254 Mondzain

Chapter 10

Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen

Marie-José Mondzain
Translated by Annabel L. Kim

Speaking about Andrei Tarkovsky’s films as a philosopher raises two difficul-

ties, each connected to the other: the first is the general difficulty, common to
all discursive disciplines, of speaking about images; the second, echoing the
first, is that to speak of Tarkovsky’s work is to address an object that, in a singu-
lar way, throws into crisis the speech that is at the heart of images, because the
poetry of the image produces a commotion at the heart of philosophical lan-
guage itself. The philosopher’s voice becomes fragile and uncertain before the
seismic events that are his films, films that put speculative thought into a state
of discomfort. When I look for where the philosophers are to be found in Tar-
kovsky’s work, I do not find them in figures of eloquence or theory—to the
contrary, there, only weakness and vertigo are found. I find philosophers in the
bodies of children, in the wind’s voice, in storms or in a dog’s appearing. It is
these things that address signs to the professionals of discourse or of writing,
signs that are at once tender and violent, signs that concern meaning’s incar-
nation in the world’s body. These signs manifest this presence of meaning in
the figures found in the suspension of words, as if the coming of the word took
place in silence. Thus, like a burst of indecipherable light, poetic speech springs
up.
That is why we must be very delicate and above all, modest, in assuming
philosophical speech about Tarkovsky’s work. Because these films seem to be
overflowing with symbols, I will strive, as much as possible, to avoid any posi-
tion of knowledge. I would like to do what Serge Daney alluded to, on 20 No-
vember 1981 in Libération, when he wrote about Stalker, saying that Tarkovsky’s
film “is a machine that is sufficiently infernal to not exclude, a priori, any inter-
pretation…. In a potluck, we can bring our food!… We can interpret a film.…
But we’re not obligated to. We can also watch a film. We can watch for things to
appear that haven’t ever been seen before in a film. The viewer-watcher sees
things that the viewer-interpreter no longer knows how to see.” Therefore, I
will not seize films for myself as if they were material that could be broken
down into particular or recurring elements. I will not make an inventory of
theological or fantastical obsessions. No bottom line.
I will try to situate my speaking as best as I can, that is, by testifying to a way
of seeing, renouncing all academic theorizing of the way this work is viewed.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300019_013

Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 255

Opening paths, proposing connections. Being the Stalker, walker, and watcher,
because this work is, par excellence, a meeting between gaze and thought that
asks the philosopher to make a radical return to the site where the mystery of
the visible intersects with the visibility of the word—as the Christians said one
day, its incarnation. Structurally, I do not consider that Christians in any way
own this concept of visible incarnation, because by inventing it, they provided
the conceptualization of all images with the model of a renunciation of all
possession, of any capturing of the visible. Incarnation is the experience of be-
ing dispossessed of things for the sake of vision, the experience of a transfigu-
ration of the viewing of images of their absence.

Renouncing Metaphorical Interpretations

In Tarkovsky’s films, symbols, citations, and references are so abundant, the

cinematographic, theological, poetic, and artistic culture so ample and present
that we could content ourselves with a decoding, we could yield to the tempta-
tion of a kind of erudite, endless hermeneutic. I spoke of temptation, but I
think that we could, instead, speak of a trap since, in the end, the commen-
tariat treats films as objects of encrypted, encoded communication. The “pot-
luck” Daney spoke of can become a caravansary overflowing with referential
treasures. Critical thought can make a bricoleur of itself, or exercise itself to the
point of indecency, by seizing everything that appears in images in order to
reorganize it all into expository discourse. Now, a work of art, be it overloaded
with codes and references (and great works, more so than all others, are loaded
with memory and signs), does not stand in front of us as a work of art save
through how it resists all reduction of its effects to referential significations. A
work springs forth from its own terrain, certainly, the terrain that nourished it
into producing meaning, meaning whose effects are more related to the mys-
tery of presence than to the persistence of sources or the return of what is
memorized, or even repressed. A work’s meaning comes from its horizon.
To illustrate the polysemy of all creation, I will recount an anecdote that the
dramaturge Valère Novarina told me recently. When he presented his play, The
Red Origin, in Moscow, he was asked if it was a political work, to which he re-
sponded yes. From there he left for Brazil, where he was asked if The Red Origin
designated the vagina, to which he responded yes. Then when he arrived in Tel
Aviv to put on The Red Origin he was told that surely it was about the sacrifice
of Abraham, and Novarina acquiesced again. The Red Origin was all that and
thus none of it at all … In the same way, I think that each of Tarkovsky’s films
could be the object of successive and contradictory identifications without
ever having its authenticity either betrayed or illuminated in any way. No
256 Mondzain

framework impoverishes them, including that of Christian doctrine, if used as

an interpretative lens. A work’s freedom is illegible in a certain manner. Cer-
tainly, the incarnation and trinity are related to this work, but on what level
can it be understood while still maintaining the mystery?
There are mystery and shadows there that discourse must respect. The silver
screen is not a jewel box filled with meaning. The visible is entirely where the
gaze meets, not a discourse’s significations, but the meaning of the word. It
cannot be a matter of transforming the image into a rebus to decipher.
The indeterminate and interminable proliferation of visual and sound signs
reflects tirelessly back to strata and layers of meaning that come together to
construct the plane on which the visible is inscribed on the screen. Now, this
surface totally preserves the viewer’s position and freedom, on which Tark-
vosky never imposes an unequivocal catechism’s message. How does what in-
spires him leave us free to wend our way through these films with our own
story? Like any great creator, he makes sure the meaning of what he shows is
revealed neither intentionally by him, nor allegorically by the image, nor meta-
phorically by the word. There is no bottom line, no secret message, no last
word. The image is open, exposed, its meaning yet to come, to be constructed,
there for each of us to re-elaborate starting from the present that is ours, from
the history that is ours. The power of an image is founded in its undecidable
polysemy. We are affected by it and its force comes from the energy that it frees
up in us. That is the fundamental iconic teaching. All these faces in all these
landscapes are our faces caught in the geology of a world that is forever ours, a
world of waste and promises. Art is irreducible to the communication of signs
encoded early on. Meaning is our responsibility, since all these images and
films do is make the offer of freedom. Godard said one day: “There is no image
of change and the image changes nothing, it resists change, what changes is
what’s between the images.” We must undoubtedly understand how Tar-
kovsky’s sources operate, not through images as referential signals, but be-
tween images, like the energy of a conviction. This powerful and painful
conviction is that, in cinema, the question that is played out is that of the exis-
tence of the other.

The Incarnation Tells Us about Cinema

However, if I am here, I owe it perhaps to long years spent in the company of

Byzantine images and texts that nourished Russian Orthodox thought as well
as to the homage I’ve repeatedly been able to pay to the work of Tarkovsky. I
will not assume the position of expert. Who could possibly be an expert in the
Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 257

matter of incarnation? When I saw Andrei Rublev for the first time, my emo-
tion was considerable and I set out to take each step of Rublev’s passion all the
way up to his resurrection, up to this resurrection of the word and image. I saw
clearly the path of the passion, the lesson of shadows that travel through the
space of pain, silence, and death to lead the artist from the mute night to the
paschal light. I saw the word and image flow together, the chime of triumph
and redemption. But this world, totally familiar to the theologian, philosopher,
or believer, was here no longer the world of icons but truly the world of cine-
ma, a cinema born in Soviet lands. Tearing the icon away from the Church and
associating the adventure of looking with the constitution of a new assem-
bly—the gathering together of viewers—Tarkovsky addresses to them signs
that question their servitude or their freedom, and thus, their desires. This is
the cinema produced by the hands and the gaze of the creator of the films
Ivan’s Childhood, The Mirror, Stalker, Solaris, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice.
How then is cinema connected to the incarnation of the word on the
screen? I continued to see the films of Tarkovky entering slowly into the inde-
cipherable mystery of the visible. For twenty years, this adventure of the gaze,
of looking, accompanied my philosophical and political work on the question
of the gaze in the production of the visible, and of cinematographic works. My
conviction came together little by little: today, engagement in cinematographic
production has a singular signification that has been associated, since its birth,
with the history of visibilities in the Western Christian world. This signifies
that if the intellectual and spiritual history of Christianity enabled cinema to
be invented, it is in that capacity that it is also related to Tarkovsky’s films. I
mean that his films inscribe a meaning that concerns the totality of cinematic
history. The Christian theory of the image gives its plenary signification to this
work in the measure that it shows the path of meaning for all cinematographic
enterprises. Tarkovsky answers for what he does just as all great artists are ac-
countable for an image of humanity. I could also state this another way by say-
ing that the filmmaker’s freedom, his spiritual and political responsibility, is
inscribed in Christianity’s most mysterious heritage. There, the incarnation is
not a divine or religious matter but a human one understood in terms of image
and the management of earthly visibilities. Tarkovsky’s cinema is neither reli-
gious nor sacralizing, it is an “anthropogenic” cinema. There, man is created in
the image of humanity. Tarkovsky places the cinematographic gesture in a site
of historical responsibility as regards the modern definition of humanity. Hu-
manity, the human future, is nothing other than the image that we produce as
our gestures’ horizon. The cinematographic gesture is thus a fictional gesture
of great gravity since it works with a world of visibilities that may have taken us
hostage. Is cinema condemned to be nothing but the idol industry, or is it
258 Mondzain

something else, perhaps, an art? The question that the Church wanted to re-
solve, that of knowing which form of power we take in making images, is posed
by cinema as an open crisis. This question can be formulated as follows: can
the assembly of a film’s viewers be constituted by the form of the film itself as a
free assembly of speaking subjects desiring to share a world?
What relation exists between Tarkovsky’s films and the incarnation?
I could say laconically that to believe in the incarnation is to produce
­cinema.
Why do we say, “incarnate on screen?”

If the doctrine of the incarnation was a solemn legitimization of the visible fi-
nally freed from the suspicion of idolatry, then all of Western art history is a
consequence of this doctrine. Now, for cinema, being an art and an industry,
the question that is posed is that of knowing whether it can be both at the
same time without contradiction or if it can only be art by breaking away from
the industry or, inversely, if as an industry it must renounce art. In short, the
question is to know if the freedom that is at the heart of artistic creation is
­viable in industrial creation. Bazin’s response, we know, is that cinema is im-
pure. I will say the same thing differently. I will say that the image that is most
at stake in cinema is the site of freedom for a gaze that chooses or does not
choose its own freedom. Art’s freedom and the industry’s constraints come to-
gether to make us responsible, in return, for the meaning that we wish to give
to ­visibilities. Tarkovsky’s films appeal to all our desires to see, to experience
pleasure, to think, to speak … What are we going to do about it? He made
a choice because for him, cinema is an industry that itself questions the desti-
ny of the gaze cast on its works. His films view cinema as an industry saved
by art, thus they view cinema as a major writing of history. He makes cine-
ma’s redemption operate in his treatment of the image, in his singular inscrip-
tion of the visible on a screen. The history of the world, is it or isn’t it a
shipwreck?
The cinematographic gesture only illuminates the iconic doctrine of the in-
carnation of which Tarkovksy’s vocation is the jubilant, necessary, and painful
consequence. I say painful and jubilant because the cinematographic adven-
ture is passionate, sacrificial but also resurrectional and full of hope. The gaze
is seized by the poetic enchantment and inconsolable anxiety of each image.
Each instant of darkness is fashioned by its own radiance, every word, every
sound is perceived in the singularity of a silence. In other words, no sign ap-
pears in its compactness to be an unequivocal thing but the alterity of its con-
tradiction passes tirelessly through it. And there is the great lesson of the
iconic incarnation: the meaning of what we see is in what is unseen,
Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 259

the meaning of what we hear is in what is unheard. The word in Greek, eikôn,
expresses well what the word imago lost in Latin: it concerns an indecisive and
unstable semblance, a resemblance to an absence, an object of uncertainty of-
fered up to opinion and judgment.
This commitment of incarnation to meaning, in the heart of the industry,
requires a return to the Christian device of incarnation. Cinema’s calling is not
an idolatry of the visible or an addiction to spectacle but rather, an uncondi-
tional loyalty to the word as it was defended and sustained in Orthodox spiri-
tuality by the church fathers, first Greek then Russian. This means that iconic
thought has offered, for the first time, a modern and secular possibility for re-
deeming the way we look at the world, through refusing a gluttonous con-
sumption of the visible. Now, cinema as a modern industry of mass spectacle
is precisely the art upon which falls the responsibility for either the freedom or
the enslavement of gazes, thoughts, and bodies. Making films thus engages all
filmmakers to be responsible for the meaning that is to be given to the adven-
ture of filmmaking worldwide. Is the visible a good to be consumed or the frag-
ile mystery of sharing in the sensory? Tarkovsky inscribes his filmmaking
gesture in the depth of this specifically political problematic where the term
political denotes the construction of a space shared by bodies speaking togeth-
er and desiring separately.
Philosophers have long considered images to be suspect or untrustworthy
and thus having no place or function in the city. Only language seemed capable
of bringing together those who were divided by their passions and intimate
desires. Sharing in a vision, the incarnation was the invention of a universality
of meaning. The question was thus that of finding the universal dimension of
the visible. What sort of visibility needed to be agreed upon to make the com-
munity of desires thinkable? The doctrinal response was as follows: the Son, as
the image of the Father, saved the image and returned dignity to the visible. To
be incarnated is to become image. To become image is thus to take on flesh.
When the Word was made flesh, it became image, and not body. Thus, all im-
ages celebrate the presence of a word in the absence of a body. A complex and
powerful response, since from that point on all image makers will give their
flesh to the Word. If not, they will give a body to idols and make the visible fall
back into a silence with no redemption, no sharing. The Passion is the story of
the redemption of the visible by the sacrifice of a body that consented to die so
that the image would be resuscitated, hence the flesh of the word. The image,
therefore, has a passionate, mortal, and resurrectional history. What is the im-
age? The universality of the visible is therefore founded not in the contents of
vision but in the meaning that is produced and shared by the community of
gazes cast upon the image. What does it mean to share a vision? By definition,
260 Mondzain

it will never mean reducing a multiplicity of living beings to a single organ’s

activity. Each has two eyes and none sees what another sees. So we will never
be able to agree on what we see in terms of a sharing; now, what do we share if
not language? Thus, in all images, or rather, in all visibility, agreement is
reached only through the invisibility of an audible or silent word, but in whose
name it’s understood that this multitude that sees together is a multitude of
speaking subjects who, through the incarnating image, hear meaning.
Tarkovsky’s films are radically faithful to this iconic doctrine and charge cin-
ema with making the word heard, that is, with producing the community of
meaning through the incarnation of the visible. But let it be clear that this
meaning is not in the image. Since I’ve dismissed hermeneutics, where is
meaning to be found? Where is its site?
A new laconic response: nowhere. Cinema makes the screen into a siteless
site, a place where meaning is not sheltered, a zone of turbulence, buffeted by
the winds of all desires.

Voice, Sounds

Let us pursue this doctrinal listening a little further to get closer to the weaving
together of iconic and sound signs, because in these films, the shot is defined
not visually but temporally. The shot is constructed in the spatial exigency of
listening, and it expands not in space but in time. Like the musician who in-
scribes his movements in the singular architecture that welcomes a line of
sound. The camera can remain motionless and the space given to the gaze can
expand progressively, growing bigger, unable to end. The operations of the vis-
ible seem to want to give the word to eternity, not as the promise of a world
that is outside the world, but in the cinematographic stakes of the world’s be-
ing present to itself in each moment. Homage given to the act of being born in
each appearing of things and bodies.
If to show is to be heard, then what sort of nature do voices have? How do
they circulate? In the iconic tradition, the voice that announces, like the voice
that designates, is a voice that authenticates the visible as an index stretched
out toward the image. In icons, this is called épigraphé, the inscription of the
name being the sign of the voice that authenticates the contract between the
visible and meaning’s invisibility. This is why the annunciation, and all an-
nouncing positions of messenger and conveyor, is a site of creation. The voice
that designates and the index that shows, address the ear and eyes. This ad-
dress releases not a message, but rather, the name of a breath, a direction. The
voice that announces the womb’s fertility from which the image will emerge,
Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 261

the annunciating voice that belongs to Abraham’s three visitors, the voice of
John the precursor—these voices all announce the arrival of an awaited figure.
In Tarkovsky’s films, there is a strange distance between voices and noises. I
must confess that as I do not know Russian, I suffer through the subtitles, not
only because poetic translation is by itself nothing but a buttress, but more
because reading deprives me of the incarnational power of the voice. So much
so that in re-watching the films I no longer read the subtitles so as to stay in the
epiphany of sound.
We might believe that human voices are closer to speech than noises. Here,
it is entirely otherwise. The world and nature are buzzing with words and
meanings that human ears cannot hear or can no longer hear, but these hu-
mans speak and make speeches that all more or less make a mess of the word;
“Words! words! words!” we hear in Sacrifice, resounding as well in Stalker, a
desperate exclamation taken from Shakespeare. Words are not the Word. They
are idols, idolatrous signs. This is why the ear enters image as the organ abso-
lutely representative of the cinematographic gesture. From the profile or from
behind, a body can no longer fall victim to the abyss that could turn into a face.
Poetry resonates thus as a reminder of the power of the word in another art,
that of writing. But Tarkovsky does not write when he films, he incarnates the
voice of things and of bodies. The voice falls, explodes, swoops down on those
who welcome the word, this word that falls in the snow and not as snow, that
patters in the rain, the voice that breathes through the wind and not as the
wind, the voice that issues forth from machines, motors, sliding into footsteps,
under tires, into the explosion of falling glass, the voice flowing with rivers,
streaming with milk, rippling with seaweed. The word is an energy spread out
through all of nature. In the world of the most ordinary things and objects,
everything murmurs or utters a sign that our ears must learn to gather, a sign
whose desire and mourning are enunciated at the same time by human speech.
The soundtrack makes the image tremble and the voices of the actors tell of
the tearing apart of language when it turns into the desire of the word attained
by meaning. The sounds of the world are not metaphors but are seized by the
incarnation itself the way the image was announced and took on flesh the mo-
ment the visible came together with words. We’re talking here about the word
whose attentive listening and whose trace of visibility are inscribed by the
icon. The poetic word of the poet father, Arsenei, refers back to the voice of the
father who legitimates the visibility of a son and the iconic productivity of his
hands. In this space where messages are sent and received, art is at once a love
letter and hospitality.
262 Mondzain

Hospitality-Exile, Hebrew Loyalty

I said earlier that the site of meaning was siteless and constructed by the word
breathing through all things. The movement and circulation of visual and
sound signs institute, despite everything, a space, even if its geometry is fragile
and unstable. This space is that of the image on the screen, a tenuous space,
breakable, a sort of seismic soil no one can stand in without difficulty. One
walks in it zigzagging, bent over, limping, bumping into things; one falls, one
designs trajectories in all directions of the space, spaces of remarkable clumsi-
ness, fugitive wavering, be it aerial or aquatic. It is a space made of imbalances,
falls, and shipwrecks as well as flight. The space has no limit, no weight, and
can at any given moment swell up or empty out. It is a space that asks us what
it means to stand up. It is not a matter of holding onto a place, but onto oneself,
which can only take place in a state of continuous mobility. All stopping threat-
ens collapse. In an infinity in which each appearance produces incertitude, in
this cosmic extension of expectations and catastrophes, people move accord-
ing to the measure of their bodies, of their steps. The step is like a word, genera­
tor of humanity. How to produce meaning in such an unassignable topology?
In a way, no solitude can respond. Nowhere does meaning ever belong to any-
one. Meaning is not in the image, nor in a place, no more than any one of us
occupies a place that can truly be ours. Life is only an uninterrupted displace-
ment, an unceasing game of displacements between sites where nothing can
reside, settle, find comfortable rest, a sleep of the spirit, but where the word
produces, despite everything, hospitality, a temporary address. We are exiled
from our first cry on, separated from our land of birth. Accessing language and
arriving at speech are intrinsically founded on the ordeal of separation and
sacrifice. We must leave to speak, walk to hear, cross in order to comprehend.
No refuge, no rest, memory offers its treasures only to desire, to the one who
keeps walking, never to satisfaction and assuagement. Never a seat, no one
ever sits. Desire’s place is itself placeless, not utopic. Thus, it is also impossible
to assimilate this work’s imaginary into a Christian imaginary because salva-
tion is not in the city of God, somewhere else, but here and now in each instant
of desire’s extreme tension. On this itinerant trajectory of insatiable desire, the
face of exile and the traveler are indivisible from the face of hospitality. Be-
cause the films of Tarkovsky are constructed as a land in which all of humanity
is welcomed, even though he himself only ever knew exile everywhere (I say
everywhere because the birth home, like the maternal bosom, like roots, is sim-
ply memory’s flowers, nostalgias inherent to the wandering of all life). Nothing
is more Hebrew in this fidelity to exile and invisibility than this uninterrupted
homage to gestures of hospitality. Coming from and staying far away is the only
Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 263

way to let freedom and alterity occur. Inevitable melancholy of a restless work
that offers no rest. The voice and the image speak infinitely of the disposses-
sion and disappearance of all influence. All things exist only in the flesh of the
image and in the present vibration of voices and sounds. Hospitality is there-
fore not a biblical allegory meant to present Messianism, and even less so the
dogmatism of a Trinitarian theology. As we know, the famous icon of Rublev
entitled Trinity is first an icon of the hospitality of Abraham. I think that in
Tarkovsky, the trinity refers to two things: wandering and hospitality. In Rublev
Trinitarian hospitality constructs the space of welcome for all words and im-
ages. The trinity begins where hospitality does. Cinema, as a land of welcome,
a work open to the freedom of encounters, can only produce the image of
some third party, some other that designates the viewer as the third site of an
address that the creator and the image he offers need in order to find the site of
return. As Godard said one day, “making images is to give them but also to re-
ceive them.” Tarkovsky creates films that make us respond on our part through
images that we produce in the other’s gaze. Be nowhere, possess nothing, give
everything—this is what the three visitors of Rublev’s icon announce. In real-
ity, there are six persons: three are visible, messengers from the invisible world,
three angels stopping and sharing a meal, but this meal is served by two hosts
who are invisible in the icon, learning from their strange visitors that they will
be the progenitors of a belated child, Isaac. That is, a human family: a father, a
mother, and a child, a triangle outside the declarative field. Beneath our eyes
are the figures of their welcome, the Trinitarian figure of the annunciation—
they came as three to speak. This is what cinema does, rendering not only the
visible but also the invisible, all the Trinitarian inclusions that support the im-
age outside its frame. The mediation of announcing voices institutes an infi-
nite triangulation demanded by all the effect of meaning. As in the encounter
on the road to Emmaus, there must be three to be able to share the table of
meaning. The power of the third is also that of the word—between what one
sees and what all must hear.
What is art? What is producing a gaze if not the gathering together of the
innumerable multiplicity of visions given to all eyes and the production of a
common meaning in a shareable space? By which I mean that the symbolic
power of the image obeys not the logic of some excluded other, a binary logic
that belongs to the discourse of truth, but rather the proposal of an included
other. If the image is undecidable it is precisely because it does not submit to
any disjunction between true and false, good and evil, beautiful and ugly. It
­allows life to happen and waits for the choices we make in our freedom. The
logos of the flesh, the flesh of the word, is in keeping with the logic of the in-
cluded other, neither god nor man, visible nor invisible, immortal nor mortal,
264 Mondzain

but all those at the same time. Which means that art, as Hannah Arendt said,
has nothing to do with truth, but has as its only concern the production of
meaning from within a community.
What can living subjects share with each other if not a certain tonality, an
intensive grandeur of the present? Each life withdraws to the solitude of its
intimate losses and singular griefs. No one can share the wound. What can we
share in a common space, in a circumscribed time? Images and voices: images
sustained by voice, a space woven through the sensible’s moving through it, a
space in which the visible and the sonorous make up the chain and the uncer-
tain, fragile fabric.

Trinity, or Sending the Letter to the Other

Coming three-strong to bear witness to a hope—that’s what Leonardo tried to

do in his Adoration of the Magi. But at the anniversary feast of the Sacrifice,
one of the three men, Otto, neither doctor nor writer, bearer of the news, mes-
senger, says that Leonardo frightens him. He prefers Fra Angelico, whose an-
nouncement is inhabited by the word. It is easier to pass from Rublev to Fra
Angelico than to Leonardo. Tarkovsky shows us that a da Vinci does not speak
as much as it ought to, perhaps. Too much theory, too much fantasy? Isn’t it the
same elsewhere? The trinity is the structure of the cinematographic gesture.
The image incarnates space in all of its mediations.
Ternarity is the structure of all circulation of signs, of all production of
meaning. The messaging function, the operation of announcement, the ser-
vice of sent letters, messaging systems, be they interplanetary from Solaris or
intersubjective, are all the same. The abyss that separates us from each other is
as vast as the emptiness that separates stars. The irreducibility of intersubjec-
tive distances can only be resolved through the crafting of messaging systems,
of epistolary exchanges. I want to evoke here two occurrences of the letter in
contemporary art that are close to Tarkovsky. The first because it is a Russian
example, the other because it is a cinematographic example. On the one hand,
“Corner-to-Corner Correspondence,” on the other, Godard in “To Alter the Im-
age.” A film is a letter, a dispatch without a specific addressee, because it is a
letter written to history.
The crossing of signs invents the fictional space where meaning is formed.
In a 1920 text entitled “Corner-to-Corner Correspondence,” two great intellec-
tuals share a room in a Bolshevik sanatorium. One is a Christian poet with an
inclination toward Platonism. The other is a Jewish historian with a Nietzs-
chean sensibility. Outside, it’s Soviet Russia, revolution, destitution, and the
Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 265

utopia of a new world. What will they share? A room, without speaking to each
other? Oratorical jousts where the contradictions of their respective cultural
heritages will clash? Everything divides them, everything identifies them; the
room could just as well become a Bolshevik trap that closes in on the spiritual
impotence of great spirits confronted with a situation that is crushing, con-
crete. A prefiguration of the gulag. Mikhail Gershenson and Vyacheslav Ivanov
came up with a solution to give this imprisonment, this house arrest, this
forced cohabitation a form of freedom: They wrote letters to each other, a cor-
respondence from one corner of the room to the other that produced the invis-
ible diagonal of community. The fiction of an infinite separation became the
weaving together of a space both living and very real, the space of an exchange
of signs. They created—together—the stage and the screen, the screen, invis-
ible, as the stage of life itself. Thus, neither fusion (leave one’s corner to join the
other in his), nor rupture (silence and pretending the other corner doesn’t ex-
ist), but linkage through words and signs turned toward a far-off destination,
an unknown horizon because the site of the other is unattainable. They in-
vented an other: the text is there, legible between them and for us, henceforth,
as a letter that they continue to send us and that we continue to receive. The
diagonal of the room produces the symbolic triangulation. It’s why I will also
evoke the voice of Jean-Luc Godard saying, in a short film on television: “All
text is a text to the beloved, be it Saint Theresa of Avila, or Marx and Engels, it
is a text to the beloved.” In the same film he reminds us that meaning is not in
the image, but between images, invisible but immanent to the weaving together
of what is visible.
Giving the form of a dispatch, an address, to the circulation of signs is so
strongly inscribed in the films of Tarkovsky that each time that his faces turn
toward the horizon that confronts them, or toward an other, the napes of their
necks and their gazes pivot on an invisible axis that is none other than this in-
finite diagonal of address. The visible is the construction of a veil upon which
we see meaning from behind. No one ever turns his back to us, we walk to-
gether toward the same unknown destination because we know only the nape
of truth, never its face. Two biblical texts established this retroversion of the
gaze: in Exodus, the vision of Moses, to whom God refuses his face but lets his
back be seen; in Genesis, Noah’s sons, who approach their naked father to cov-
er up his nudity while veiled and walking backward. The screen, as I’ve said, is
not a jewel box of meaning, the chest in which a secret is stored—it is the veil
upon which meaning is inscribed, the surface that offers itself up to be read.
The screen is the plane in which the veiled appearance of meaning is inscribed.
266 Mondzain

The Mirror of No Return

Memory, and in memory, all that are called “memories,” does not rely on cita-
tions of what has been but is no longer, anymore than it does on referring to
what is known, read, understood, stored, and more or less conserved, but rath-
er, to the contrary, its support is like an intimate disrupting of all past refer-
ence, a disruption at the heart of the most violent shock, a shock imprinted by
the present. All horizontality of a temporality spun in a linear fashion is
abruptly recaptured vertically. Memory is itself marked by the seal of dispos-
session but in memory a capital gesture is played out: not the transmission of
meaning, but the desire of meaning, meaning as the voice of desire. Maintain-
ing the heat and light of a flame in the darkness of broad daylight, that is the
cinematographic gesture, the script that underlies all scripts. It’s why nostalgia
is never regret, a movement of retention and the evocation of what is absent,
but rather an incarnation, in the remnant’s present face, of what is no longer.
In all that is present at each moment, a reading of traces and the sacrifice of
control take place. To burn, to set aflame is to submit to the fire of all catastro-
phes the desire to possess, to worship the signs themselves idolatrously. Every-
thing that can be consumed, must be consumed. The idols of certainty are the
ruins we leave behind in this landscape of ashes, water and wind welcoming
breath, and the spirit’s living, even vivifying, uncertainties.
From the beginning, speaking about mystery makes me think about Paul’s
prodigious expression in the first letter to the Corinthians that qualifies our
present gaze into truth, in which he says that we only see the truth in this world
“dimly, as in a mirror” (blépômen gar arti di’esoptron en ainigmati). A mirror
that does not double the world but enigmatically directs the gaze into a dis-
similar space, of another nature. It is about conceiving cinema as this enig-
matic mirror of the world’s truth. Cinema is an art of the real but it is the
real that comes back with cinema as its starting, not ending point. The films of
Tarkovsky include the mirror’s operations in their Trinitarian, or if one prefers,
ternary, structure. While the mirror can become a completely ­binary specular
operator whose identifying effects are linked, in the fable of Narcissus, to illu-
sory and deadly effects, the Pauline mirror, like the cinematographic mirror,
thwarts all fusional reconciliation. This is the mirror that can also be called
Augustinian as it is by its light that Augustine sees the manifestation of the
trinity. The mirror is not an instrument of specular duplication but the abso-
lute operator of alterity—all reflection is an image of the other. It is about
­seeing, in the mirror plane, the overturning of the spaces between a subject’s
real body confronting the mirror, and the intangible image of the desiring
­subject meeting the other in the mirror. Now, cinema is entirely caught up in
Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 267

this beat, this incessant pulsation of body and flesh, image and text, same and
other.
The mirror is the operator not of a coextensivity between the world and its
reflection, but of the overflowing of the immeasurable.
There is more in this world than can possibly be reflected in a mirror, but
there is more in the mirror’s signs than can possibly be shown by the world.
The excessiveness of meaning in relation to the frame recalls what the Greek
Fathers said about the image. They said that the limited womb of the Virgin
had contained the Word, that the finite had thus been the container of the in-
finite, that the content was infinitely larger than the body that welcomed it.
They called the Virgin a “mirror without blemish.” So I think of Tarkovsky’s
hands lifted up in space to his face, delimiting before his eyes, between the
thumb and the palm, the frame in which he will bring forth the infinity of the
visible, the invisibility of the word. I cannot forget this gesture, captured dur-
ing the filming of Sacrifice, in which he constructs the space where the word
would be inscribed in time. Framing the infinite.
In effect, it is in terms of excess that we must understand the distance that
forever separates what we see from what we say, what we say from what we see.
The world exceeds signs and signs exceed the world. This incommensurability
of signs and the world hollows out the infinite in the depths of works that des-
ignate the world through signs and submit it to the freedom of these signs. This
is why the films of Tarkovsky are in a certain sense irreducible to analysis.
Each element of nature, each gesture, each skull, surges forth like a proper
name, never generically or conceptually. I won’t say that it rains in Tarkovksky’s
films but with every rain, in every rain, every drop bursts in an insistent and
singular way, exploding like a cry on the edge of the world’s lips, in order to say
something that has not yet been said and that won’t be said again, perhaps
ever. The question is posed again in each surface: How do this image and its
sound produce an irreplaceable temporality? If at each moment all of human-
ity is in danger, threatened with extinction, then cinema bears today a crush-
ing responsibility: either it should help us live together, sharing the image and
the word, or it should serve barbarity and promote the idolatry of the visible.
Tarkovsky’s films testify to his choosing a cinema that desires life.