Movies - The Sacrifice

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	Movies - The Sacrifice

The film The Sacrifice ("Offret") by Andrei Tarkovsky, (Sweden, 1986) was the final film from Andrei Tarkovsky. He died of cancer shortly after completing it.

Plot

The synopsis is deceptively short: Alexander, an aging psychologist/writer (Erland Josephson) with a younger actress wife, a teenage daughter and a young son (who is referred to as "Little Man" in the film, and is mute throughout the film except for the last shots) experiences the end of the world, a nuclear holocaust. This reflected the mood of the times, but this film did it with more subtlety than the US film The Day After. In despair the protagonist promises to sacrifice all he loves if only the terrible feat can be undone and to this end sleeps with a local woman whom he believes to be a witch. When he wakes up the next morning everything seems "normal", but whether Alexander dreamt the whole episode, it is never made explicit. Nevertheless, Alexander sets forth to give up all he loves and possesses, burning his house and being driven off to an institution.

The film is more accessible than much of Tarkovsky's earlier work and features a haunting soundtrack which has three distinct pieces that stand out: The passionate aria Erbarme dich from Johann Sebastian Bach's Mattheus Passion, soothing Japanese flute music, and eerie traditional chants from the Swedish forests (in the old days farm girls used to call home the livestock from their forest pastures in this way). The film also contains several long closeups of Leonardo da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi. The camera work is slow and superb and contains all the hallmarks of Tarkovsky's and Nykvist's combined skill. In the face of death Tarkovsky left the world with his conviction laid down in this film, that it is the lack of spiritual values that threatens our existence. Poignantly, the first words the little boy in the film utters, in the final shot, are: "In the beginning was the word...why is that, papa?"

Production notes

The film reflects Tarkovsky's respect for the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (a respect which was mutual) and since it was set in Sweden (on the island of Gotland) and featured Bergman's favourite cameraman Sven Nykvist and one of Bergman's most well known actors Erland Josephson (both also featured in Tarkovsky's previous film Nostalghia), it has a distinct Bergmanesque feel to it.

This film used long takes more than his previous films. The opening, post credits shot (a tracking shot of Alexander, Little Man, and Otto talking and walking) lasts 9 minutes and 26 seconds. It is the longest take in all of Tarkovsky's work. Shot lasting up from 6-8 minutes are commonplace in the film. There are only 115 shots in the entire film. Most of the film takes place inside or around a house that was specially built for the production. The climactic scene at the end of the film is a long tracking shot in which Alexander burns his house and his possessions. It was done in a single, 6 minute, 50 second take (there is a mistake some commentators make that this was the longest shot that Tarkovsky ever shot. This is untrue.) It is justifiably one of Tarkovsky's most famous shots. But it was very difficult to achieve. Intially, there was only one camera used, despite Sven Nykist's protest. On the day of filming for this scene, while the house was burning, the film cameras jammed, making the footage unusable (this disaster is documented in the documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky). It was decided that the scene would be reshot, requiring a quick (and very costly) reconstruction of the house in a mere 2 weeks. This time 2 cameras were set up on tracks, running parallel to each other. The footage in the final version of the film is the second take, which lasts for several minutes and ends abruptly because the camera had run through an entire reel in capturing the single shot. The cast and crew broke down in tears after the take was completed.

It won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1986.

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