DVD Review - Nostalghia (1983)

There are very few people worthy of the accolade of “Genius” but the late Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky was definitely one of them. In his film-making career he is responsible for some of the most beautiful images ever to be put on a cinema screen.

This was Tarkovsky’s first film made outside the Soviet Union (and his first in a language other than Russian), but it is still very obviously a Tarkovsky film, complete with many haunting images of water and fire. In fact, instead of the beautiful, sun-drenched Italy we are used to seeing on film, here the country is grey, wet and shrouded in mist. As usual in Tarkovsky’s films there are many changes between colour footage and black-and-white (or sepia). Here, the poet’s memories of Russia are presented in monochrome.

Into the mix of things we also get a dose of the mystical, supplied here by the character of Domenico, another tortured soul who’s back-story involves keeping his family hostage for a prolonged number of years under fear that the world would end. Domenico, like Gortchakov (and indeed, Tarkovsky), is another one of those haunted souls, inhabiting an earth they don’t really understand, whilst questioning their place in the world and the world within the cosmos.

Art is translatable. Poetry can be written in pictures just like how movie subtitles are justified. Visually translated feelings, and emotions evoked through moving images are all legitimate. The nostalgia that we obtain from this film which was translated from the director’s is nevertheless genuine.