forty-five minutes, during which we covered some 300 metres, stopping to rest on the benches scattered about the grounds. It was only then that I realised how weak Andrei had become. The illness itself at that stage was not alarming; it seemed that the danger was over, and the detail of the plans Andrei was making for the future encouraged optimism about his state of health.

Exhausted by the effort of walking, Andrei lay down and reached for the Bible, reading again from Ecclesiastes: ‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted… a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together…’ ‘Do you remember,’ Andrei asked, ‘that I wanted our film to carry that title, “A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together?” It somehow didn’t sound right in Swedish.’ Tarkovsky lay there looking at the icon on the wall of his sanatorium room. The humming of the forest and the sounds of swallows replaced the sound of his words. After a time, he resumed his reading: ‘…I have seen the travail, which God has given to the sons of men to be exercised in it. He hath made everything beautiful in his time; also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find the work God maketh from the beginning to the end.’

Andrei set the Bible aside, pulled up the blanket, pedantically smoothed it, and silence fell again. It was not the silence of a void; it was a silence full of deep reflection. The entry of the nurse, bringing tea and biscuits with Andrei’s medicine, brought me back to the sad reality moving to the rhythm of its own existence. She took away Andrei’s discarded soup, wished him goodnight, and asked in the same breath whether he needed anything — all in a mixture of German, Italian and English. Andrei nodded, and at the same time said in Russian to me that the only thing he needed was to go to Italy, the rest being unnecessary. It was getting dark when the time came for me to leave. We embraced and kissed, saying ‘See you soon in Italy.’ And that was our last meeting, on 26 July 1986.

‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity.’ On the day of his funeral, in the Church of St Sergius in Paris, we were holding candles and bidding farewell to the great artist. The priest lit his candle and forwarded its flame to the people standing in the front row. They in turn passed the flame on, so that finally all the candles crowned with small dancing lights made a chain of our memory of Andrei Tarkovsky.