Sacrifice as Necessity and the Ascetic Principle of Filmmaking: Andrei Tarkovsky Reconsidered

This article focuses on sacrifice as a necessity and as an ascetic principle of the artistic process of creation. Examining the thought of Andrei Tarkovsky and the ways in which it manifests in his films, the article focuses on two concepts: ascetic iconography and sacrifice. In investigating the concept of sacrifice, not as intellectualised exercise but rather as a creative, authentic act, this article argues that sacrifice as necessity is an ascetic principle. This principle involves self-sacrificial life, which is visibly manifested through iconographic language, shaped by ascetic experience, whose final aim is to invite the observer into an active state-of-being (as being-with), the participation in historical–ontological reality in the eternal presence of God. The inverse perspective of ascetic language centralises the human being, one’s heart, as the foci point for metanoia – sacrifice – the circumcision. The transformation of the heart offers a radically new experience of reality and consequently humanity. A similar linguistic–experiential principle is applied in the film language of Andrei Tarkovsky whose originality, which though cannot be “decoded,” can be examined closer in the light of the ascetic iconographic tradition that moulded him, as well as his cultural context, influencing greatly the film language of many other notable film artists, including Sergei Eisenstein. For Andrei Tarkovsky (self) sacrifice was the only possible manifestation of ontological freedom, the state of joyful sorrow, in man’s striving for eternal love. Tarkovsky’s thought is inseparable from its iconographic tradition in the sense of “seeing the world by denying oneself.”