Ursula Hentschlaeger
On the Power and Powerlessness of the
Individual.
1989 - 1990
The first interest in research was
directed at films and the past. Both were about crime and
redemption, burden and liberation, love and survival.
| Wilma Lettner |
Never let yourself be silenced
1989
| Andrej Tarkovskij |
SACRIFICE
1990
BACKGROUND
WILMA LETTNER
The fact that Soviet cinema flourished in
the 1920ies was a matter of world-wide significance. Artists
such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin had a decisive impact, not only
on Soviet cinematic art but also on the cinema of other
countries. While Eisenstein filmed the masses as they built up
and scattered again, Tarkovsky focused on the individual who is
isolated in his her/her struggle for order about forty years
later. His films are also great works of European cinema today.
The Sacrifice is Tarkovsky's legacy. The
landscape is determined by a slow pace, just like the way in
which the characterised deal with each other. Cautious
movements on shifting terrain, even before the disaster that
occurs and calls for decisions. In the end the plot has come
full circle, and the boy says: "In the beginning, there
was the word. Why, Papa?"
The sacrifice in the eponymous film
consists in giving up oneself for the benefit of the others.
Are we in the world of collective goals or humanistic ethics?
And are these two worlds really so far apart?
SACRIFICE
