"He was the most important director of our time." - Ingmar Bergman

LOVE AND SACRIFICE
by Andrey Tarkovsky

It is obvious to everyone that humankind's material aggrandizement has not been synchronous with spiritual progress. The point has been reached where we seem to have a fatal incapacity for mastering our material achievements in order to use them for our own good. We have created a civilization which threatens to annihilate humankind. In the face of disaster on that global scale, the one issue that has to be raised, it seems to me, is the question of our own personal responsibility, and our willingness for sacrifice, without which we cease to be spiritual beings in any real sense.

I mean that spirit of sacrifice which must constitute the essential and natural way of life of potentially every human being" not something to be regarded as a misfortune or punishment imposed from without. I mean the spirit of sacrifice which is expressed in the voluntary service of others, taken on naturally as the only viable form of existence.

And yet in the world today personal relationships are all too often based on the urge to grab as much as possible from the next person as we jealously protect our own interests. The paradox of such a situation is that the more we humiliate our fellow-man and fellow-woman, the less satisfied we feel and the greater our isolation becomes. Such is the price for our failing to turn, of our own free choice, to the heroic path of our own human fulfillment, accepting it with our whole heart and will as the one true way and the only thing we desire.

Anything less than such total acceptance will exacerbate the conflict between the individual and society; a man or woman will see society as the agency of a violence done to him or her.

We are witnessing the decline of the spiritual while the material long ago developed into an organism with its own bloodstream, and became the basis of our lives, paralyzed and riddled with sclerosis. It is clear to everyone that material progress doesn't in itself make people happy, but all the same we go on fanatically multiplying its "achievements". We have reached the point where, as Stalker says (editor's note: in the director's film of the same name), the present has essentially merged with the future, in the sense that it contains all the preconditions for immanent disaster; we recognize this and yet we can do nothing to stop it happening.

The connection between our behavior and our destiny has been destroyed; and this tragic breach is the cause of our sense of instability in the modern world. Essentially, of course, what we do is of cardinal importance; but this is because we have been conditioned into the belief that nothing depends on our own personal experience, and that what we do will not affect the future. We have arrived at the false and deadly assumption that we have no part to play in shaping our own fate.

TO BE CONTINUED




A note about the author:
Andrey Tarkovsky was born in Russia in 1932. He was the son of the poet Arseniy Tarkovsky. He attended and graduated from the All Union Institute of Cinematography in 1961. Over the years his films won many international prizes. His first feature, Ivan's Childhood, won the first prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1962. His second film, Andrey Rublyov, won an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966. His subsequent works, Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1974), and Stalker (1979), have been received in the West with critical acclaim. While filming Nostalgia in Italy in 1983, Tarkovsky decided not to return to the Soviet Union. His final film, The Sacrifice, won the Jury's Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. Tarkovsky died of cancer in Paris in December 1986.


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