In 1985 and 86, as 54-year-old filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky was dying of lung cancer, he managed to complete The Sacrifice, one of his finest works. Tarkovsky’s career began in his home country, the Soviet Union. There he made Andrei Rublev in 1966, Solaris in 1972, followed by Mirror and Stalker. By the end of the seventies his relationship with Soviet state film authorities was so strained that he moved to Italy to make Nostalghia and there he was labeled a Soviet defector.
His final film, The Sacrifice, was shot in Sweden under the auspices of The Swedish Film Institute. He didn’t have a fatal cancer diagnosis until late in the filmmaking process. Still, there is something in this film that is so perceptive about death. One has to wonder.
The story of The Sacrifice begins at the home of a small family in a dark lake house on a Baltic island. The entire film has an atmosphere of desolation. The husband/father is Alexander, a handsome, middle-aged intellectual whose career is being celebrated as he awaits his birthday dinner. He has been a successful actor and theater critic, a writer, philosopher, and professor. Alexander is played by Swedish movie star Erland Josephson, an Ingmar Bergman favorite.
We first see Alexander planting a tree, a scrawny affair, with his five or six-year-old son, Little Man. The small boy has had surgery on his throat and temporarily cannot speak.
The Sacrifice was shot by one of the most renowned cinematographers who ever worked, Sven Nykvist. It was Nykvist who shot many of the Bergman films, and there is a Bergman look to Tarkovsky’s film. I’ve read that Bergman’s crew members worked on this film.
For so many movies, the details of the digitizing process, or decisions of the technicians, could alter the original coloration and even texture, but that may not be disastrous. I’m told this; I never digitized a film. For a film like The Sacrifice, where texture and color are key, this new restoration needed to be very carefully processed.
For the new 4K SDR release from Kino Lorber this month, the Swedish Film Institute worked from the original 35mm camera negative and a 35mm dupe neg. The audio mix is from magnetic tape. The result is stunning, the kind of restoration a visual masterpiece such as The Sacrifice deserves.
Almost an hour into the film, Tarkovsky brings his fictional family and a couple of their friends together in front of a TV set in a darkened room. An announcer reports what appears to be the start of World War III – and it’s a nuclear holocaust. We see people frantically racing around city streets. This isn’t a sci fi film and its not a melodrama. Instead, The Sacrifice is a study of the metaphysical. As an intellectual with only a vague sense of a god, Alexander finds himself pleading, striking a bargain with an unfamiliar deity as he faces certain death and the deaths of his family, including his beloved Little Man.
There isn’t an absorbing or titillating storyline. In fact, some of the plot of The Sacrifice is inexplicable, emphasizing Alexander’s thoughts and moves. Where he goes and what he does are mysterious. The ending leaves the viewer paralyzed, or maybe shaking one’s head in disbelief.
The Sacrifice has won countless praises and awards. It’s even on the Vatican’s best film list. Screening the new restoration is a worthwhile endeavor.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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