KREIDER + O’LEARY

Gorchakov’s Wish

Gorchakov’s Wishby Kreider + O’Leary

Published by:Unnameable PressLondon 2014www.unnameable.org

Copyright © Kreider + O’Learywww.kreider-oleary.net

Design: Kreider + O’LearyFonts: Garamond, Optima, Calibri

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available in the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-908602-12-1

Cover image:‘Tree’ Kreider + O’Leary 2009

Rear Cover image:Video Still from ‘Fall (An Allegory) II’ Kreider + O’Leary 2009

Kreider + O’Leary

Gorchakov’s Wish

Contents

4

Prologue..........................................................................07

Beneath the Furnace, the Ash: The Making of Gorchakov’s Wish

Gorchakov’s Wish...........................................................29

.............................................................................................

I. Parrhesia

i ii iii iv

v

II. Allegory

1 2 3 4 5

III. Elegy

5

6

Prologue

7

Beneath the Furnace, the Ash

Reflections on the Making of Gorchakov’s Wish

Poetic, profound and technically masterful – complex in both medium and message – the work of acclaimed Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) speaks eloquently and directly to a wide audience around issues central to the human condition. Increasingly, it has also become the focus of academic and artistic debate. Introducing his recently edited collection of essays entitled Tarkovsky (2008), film critic Nathan Dunne describes how, over the course of a 25 year career, Tarkovsky generated only seven feature films and three short student films, “yet his body of work stands out as one of the most significant in the history of the moving image.”1 Testament to this, recent years have seen marked rise of interest in Tarkovsky’s work, with Dunne’s publication joining Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (2008) by Robert Bird and Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrey Tarkovsky (2006) by Gunnlaugur A. Jónsson and Thorkell Á. Óttarsson’s as recent examples of scholarship in English on Tarkovsky. Such publications explore, to borrow Dunne’s words, the “potentialities for research on Tarkovsky’s corpus”2 – an

exploration taken up not just by academics, but also by artists. Indeed, the relationship between Tarkovksy’s film work and contemporary art practice formed the basis of a symposium held at the Tate Modern entitled ‘The Art of Andrei Tarkovsky’ (May 2008).3 Clearly, the work of Tarkovsky is proving to have a significant place in, and influence on, contemporary culture.

Arguably, the potentialities inherent in Tarkovsky’s ouvre for film and film studies – and, we suggest, for contemporary video art and site-related practices – have their basis in his theory and practice of the ‘film image’. Tarkovsky’s specific understanding of the film image is articulated in his collection of writings Sculpting in Time (1986) and evidenced in his film work. A vital and complex element of his cinema, and key to its uniqueness, Tarkovsky’s film image warrants exploration.

Working together as Kreider + O’Leary, we have spent the past three years investigating Tarkovsky’s theory and practice of the film image through academic research and writing as well as through our collaborative and

8Fig. 1. Window overlooking the Santa Catarina Pool; page from Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids (2004).

9

interdisciplinary creative practice.4 In doing so, we have engaged with those aspects of Tarkovsky’s film image that make it unique, such as an emphasis on time and the ‘rhythm’ of the film image; the relationship between the film image and place; and Tarkovsky’s signature syntax of the long take and tracking shot. We have also engaged with other – lesser explored – aspects that likewise contribute to the overall generation of meaning in Tarkovsky’s film image. This includes the symbolic properties of the poetic image as well as the material properties, design and construction of a particular location or place. As a poet and architect, respectively, we were drawn toward the complexity of meaning in Tarkovsky’s film image and, in an effort to expose – and exploit – its wider potential, we generated a number of works culminating in Gorchakov’s Wish.

Gorchakov’s Wish is a split-screen video piece comprised of three parts, with each section reflecting our engagement, respectively, with the final three scenes of Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia (1983). These three sections of the video piece Gorchakov’s Wish correspond with a poetic text that acts partly as a score and partly as a reflection of and on the project. A DVD of the video piece as well as the corresponding poetic text are all included in this book, and what follows here is a description of works generated at various stages throughout the project that informed and, ultimately, realised Gorchakov’s Wish.

*

‘Cinema lives by its capacity to resurrect the same event on the screen time after time – by its very nature it is, so to speak,

nostalgic.’

– Andrei Tarkovsky5

We took as our starting point for the project Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia and, specifically, the penultimate scene of this film. In conversation with the actor Oleg Yankovsky, who portrayed the poet Gorchakov in Nostalghia, Tarkovsky described his intention that the scene display an “entire human life in one shot, without any editing, from beginning to end, from birth to the very moment of death.”6 In case of success, he told Yankovsky, “the act may be the true meaning of my life. It certainly will be the finest shot I ever made – if you do it, if you endure to the end.”7 Yankovsky endured, so Tarkovsky succeeded in filming one of the most celebrated shots in the history of cinema: a single extended take and tracking shot that follows Gorchakov as he carries a lit candle across the drained expanse of the Santa Catarina Pool; a ritualistic act after which, his heart failing, the poet falls. The pool, a natural thermal spring in the Tuscan hillside village of Bagno Vignoni, is emptied for this shot, but still steaming, thus infusing the film image with a vaporous atmosphere through which through which one observes, over a period of nine minutes and four seconds, the pool and the protagonist, whilst contemplating the symbolic meaning of this journey with

10Fig. 2 A spark to begin.

11

the candle.

With this scene as an initial site for our creative and critical investigation into the film image, we engaged with its phenomenological, syntactic and semiotic properties in order to unpack their significance. In doing so, the film-image – our ‘site’ – became displaced through our particular spatio-temporal context; transformed through our methods and means of materializing it; and translated through a pansemiotic combination of image, object, action and text.

*

‘An image is not a certain meaning … but the entire world reflected as in a drop of water.’

– Andrei Tarkovsky8

The first piece of work generated in relation to the project was ‘Alba Lunedì’. Shot on location at the Santa Catarina pool in Bagno Vignoni, this piece reflects our attempt to re-enact the penultimate scene from Nostalghia. How might a shift ‘behind the scenes’, or the screen, of Tarkovsky’s film image and into the original location of the film shoot offer some insight into its construction and meaning? In our attempt to answer this question, we set out at dawn on 28th April, 2009 in order to re-perform Gorchakov’s walk across the – not so empty, somewhat steaming – pool. We recorded our re-enactment through an

improvised tracking shot (i.e. an 8mm film camera held by one of us while walking alongside the other). At the very last minute we also decided to set up a tripod at the far end of the pool in order to record the act our re-enactment. This documentary footage proved compelling, both aesthetically and conceptually, and ultimately became the video piece ‘Alba Lunedì’.

What this video piece offers – silent, but for the birds; still, but for the gliding of two figures waist-deep in sky – is less the restoration of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia than a reflection of our own desire for it. A reflection that produces its own image and, with this, our own meaning. We thus drew from ‘Alba Lunedì’ a recognition of the inherent distance and difference between Tarkovksy’s original film image and our own work relating to it. Alongside this, we came to appreciate that such an elliptical space – filled with potential – as that which we would henceforth inhabit in the project.

*

‘Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.’

– Andrei Tarkovsky9

Operating in this space between Tarkovksy’s work and our own, we developed two further works: ‘Fall (An Allegory) I’, performed live; and ‘Fall (An Allegory) II’, performed in-studio for video using a filming technique

12Fig. 3. Filming ‘Alba Lunedì’.

13

that emulated Tarkovsky’s stylistics of the long take and tracking shot. Our overall intention with these works was to explore the symbolic meaning of Tarkovksy’s film image, whilst generating new meaning in relation to this through our own creative practice.

As mentioned above, Tarkovsky describes the penultimate scene in Notalghia as “displaying an entire human life in one shot, without any editing, from beginning to end, from birth to the very moment of death.”10 He is, of course, metaphorically speaking; however, one is able to recognize this metaphor in the guise of the flame carried by Gorchakov. “The flame is an image of life,” writes Gaston Bachelard in Poetics of Space, “a living substance, a poeticizing substance … an image of life which consumes but surprisingly rejuvenates itself.”11 Following Bachelard, the flame in Nostalghia can be viewed as a life continually threatened with extinction by the blustering wind that circles around Gorchakov’s palm throughout the course of his journey. The poet is charged with the task of protecting the vulnerable flame, ‘keeping the flame alive’ throughout his venture across the pool. We wanted, however, to see the film image and poet’s task in a different – more refracted – light: one akin to that which the philosopher Juhanii Pallasmaa sheds on Tarkovsky when he writes, in an essay entitled ‘Space and Image in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia: Notes on a Phenomenology of Architecture’, that “[t]he many images present in Nostalgia are not intended to be symbols but rather emotional miniatures, riddles that

vainly seek their own explanation.”12 In search of this further complexity, we decided to ‘translate’ Tarkovsky’s film image into an allegory of representation.13

We did so by first dividing the scene with Gorchakov and the candle into five component parts, each based on actions that occur throughout: Gorchakov lighting the candle; Gorchakov touching the wall to begin the journey; the candle going out for the first time, his journey beginning again; the candle going out for the second time, his journey beginning again; the poet falling, after having made it across the pool with the lit candle. We then corresponded each part to a ‘stage’ (in the first iteration of new work) or ‘station’ (in the second iteration of work), assigning each ‘stage’ or ‘station’ a pansemiotic combination of image, object, action and text. Although we were working intuitively while devising these works, in retrospect we can conceive of this entire process as one that refracts – or, perhaps better, fragments – the symbolic unity of Tarkovsky’s original film image through an ‘allegorical’ script.

*

“The first half of the film will probably be set in Bagno Vignoni. But not in the real place – in an invented one …

I shall have to recreate the atmosphere of the place in detail.”

– Andrei Tarkovsky14

As discussed, the penultimate scene of Nostalghia

14 14Fig. 4. Performing ‘Fall (An Allegory) II’.

15

15 15

is constructed through a single extended take and tracking shot follows the protagonist, the poet Gorchakov, as he enacts a ritualistic performance carrying a lit candle across the expanse of the Santa Caterina Pool. On the one hand, the blowing steam and falling light that fill the frame can be understood as material indices of place recorded by – and experienced through – the film-image. On the other hand, in the context of the filmic narrative, these elements suggest a mental space of isolation in a physically demarcated ‘sacred’ space; the wind shifting from index to symbol as it threatens to extinguish the vulnerable flame that Gorchakov, fated to die at the end of the scene, shelters with his curved palm and shielding coat. There is, then, a duplicity of meaning inherent in the elemental qualities of Tarkovsky’s image that refer indexically to the world of objects and things, but also symbolically to the artist’s struggle. Tarkovsky himself suggests this duplicity of meaning inherent in Bagno Vignoni in the quote at the start of this section. This claim allows us to appreciate the pool as both a ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ location, with the resulting film-image a ‘constructed atmosphere’: one that bears a naturalistic and poetic, material and symbolic, relation to place.

In our own effort to communicate something of the atmospheric conditions we experienced both in Tarkovsky’s film image in the penultimate scene of Nostalghia and in our own visit to its original filmic location in Bagno Vignoni, we developed two further

works: ‘Kino Haiku’, an installation work, and ‘To Forget : Of Air’, a short video piece. The first, ‘Kino Haiku’, is comprised of multiple objects and elements: an image projection of ‘Alba Lunedì’; a bespoke plexiglass box, supported on a timber structure; six steamers; a laser light beam projected through the rising steam, terminating in a sculptural object made from aluminium and coal. The piece also included a text piece comprised of two inter-linking haiku, installed across floor and wall. The material and spatial qualities of the design generated an immersive environment for the viewer that, displaced, evoked a phenomenological appreciation of Tarkovsky’s film-image in relation to its original location at the Santa Caterina Pool in Bagno Vignoni. Meanwhile, the semiotic layers of the assemblage offered our own interpretation – or, perhaps, translation – of the original scene through image, object and text.

The second work, a video piece entitled ‘To Forget: Of Air’, is comprised of clips shot on location at Bagno Vignoni during New Year celebrations. Through digital video, this piece documents the marking of temporal boundaries as well as the atmospheric conditions of the original location. We screened this video piece as a large-scale projection alongside a small-screen clip of the original scene, all the while reading an essay that critically and theoretically unpacked the scene.15 Our intention was to draw attention to the material and symbolic qualities of the film image not only in its relation to place ‘behind’ the scene, but also in relation to the place in front of the screen. In other words, to

16Fig. 5. Designing ‘Kino Haiku’.

17

focus on the film image as mediation.‘Kino Haiku’ and ‘To Forget: Of Air’ each exemplify our research into a phenomenology of the film image in relation to place by recontextualising and rematerializing the penultimate scene of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia through our own creative practice.16 In doing so, these pieces offer the viewer an experience of place both displaced and mediated. This, in turn, allows us to align our project with Robert Bird’s assessment of Tarkovksy’s work and its influence on contemporary art practice in ‘Andrei Tarkovsky and Contemporary Art: Medium and Mediation’ (2008). “Tarkovsky was an artist at the end of modern art,” writes Bird. “His work can be interpreted equally as a gesture backward, pointing to former modes of representation and regimes of meaning, and as a gesture forward, pointing to newly emerging modes and regimes.”17 By way of example, Bird cites specific artworks engaging with Tarkovsky’s films such as Susan Hiller’s Psi-Girls (1999), which includes an excerpt from Stalker alongside four other simultaneously played episodes from films featuring young girls with telepathic powers; David Bate’s Zone (2001) featuring photographs taken in Estonia where Stalker was shot; Jeremy Millar’s film Ajapeegel (2008), an attempt to construct a parallel narrative to Stalker, shot at the location of the original film. In addition, Bird cites contemporary installation artists Mark Wallinger and Douglas Gordon – specifically their works Via Dolorosa (2002) and 24-hour Psycho (1993), respectively – as “continu[ing] the interrogation of

media as the locus of new materiality – the materiality of mediation” that Bird locates also in the work of Tarkovsky (2008). It is thus within a) contemporary video art practices engaging with Tarkovsky’s work through strategies such as re-contextualisation, or by using it as a pre-text to discuss alternative themes and concerns, as well as b) contemporary installation art practices that foreground the materiality of mediation, that Bird detects the creative potential for contemporary art practice inherent in Tarkovsky’s ‘nostalgic’ cinema. It is in this context that we situate our own work in Gorchakov’s Wish.

*

‘I wanted to express the impossibility of living in a world which is divided, torn apart.’

– Andrei Tarkovsky18

Having generated a number of works exploring the symbolic properties of Tarkovsky’s film image in the penultimate scene of Nostalghia as well as the spatial and material properties ‘behind’ the scene and ‘in front’ of the screen, we decided to take a look at its context within Nostalghia. More specifically, we were interested in the meaningful implications of its situatedness in relation to the scenes directly before and after. In the first of these three scenes, Gorchakov’s alter-ego, the mathematician and madman Domenico – a man who held his family prisoner in fear of ‘el fin del mundo’;

18Fig. 6. Imaging ‘To Forget: Of Air’.

19 19

the one who solicits Gorchakov to carry the candle in the penultimate scene – dies by his own hand. This harrowing act of self-immolation is crescendo to Domenico’s public speech in the piazza Campidoglio on Rome’s Capitoline Hill. In the final scene of the film, Tarkovsky superimposes two images: one of a ruined cathedral in the Tuscan town of San Galgano and, inside of this, another of a Russian cottage suggesting Gorchakov’s native homeland. As these two shots merge, the melancholic voicing of a Russian folk song drifts alongside gently falling snow to fill the scene with an atmosphere of sorrow and longing: a filmic composite of nostalgia. Our decision to work with the final three scenes, rather than the penultimate scene alone, coupled our investigation of the symbolic and phenomenological aspects of the film image with a study of it in the context of its narrative construction.

As with the penultimate scene of Nostalghia, the two scenes surrounding it evidence a complexity of meaning in the film image generated through: (1) an emphasis on the durational aspects of the film image through the stylistic deployment of a filmic syntax; (2) the choice (and spatial design or manipulation) of a specific filmic location or place; (3) a poetic message derived from a semiotic practice involving language, objects and/or actions. Engaging with all three scenes we employed strategies of reconstruction and allegorisation in order to reconfigure and recontextualise each scene’s significance. Through this, we introduced aspects specific to our own particular

cultural, historical and political context into the project, resulting in two further iterations of work: ‘Immolation Triptych I’, performed live, and ‘Immolation Triptych II’, performed for video.

Working in relation to the final three scenes determined, ultimately, the overall structure for our final iteration of the project, Gorchakov’s Wish. Informed by Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia and referencing it throughout, this final iteration nevertheless offers a critical evaluation of the film’s formal qualities as well as a critical commentary on our current socio-political and historical condition.

*

‘The image makes palpable a unity in which manifold different elements are contiguous and reach over into each other.’

– Andrei Tarkovsky19

The final work, entitled Gorchakov’s Wish, is a split-screen video piece comprised of three parts, with each section reflecting our engagement with the final three scenes of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, respectively. This summative piece couples footage recorded at the original locations of all three scenes (i.e. Campidoglio in Rome, the Santa Catarina Pool in Bagno Vignoni and the ruined San Galgano church) with video footage that, shot in-studio, was scripted, designed and constructed to include the semiotic and performative aspects of previous iterations of work. The effect of this video

20 20Fig. 7. Constructing ‘Parrhesia’.

21 21

composite is threefold: firstly, we expand Tarkovsky’s filmic syntax through our use of spit screens, thereby rendering more complex the rhythmic composition of the film image; secondly, we conflate different times and places in the film image, thereby constructing a multi-layered spatial experience for the viewer; thirdly, we explode the symbolism of Tarkovsky’s original film images, allowing us to detourn its message for our contemporary context.

Each part of the film corresponds with a creative text. These three texts appear in the following sections, each with a unique poetics and semiotics as well as a different subject position and ‘voice’. These reflect the writer’s engagement with the final three scenes of Tarkovsky’s film image as much as an experience of the original filmic locations for each scene. As with the video work, the written piece can be understood as a composite that investigates Tarkovsky’s film image, translating and transforming its various elements through the poetics of the work, ultimately ‘speaking’ a message specific to the writer’s own context and experience.

* * *

The progression of work throughout Gorchakov’s Wish evidences a transformation and translation of the material and symbolic qualities of Tarkovsky’s ‘original’ film image(s) through our own creative practice. This process was both intuitive and dialogic: intuitive

insofar as we allowed one iteration of the project to inform and lead into the next; dialogic insofar as we were working collaboratively throughout: discussing, analyzing and changing the work in relation to one another. However, we did not consider this a dialogue between two, but also inclusive of the film image itself and, through this, Tarkovsky. Such a relation, through the film image to Tarkovsky, was established in three ways: 1) through our engagement with Tarkovsky’s theoretical writing about the film image; 2) through our embodied act of viewing and engagement with Tarkovsky’s own his embodied act of generating the film image on location; 3) through our partial identification with the character Gorchakov who, as one discovers from reading Tarkovsky’s diaries and from viewing his filmic documentation of the making of Nostalgia in Tempo de Viaggio, was modeled after the film-maker himself. (Indeed, throughout the writing and filming of Nostalghia and thereafter until his death, Tarkovsky – in conflict with the Soviet authorities – was living and working in exile, separated from his wife for years and from his child for up until the period of his terminal illness.) However, if our project opened up a relation, through the film image, to Tarkovsky on one side of the screen, it also opens up a relation to the recipient of Gorchakov’s Wish on another side of the screen. In doing so, it extends the work’s construction of a dialogic space to encompass the space of shared vision constituted through a viewer’s reception and perception of the film work.

Progressively throughout the project, we focused

22Fig. 8. Constructing ‘Allegory’.

23

our efforts on evidencing the multiple relations comprising this dialogic space: that is, emphasizing the relationship between the viewer and our work and, through this, to Tarkovsky and the ‘original’ film image. We did so by ‘thickening’ the layers of mediation in the final incarnation of the work. Such thickening, particularly as it manifests in the video piece (itself informed by and informing the written component), is evident in numerous ways: syntactically, through our use of split screen; temporally, through our inclusion within this split screen space of footage shot at different times and places, referencing different iterations of the project; semiotically, through our use of image, object, action and text that translates the original film image into an alternative representational space; and spatially, in the construction of the studio shots that appear in the video piece. This conflation of layers in the work evidences an historical process whereby acts of reconstruction and homage give way to those of displacement, transformation and translation. In doing so, Gorchakov’s Wish opens up a critique of a particular type of nostalgia: a conservative, restorative nostalgia; one that, seeking to recapture the past, becomes detriment to experiencing of present – and closed to future possibilities. In this we understand our work not in terms of a restoration of Tarkovsky’s original film image, but in terms of a space through which to reflect (on) the many layers of meaning in the original work, contemplating this in relation to our contemporary context and possible

futures.

Notes

1. Nathan Dunne, ‘Introduction,’ Tarkovsky (London: Black Dog

Publishing, 2008): 6.

2. Ibid.

3. ‘The Art of Andrey Tarkovsky,’ symposium held Friday 9th

May, 2008, 10.30am – 6.00pm (http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/

eventseducation/symposia/13939.htm)

4. See ‘Time, Place and Empathy: The Poetics and Phenomenology

of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film Image’ in Visual Studies (Vol.28, No. 1:

pp. 1-16) for our academic research into Tarkovksy’s film image.

Conference papers and talks informing this article and showcasing

our creative work include: ‘Gorchakov’s Wish: Translating

Elements of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film Image through Site, Image,

Video and Performance’, paper presented at the International

Image Conference (San Sebastian, Spain, 2010); ‘Time, Space and

Empathy: A Material Poetics of the Film Image’, paper presented

at Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics (UCL, London, UK,

2010); ‘Displaced Occupations: Revisiting the Atmospheric Space

of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia’, paper presented at Society for Cinema

and Media Studies International Conference (Los Angeles, CA,

2010); ‘Site and Generative Process in Gorchakov’s Wish’, talk at

Theorising Practices Lecture Series (Bartlett School of Architecture,

UK, 2009); ‘Constructing Atmospheres: A Phenomenology of

the Film Image and its Relation to Place’, paper presented at

Architecture and Phenomenology 2, International Conference

(Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto Japan, 2009).

5. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (Austin: University of Texas,

1986): 140.

6. Robert Bird, Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion Books,

2008): 192.

7. Ibid.

8. Andrei Tarkovsky and Giovanni Chiaramonte, eds., Instant Light:

Tarkovsky Polaroids (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004): 12.

9. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (Austin: University of Texas,

24Fig. 7. Constructing ‘Elegy’.

25

1986): 57.

10. Robert Bird, Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion Books,

2008): 192.

11. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1964), trans. Maria

Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 45.

12. Ibid. p. 146.

13. For a discussion of the relationship between Tarkovsky’s film

image and Walter Benjamin’s conception of allegory see ‘Time,

Space and Empathy: The Poetics and Phenomenology of Andrei

Tarkovsky’s Film Image’ in Visual Studies (forthcoming) and at the

end of this book.

14. Andrei Tarkovsky and Giovanni Chiaramonte, eds., Instant

Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004):

102.

15. See ‘Time, Space and Empathy: The Poetics and

Phenomenology of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film Image’ in Visual

Studies (forthcoming).

16. In stating this, Bird is at pains to point out that he does

not include within such emergent modes and regimes certain

contemporary film-makers who simply, perhaps simplistically,

pay homage to the ‘great master’ (e.g. the work of Donatella

Baglivo or Sokurov’s Moscow Elegy [1987]) or imitate his style

(e.g. Andrei Zviaginstev and, even, Bèla Tar) (2008). This is

important for us insofar as our initial work for the project can,

indeed, fall into this category. The progression throughout this

project thus suggests our own shift from acts of homage to acts

of construction and re-construction, more akin to the artists that

Bird cites in his continuing argument. (See http://www.tate.org.

uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/08autumn/robert-bird.shtm)

17. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (Austin: University of

Texas, 1986): 85.

26 26Fig. 10. A remnant of Gorchakov’s Wish.

27 27

28

Gorchakov’s Wish

29

30

I. Parrhesia

31

This image will not haunt us. Faces bleachedlike lime. Stones lined in divisibleplots. This storywill not be told.

Instead let usmove together - hands clasped -into the thick black oceanwhile the dead bury their dead beneath the factory floor.

i.

32

33

Here is the roofand these are theholes of our dirtyexcess. But nevermind. The sky will continue to be the sky - the grass asgreen as Astroturf -so long as we look up.

(Or shall we justpaint the grass?)

We must turn our ruins into mass spectacle. Bring the weather inside. Shimmy on the floor beneatha crowded reflection, delighted by our own fake sun.

ii.

34

35

We cut our daily bread with silence. Float in acquiescence. (Still, silent.) Who will decry this silentlife?

There are threefruits ripe butonly two knives.

Somewhere outsidethis tender scenea man with nofeet sits still and silent in the sands of our inevitable progress. The air smells of air.

iii.

36

37

Could this be our Golden Age? Thissingle point, com-pressed, at the end of a time drawn to remember we were there and visible. Ordinances vaguely beckoning a future less worldly, so sabotaged by our own dumb want.

The streets, now,are deserted.

They are all inside praying for snow.

iv.

38

39

This is how onepictures the angelof history: poisedon inconsequentplinth; a towel thrown over his head; arm raised in remonstrationto the beautiful bathers.

O beautiful bathers.

We look down to see that what once were his wings are now ears against a mottled earth, ruining. All of the meanings have doubled.

The angel sets fire to his ears.

v.

40

41

42

II. Allegory

43

CharactersProtagonist (p) Director (d)

Set

. . . . large small sheet sheet of of paper paper station 5 station 4 station 3 station 2 station 1 ‘wall’ Polaroid candles clay water bowl lighter pyramid salt ink

[track & dolly]

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _

•

• p

d

44

voice:

‘A threshold camouflaged by glass; window looking onto a mirrored reflection of sky. All of these are tricks of space and light and what we have left of phenomena.

So nostalghia becomes figured, a maquette outstanding beauty amongst monochromous present.’

45

station 1

Fig. 1: pool

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _

•

• p

d

Objects: water, bowl, salt, inkActions: mix water, salt and ink in bowl > pour over the large sheet of paper

46

voice:

‘When the lights of the buildings go off, and reflection takes on that tepid hue of sky, the silence thickens, the steam rises, filling the air with its lay rhythm. Only later will this same space become filled with a system of flight; the pool a polyphony of swallows.

Beneath the surface looking up in your own image, a litter of wishes ’

Actions: mix water, salt and ink in bowl > pour over the large sheet of paper

A glove covered in lime.

47

voice:

‘A woman walks around the pool in the glare of mid-day, holding a baby swallow and looking for insects. A man dips his feet into the water, more green in shadow. Jade. The moss appears ochre or gold. He says that it will die without its mother. That everything dies without its mother, that it’s natural. She places the bird at her breast and says today they will go to Pienza. Tomorrow to Montelcino. Then they will be finished and will have a bath.

In front of the pool, another man and another woman take their image in turns. This will happen again.’

48

voice:

‘At night, in artificial light, a line continually shapes itself to not-line. The pool an artificial moon, and I am reminded of a painting we saw once, in London. The one with a single white lace draped across a board. Hung, thus suspended in mid-frame, its perfect stillness extended into even more perfect dark.

Image without apparent gesture. Here, the surface, the wind.’

FIRST OUT

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Object: clay

Action: mould ball of clay with hands

Fig. 2: window

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station 2

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* affection

Action: mould ball of clay with hands

voice:

‘That day – remember? – you sitting by the window. The one that looked to the wall, that should have been the pool, like the view in his Polaroid, but still it was perfect. The light filtering the shutters was green-like and you sat working at the long table. I wanted to capture the moment, frame it as image, with you not as actor but as object of attention.*’

‘Through curtain, panel, glass, shutter – layers of window to image. Layers of image to world.’

1. Subjective angle shot of the hands in action.2. Objective camera shot simply of hands.

51

voice:

‘Yesterday, you out chasing winter light, I awake from the night with its black feathers to this now-terrestrial window before remembering: this is what we came here for. This image with its bloated beauty rising and filling the frame only to disappear traceless into the clear, crisp ether; this image we both crave and resist, suspicious of its inclement dematerialisation. This is, I know, where to find you.

Through the window, voices. Distance, pitch and rhythm. The piano each day at 3.30.’

52

voice:

This evening, watching that morning unfold, a realisation: that even with the most precise of observations, imperfections creep into the frame – ; that as each image embodies inevitable failure, so its generation must incorporate at least one mistake. Which is why, at the start of any painting, she always drew a mark on the canvas first.

Through the window, colour – regardless of observation.’

SECOND OUT

53

Objects: candles, pyramid

Actions: light the two candles > blow them out upon return.

Fig. 3: ruin

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _

p

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station 3

54

Actions: light the two candles > blow them out upon return.

voice:

‘& as we drove toward that worldly image of death, the road in the mirror looked somehow more real; the landscape, curve-cropped and flowing backward.

This is San Galgano, or it was that day.’

His hobby is architecture, which turns out to be not as one has always known it.

55

voice:

‘& we arrive anticipation of what I cannot (now) remember. Walls old and arched and buttressing transcendence, by which I mean the sky, by which I mean there is no roof, which is what we came to see.

Something ‘real’ behind that fading scene; a curve of flesh at the origin of drawing.

’

56

voice:

‘& if the aim of art is to prepare a person for death then we reach it before 7.30pm The chairs, stacked, are lain. The piano is tuned.

The performance will remain unheard.’

____…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. …….. …….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..…….. ……..

57

Object: Polaroid camera

Action: take image of tree

Fig. 4: tree

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station 4

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Action: take image of tree

voice:

‘… because without it the horizon might go on forever, and meaning slide on without fixity, we trespass clumps of soil tilled and milling with flies to reach that particular one, there, with its wrapped roots and algae. The one we have looked for, to find what is true to type.

You set your tripod down onto the good, brown earth where it stands upright and rootless – not at all like a tree.’

59

… a ruined church with a tree growing inside it.

voice:

‘… metaphorically speaking, as much lies unseen, drinking deeper down than what we see when we stop, here, at this single point of reference: its outline pressing the too-blue sky, its greenness a certain rapidity of vibration. It imprints our memory with a stop-time that, like a photograph, still takes time to develop.’

‘Removing the lens cap to a wash of Tuscan sun exposes a whiteness from which will emerge this image.’

60

voice:

‘… so what does it mean to go back? To search, again, amidst ridiculous beauty for that single, distinct phenomenon? It means that no longer a tree but the tree, ‘our’ tree – branches bare and backlit on the hill of Alte Vignoni – solicits recognition. That the general, having thrust the particular forward, falls back and remains outside and, yes, that halfway through the journey of our life what we have seen is in fact a true image.

’

61

Fig. 4: poet

Object:

Action: trace the shadow of a tree

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d

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•

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station 5

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Action: trace the shadow of a tree

voice:

I have this irrational fear of bees. Because they are so small in comparison, because even when I’ve been stung nothing really happens, because of so many dying on my windowsill, a groundless fear – hyperbolic and somewhat pathological. So when we step into the thick smell of roses at the Giardini del Leoni, I know to close my eyes throughout its scaffold of trellis, an experience more of time than of space.

Of the many paths to take, the rose garden.

•

63

voice:

I take your arm crossing into the avenue. Ahead of us the bosco with its deciduous crowd, behind us the rose garden and my blind memory. Between the two a line we walk to the right, in shadow of the mid-day heat.

Of the many paths to take, this one along trees and, before that, the smell of roses.

•

64

voice:

I will imagine, later, in the bosco, that I have lost you – that in fact I never met you and our life to this point has been fantasy. I do this sometimes, every now and again, like when we’re in a crowd and I can’t see you or when you take a bit longer to return from the shop. It’s a way of testing myself, or at least what I take as reality.

Of the many paths to take, those in the bosco are dirt leading to a grand stairway of stone.

•

65

voice:

I admire geometry its ease of movement from world to symbol and back again; its capacity, in doing so, to stay rational as much as its generative possibilities. Like that of the parterres, here, at the end of a staircase, in this garden in San Querico, where my wanderings need never be aimless, tending always toward the hexagonal.

Of the many paths to take, each in the parterres a decision leading onto itself.

•

66

voice:

I am surprised when we return at how monochrome the scene appears, although we are mid-winter and it is cold. Although our movement is reversed so that – past the parterres with its involuted logic, through the bosco with its still-kept leaves, along the avenue, now without shade – we arrive at the rose garden, this time eyes open bearing witness to a singular decay.

Of the many paths to take, this one back to the white winter rose is nostalgia.

Gorchakov forgets he had a dream about death.

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68

III. Elegy

69

— you, exile. Bird-tipped. Extinguishing. Buried in the night of the eye —

— you, exile. Bird-tipped. Extinguishing. Buried in the night of the eye —

Oculus framing

the tremulous lick of asalamander soul.

74

75

Gorchakov’s Wishby Kreider + O’Leary

Acknowledgements:

We would like to thank the estate of Andrei Tarkovsky for permission to use still images from the film Nostalghia.

This work has been supported by:

The Poetics Research Centre at Royal HollowayUniversity of London

The Architecture Research Fund atThe Bartlett School of ArchitectureUniversity College London

The Center for Creative CollaborationLondon

The Arts Council of Ireland

Copyright © Kreider + O’Learywww.kreider-oleary.net

Gorchakov’s Wish Video:

www.kreider-oleary.net/video/wish.htm

Nostalghia 1979-1983Andrei Tarkovsky

Gorchakov’s Wish 2008-2011

Kreider + O’Leary

KREIDER + O’LEARYG

orchakov’s Wish

Unnameable PressLondon

www.unnameable.org

© 2014

‘An image is not a certain meaning … but the entire world

reflected as in a drop of water.’

- Andrei Tarkovsky

Poetic, profound and technically masterful – complex in

both medium and message – the work of acclaimed Russian

film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) speaks eloquently

and directly to a wide audience around issues central to the

human condition. Increasingly, it has also become the focus of

academic and artistic debate. Entering into this debate, Kreider

+ O’Leary investigate Tarkovsky’s specific understanding of the

‘film image’ as this is articulated in his collection of writings,

Sculpting in Time (1986), and evidenced by his film work.

A vital and complex element of Tarkovsky’s cinema, and

key to its uniqueness, the film image warrants exploration.

Kreider + O’Leary, as poet and architect, enact this through

their collaborative and interdisciplinary practice. Taking the

final three scenes of the film Nostalghia (1983) as a site for

their creative and critical investigation, they engage with

those properties of Tarkovsky’s film image that make it unique:

an emphasis on time and the ‘rhythm’ of the image; the

relationship between the film image and place; and Tarkovsky’s

signature syntax of the long take and tracking shot. They also

engage with other, lesser explored aspects of Tarkovsky’s film

image that contribute to its complexity of meaning including

the symbolic properties of the poetic image as well as the

material qualities, design and construction of a particular

location or place. The result is Gorchakov’s Wish: a video

work, poem and record of investigation into the potentialities

inherent in Tarkovsky’s film image for contemporary creative

practices relating to place.