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A second look: Tarkovsky and Feminism: a second look at Nostalghia.

Article Excerpt
Most people don't look for men and women in Andrei Tarkovsky's films; they look for allegories and symbols despite Tarkovsky's repeated insistence that his work contains neither of these. (1) Because it has been widely agreed upon that Tarkovsky adheres to mystical misogyny, critics tend to close their eyes and ears when it looks or sounds like he might be trying to say something about male/ female, emotional/sexual relationships. Tarkovsky nevertheless has things to show us about these kinds of relationships that are every bit as subtle, nuanced, and profound as what we see in Bergman or Cassavetes.

There are three characters in Nostalghia (1983), and two of them, whether their words indicate it or not, are a man and a woman whose every conversation is about their feelings for one another, and their feelings for one another are heavily entrenched in their conflicting ideas about appropriate and inappropriate behavior for a person of one or the other gender. The superficial view of Nostalghia provides a facile interpretation of the two principal characters. Eugenia is a Jezebel, an unrepentant temptress who doesn't understand spiritual matters because feminism has corrupted her into abandoning them to pursue earthly rewards. Andrei is the misunderstood and long-suffering noble artist who is unaffected by her advances because of the strength of his spiritual convictions. Moreover, this characterization should reveal Tarkovsky's own deeply held beliefs, in which Man plays the role of the suffering artist and Woman without Child is utterly lost. Tarkovsky says as much in his diaries, "What is the purpose of Woman? Humiliation in the service of Love." Since it comes from his journals, it must be true, and this fact allows us to see every characterization of a woman in Tarkovsky's work as an embodiment of his sexism. Armed with this information, the figure that emerges from the carpet is misogyny, and the critic can neatly conclude that Tarkovsky hates women and therefore is on the wrong side, against all of us who are committed to women's rights.

There are two problems with using journals as evidence. First, they are not necessarily indicative of the artist's beliefs. I write a lot of things in my journal that I only believed for a fleeting moment, as if I thought writing it down would help me decide whether or not it was really true. Second, perhaps it was true when Tarkovsky wrote it in 1974, but when he made Nostalghia between 1979 and 1981, the possibility that he changed his mind by then should be considered. Both of these facts amount to the same thing: trust the tale and not the teller. If we are going to use Tarkovsky's diaries as the key to understanding his films, we are going to be left with some fairly commonplace insights and some very convoluted and vague meanings.

Tarkovsky's films are enjoying a lot of critical interest right now, and one can easily get the impression from all the scholarship that the subject of women in these films embarrasses scholars who otherwise praise Tarkovsky's genius. His "attitudes" about women, it would seem, are not what one should watch his movies for. Jonathan Rosenbaum, in...