CHAPTER I

Introduction
Existentialism and Cinema: An Overview

1.1. Existentialism: A Survey

Existentialism was a cultural movement of the post war era from the 1940s to the 1950s
though its origins can be traced back to the nineteenth century philosophers like Soren
Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Existentialism historically
emerged after the period of the enlightenment, where man thought proudly that he has reached to
a point where he can have an answer for every problem with the help of technology and science.
The term existentialism was coined first by the French thinker, Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) in
order to propagate his doctrines. It is difficult to define the term existentialism due to its
multiplicity in usage and types. However, there is no denying the fact, that the two World Wars
played a vital role in the emergence of existentialism as a philosophy that questioned the horror
and the accompanying disillusionment of the wars. The horror of the First World War entailed
social traumas which in turn created the mass disillusionment at the end. This disillusionment
showed itself in different ways as artistic, philosophical, literary, musical and cultural
movements. In contrast to pre-war artistic movements, such as Impressionism, post-war art
became bleak and cynical, changing the rules, abandoning tradition. The artistic movements such
as surrealism, minimalism, expressionism which then led to nihilism, Dadaism, and various other
radically skeptical philosophies were the reaction towards the instability of the human life.
Modernism in literature reflected these new artistic movements, in its experimentation. The
collapse of the economical graph which gave way to communism and subsequently to Fascism
was also the result of the First World War (1914-1918). These were eventually among the
primary causes of the Second World War.1

Information about the World Wars is available on http://www.wikipedia.com. Accessed on 11.11.10. 6:30 p.m.

In the Second World War (1939-1945) which was the deadliest conflict in human history
over seventy million people were killed. At the end of the Second World War millions of
refugees were homeless. The European economy had collapsed and most of the European
industrial infrastructure was destroyed and the people were suffering from poverty and famine.
The impact of war was so devastating that its effects lasted even till the end of twentieth century.
The destruction of the world war eventually led to the destruction of mans dignity. If anger and
hatred were the foundation for majority of movements after the First World War, then after the
Second World War, the insufficiency and absurdity of the human condition was the foundation
of many movements. It made the world reflect on mans history in a different light. Many
traditional concepts collapsed in this self reflection. Civilization and man had to be defined all
over again. Man, who had been defined formerly as a rational animal by Aristotle over two
thousand years before, now was in question.
It is with this premise that Existentialism started gaining ground as a style of
philosophizing than philosophy itself. There are mainly two branches of Existentialism. One is
the Christian or Theistic Existentialism and the other Atheistic Existentialism. Theistic
existentialists are thinkers like Soren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), Karl Jasper
(1883-1969), and Martin Buber (1878-1965). Atheist existentialists are philosophers like Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976), Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and some other French intellectuals
though some of them refused to be labeled as existentialists.
The most important characteristic of this style of philosophy is that it begins from man
rather than nature. It emphasizes on the subject and not the object, not as thinking subject but
as the initiator of action and the centre of feeling. There are some themes which are common to
all existentialist thinkers such as freedom, responsibility, decision, finitude, guilt, alienation,
despair, death and absurdity.

The whole history of philosophy is about existence and in this case Existentialism is not a
new philosophy but it is new insofar as its approach to the existence is drastically different from
that of traditional philosophy. From Plato to Hegel, philosophers were struggling to define
existence in one way or the other. In fact, Existentialism is a reaction to the Idealism of Plato and
Hegel. Plato believed in the world of forms which is beyond this existing world. For him essence
2

precedes existence therefore anything that exists must essentially have an essence otherwise it
does not exist. Since then the whole of traditional philosophy has become a quest for essence in
order to explain the existence. Essence implies a certain characteristic which is common to all
classified entities such as men, animals, tables, trees and so on. Therefore, traditional philosophy
in search of essences ignores the differences and in the case of man it ignores individuality. They
have tried to classify or in other words to objectify the subject in order to define it.

If we base our knowledge upon existence, then our knowledge will never be justified
because existence is changing from moment to moment. So Plato in order to solve the problem
of knowledge had formulated the notion of the world of essence. The existence may change but
the essence will never change. One of the important characteristics of essence is that it is aspatial
and atemporal. Since in traditional philosophy essence implies being therefore being is absolute,
aspatial and atemporal and consequently asituational. The situation is not important for
traditional philosophy which talks about being as only being irrespective of the situation whereas
for Existentialism being is being in the world so the space and time become very important
elements in dealing with existence. Traditional philosophy has always considered being as
something unchangeable and permanent but existentialism is concerned about being as becoming
since existence is changing momentarily. Therefore, in traditional philosophy knowledge is
possible only through essence. So essence not only precedes existence but also precedes the
knowledge. For existentialism, this knowledge is valid only as far as objects are concerned but it
is invalid as far as humans are concerned and rejects the idea by saying that existence precedes
essence. For Existentialism, knowledge is subjective and may change from subject to subject.

Existentialism also talks about authenticity, and being true to oneself. We cannot
understand human being from scientific and moral categories. The existentialists are not happy
with scientific method because it is trying to objectify the subject and all moral categories are
about ought which is different and distinct from is. Moral principles which have an absolute
nature ignore is which is existence and deal with ought that ought to be exist. This is more
prescriptive than descriptive. For Existentialism is is more important than ought, so they start
with is rather than ought.

1.2. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Soren Kierkegaard is considered to be the father of modern existentialism. He was

crippled physically and emotionally by a sense of guilt that had been passed on to him by his
father. His father, as Kierkegaard has said, was burdened with guilt most of his life because of
blasphemy that he had done by cursing God at his tender age. Kierkegaard has expressed several
times in his career that his whole mission in life and in philosophy was to redefine what it meant
to be a Christian which is itself a subjective act. For Kierkegaard, to be born a Christian or to
have a certain set of beliefs does not mean to be a Christian. Christianity for him is about faith,
commitment and passion. It is not simply a set of beliefs or social membership as the people
always participate in certain rituals every Sunday in the church as something routine. It is an
individual passionate commitment which has no external manifestation which is completely the
matter of inwardness. He revolted against conventionalism, as he believed that Christianity
current in nineteenth century Denmark had degenerated.

Kierkegaard also talks about passion and commitment which have to be integrated in the
intelligent action. In the absence of any one of them, namely passion or commitment, our
action is not intelligent but mechanical action. Passion and commitment characterizes also an
important element that is truth which is subjective according to Kierkegaard. Truth for all
existentialist philosophers is the truth that is confined to intelligent action which is opposite of
mechanical action. This intelligent action is generated through free will. This truth is not
objective and cannot be justified through objective or scientific reason.

The notion of subjective truth which is the domain of objective uncertainty according to
Kierkegaard is one of the important tenets of his philosophy. For him the individual choice along
with his passion and commitment towards his choice characterizes mostly the notion of
subjective truth. He was opposed to the scientific approach towards Christianity as a religion in
that time. Religion, God, faith and ethics for Kierkegaard are not objective in the sense that there
cannot be any objective or scientific proof for explaining them.

He was also the first person who revolted against traditional philosophy which had too
much conceptualizations and metaphysics in it according to him. By traditional philosophy he
meant Hegelian Idealism. He believed that Idealism takes us away from existence and we are left
alone only with concepts which are absolute and nothing else.

Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) developed an idea that history has a purpose. According
to him human spirit developed over history in a non individualistic way. Hegel called this
historical development as dialectic. He believed that history develops through conflict and the
whole world is the manifestation of the absolute reason. So everything in the world is based on
the rationality of this absolute reason which is an entity and manifests itself through modes of
existence. For Hegel whatever is rational (logical) is real and vice versa because whatever is real
is the manifestation of the absolute which is absolute rationality so reality is equivalent to
rationality. Kierkegaard was opposed to this idea and believed that this rationality has nothing to
say about the individual existence who is leading also an irrational life. Therefore, irrationality
not only is real for Kierkegaard but also is the moment in which the individual realizes that he or
she exists.

Kierkegaard also used the notion of dialectic in a personal way as existential dialectic
opposed to logical dialectic of Hegel. According to Kierkegaard this logical dialectic is correct
insofar as concepts are concerned but it is not correct in the case of existence. Hegel talks about
logical or conceptual paradoxes whereas Kierkegaard in opposition talks about ethical or
existential paradoxes. There are no absolute paradoxes according to Hegel as there is always a
synthesis to move forward till we reach to the final synthesis which is the synthesis of absolute
but as far as existential paradoxes are concerned these are absolute paradoxes without synthesis
according to Kierkegaard. The individual has to choose either this or that; there cannot be any
mediation. Every crisis in ethical paradox according Kierkegaard has its own passion and since
the individual is involved in the act of choosing he or she cannot be certain objectively what will
be the consequences.

1.2.1. The three stages of life

Kierkegaard talks about different modes of existence. For him living each mode of
existence is first of all a matter of individual choice then commitment and passion. There is no
rational paradigm for this kind of existential choice because it is based on subjectivity.

The first is the aesthetic stage, which gives way to the ethical stage, and this also in turn
gives way to the religious stage. We cannot live in all three stages at the same time. There cannot
be any synthesis, either this or that, it is an existential and not a historical dialectic, and that is the
point which according to Kierkegaard, Hegel has failed to understand. It is in opposition to the
logical or conceptual paradox by Hegel.

The aesthetic mode of existence is the life of immediacy. We initially start with this
stage. Our action is towards the immediate goal. It is the lowest form of life. It is a despairing
means of avoiding commitment, responsibility and morality. It fails to acknowledge one's social
debt and communal existence. There is no principle in life but it does not mean that we live an
unintelligible life. We are even passionate here about our choices to attain our goals. Kierkegaard
gives the example of Don Juan2 in whom there is no reflection over his actions (sensual lover),
the body and senses are central here. We live in fragments rather than the whole, moment by
moment. Living in the moment is more important than what the moment consists of. In fact, we
are repeating every moment without any reflection. This repetition gradually leads us to the
boredom. The moment we think of our life (moments) as a whole we realize that we have lived a
meaningless life, though each moment has been meaningful in-itself. This moment of realization
is the moment we go towards the infinite. The finite, the life as a moment, cannot give us any
happiness any more, we start going towards the infinite and imagining a meaningful life, though
we are living in the finite. We find ourselves surrounded by life and death and it is the moment
of grief. In fact, in our confrontation with a danger (death), we find our life as a whole
meaningless. This kind of reflection is possible in the existential dialectic and may take us to the

Soren Kierkegaard. Either/ Or. Translated by Walter Lowrie. (London: Oxford University Press, 1946).

other stage which is the ethical stage. But if we choose to live in this stage (aesthetic) even after
the feeling of boredom and meaninglessness, so we have chosen to be part of the crowd.
In contrast to the life of imagination, possibility and sensation, there is the ethical life,
which entails a commitment towards the society. Kierkegaards notion of ethics has something in
common with the Kantian notion of ethics. It is based on the universal principle. It is the life of
reason. Universality, rationality and duty are three traces of the ethical mode of existence which
bind our actions. So it applies to all individuals, and also every moment in our life. So it gives
coherence to the whole life. In Kant those actions which cannot be universalized are not ethical.
Ethics has been equated with universality and this universality is possible by the virtue of
universal reason. According to him, an action is moral if and only if it is based on a principle that
is universalizable. Kierkegaard upholds this notion of ethics. To live in the ethical mode of
existence implies to live our life according to universal reason. Our actions and choices unlike in
the aesthetical mode of existence are not based on our desires but on universal reason. In Kant,
all the ethical principles are rationalizable. They are rationally justifiable. But here Kierkegaard
disagrees with Kant. In Kant the cognitive self is more important than the ethical self. What the
ethical self ought to do is decided by the cognitive self. Whereas for Kierkegaard there is no
rational process governing the individuals life but it is passion and commitment which govern
the individuals life.
In Kierkegaard, the individual has an important role where as in the Kantian notion, the
individual, as an empirical ego is governed by a superior power which is the transcendental ego.
In Kierkegaard, it is the individual who gives value to the ethical principles by choosing them
and by his passion and commitment towards his choices. For both Kierkegaard and Kant the
source of these ethical principles are universal reason but according to Kierkegaard they have
value because they have been chosen by the individual whereas in Kant the ethical principles
have value in themselves because they are based on the universal reason.
The third stage is the religious stage. In that time Kierkegaard was against the church
because they were trying to prove God through reason. It was the time of rationalizing
Christianity. According to Kierkegaard, God is always unknowable. So it cannot be the object of
knowledge and we cannot choose God through reason. God is the object of faith. That is why he
7

believes Christianity is essentially irrational and paradoxical. For Kierkegaard, there cannot be
any justification for the existence of God and religion is the matter of acceptance and faith
whereas in knowledge there is only truth and not acceptance. So in the religious mode of
existence one never asks whether God exists or not otherwise he will be out of this mode.
Christianity for Kierkegaard is not something to be understood but to be accepted and lived by. It
is more a way of life than a set of doctrines. It is the life of faith unlike the ethical mode of
existence which is the life of reason. In the religious mode faith is superior to reason. According
to Kierkegaard, as soon as we try to rationalize the religion we have lost our faith. There is no
reason why somebody chooses this mode over the other mode. It is possible only through a leap,
the leap of faith. But after all it should be mentioned that there is no distinct line between ethical
and religious mode of existence as Kierkegaard himself says that there is a constant conversation
with one another.
Kierkegaard also talks about terror and dread towards God along with love, goodness and
justice in the religious domain, terror and dread because there is absolute uncertainty about the
other side which is unknowable. For Kierkegaard, to accept Christianity is to accept to be born as
a sinner. So the sense of guilt, suffering and despair comes out and one has to live with that. At
the same time there is a ray of hope for salvation because after all, god is just and loving.
1.3. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The Enlightenment was a revolt against dogmatism. The Enlightenment primarily means
knowledge based on ones reason as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) declares in Critique of Pure
Reason3 one should have courage to make use of ones own reason. Nietzsche accuses Kant for
giving man a framework which man has accepted without using his own reason whereas the
maxim of the Enlightenment was knowledge based on ones reason. If everybody follows this
maxim there would be no possibility of having such system. According to Nietzsche to really
believe in this maxim we need intellectual integrity. That was also his whole problem with
Christianity which gives a system of truth which is ready made and everybody has to follow it. In
the case of meaning of our existence there is no system, no doctrine, and no truth which can

Immanuel Kant. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and
Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. (UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

guide us according to Nietzsche. We are all alone and we have to find our own truth and live by
that and that is why we need integrity. For him solitude and self discipline are very important
ingredients of intellectual integrity.

Irrespective of his maxim, Kant considers reason as universal and by universal means
aspatial and atemporal which is absolute therefore unchanging. In other words whatever truth is
given by reason is unchanging. Whereas, according to Nietzsche there can be no truth which is
unchanging in relation to existence.

His stress on the individuality and his argument against the system and tradition has
labeled Nietzsche as an existentialist. For Nietzsche, every system is like a shepherd and the
followers are like sheep. To come out of this situation (slavery), one has to use his own reason
and build his own system and maxim and for that one needs to have intellectual integrity.

Nietzsches problem with the system is specifically because of this that if one builds a
system then one has to formulate something which is called universal truth and whatever is
universal is aspatial and atemporal and therefore unchanging. Whatever is unchanging goes
against the very notion of existence whereas, for Nietzsche existence means change. (Like
Christianity as a system and Ten Commandments as its universal truths, without any
consideration for space and time). According to Nietzsche if something is unchanging it cannot
be about existence at all because existence is constantly in flux. We may choose Christianity
through our own reason however we should have that much of intellectual integrity to be sure
that we are not influenced by Christianity for choosing that. Even by choosing Christianity as our
own truth it does not mean it would be unchanging because this truth also may change after
sometime. There is nothing called the truth or absolute truth for Nietzsche and truth for him is a
metaphor. Scientific method (and not science) and religion are two important disasters according
to Nietzsche to brain wash the people and gather them in a system.

Nietzsche talks about the institutionalization of reason by the tradition. Anything which is
institutionalized leads to dogmatism and by that we lose our individuality or autonomy.
Therefore we live a life which is not authentic as we do not live by our own reason and lose our
9

individuality in the face of tradition. We claim that we are rational, however, at the same time we
live a dogmatic life in the tradition. This contradiction is not apparent according to Nietzsche,
but this is inherent. For him man is an autonomous (self governing) being and lives in an
autonomous world. The reason that we as rational being, live as dogmatist in the tradition is that,
the tradition provides us security by thinking and deciding for us. All values are given to us
within the tradition as a system and we as an individual are only blind followers of that.
Anything that can be valued has to be the creation of free will. If there is no free will there is no
value and for having free will man has to be ultimately autonomous. For value to be generated
out of free will not only must man be autonomous but the world also must be autonomous.

For him values are man-made. It is a mistake to claim that values are universal because
whatever is universal cannot be man-made. Tradition has considered values as universal in two
ways; either they are like natural laws which are there in the nature and have been discovered as
law of gravity and so on or they are divine will. According to Nietzsche, morality and wisdom
are in conflict. By moral person we mean a person who follows these universal principles and
acts accordingly and by wise person we mean an intellectual. Moral man cannot be wise because
he does not have intellectual integrity; he is a dogmatist. As far as human existence is concerned
these absolute unchanging universal principles are not applicable because existence means
changing momentarily. The nature of these universal principles as value, are prescription which
kills mans freedom. But for Nietzsche that is value which is governed by ones own free will
and as they are man-made therefore values also evolve over time. Values traditionally are
equated with truth as both are aspatial, atemporal, universal and unchanging. For Nietzsche
since there are no absolute and universal values, in the same way there is no absolute and
universal truth. Truth also is changing every moment.

Nietzsche had a strong opposition towards Christianity as for him all Christian values are
the given. Such value systems are bound to fail according to him because all people who follow
this system are not true followers; they are only pretending to believe in God. God for Nietzsche
is dead and they have killed him themselves a long time ago. By they, Nietzsche means the
Christians or the masses. Therefore, they are responsible for his death. If God as the law giver is
dead therefore man has to replace God.
10

It seems that Nietzsche was fatalist in some sense of the term but not in the traditional
sense. Fatalism in the sense that we are condemned to be free and it is our fate. In other words
there is no system to provide us security. There is nothing as absolute value or the truth to
which we can seek refuge. Every moment we have to choose by our own free will and in that
case we are ultimately responsible for every choice that we make. There is neither heaven nor
hell; all existence takes place only in this world. We will die and even if we are born we will be
born here again and we will have to continue this fate of ours. We have to live this condemned
life of a free being till eternity. This is the notion of eternal resurrection that means every time
we die, we will be born again in this world.

Christianity as a system gives us security and provides some sorts of meaning for our life.
We exist for the sake of salvation. Then in the absence of this system we lose this
meaningfulness of the existence. We have to create our own reason and meaning. It is here that
we are condemned to be free in such extent that we have to provide our meaning for our
existence through our selves. If man is living in the absence of God and system therefore man is
an autonomous being in an autonomous world therefore to exist now he requires tremendous will
and will to power, power in the sense of strength and intellectual integrity to lead our existence
as a law giver and only he exists who have this will to power. This will to power is required only
when we are out of the tradition or any system.

1.4. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Phenomenology

It can be said that most existentialists were influenced by phenomenology. However,

there are many phenomenologists who cannot be labeled as existentialists. Edmund Husserl in
his phenomenological approach provides an important key to the existentialists by giving a
detailed description of the phenomenon as it is given to the consciousness but for that matter the
mind has to be wiped out from presuppositions and prejudices. According John Macquarrie,
phenomenology:

[] offers a description in depth, so to speak, causing us to notice features that we

ordinarily fail to notice, removing the hindrances that stand in the way of our seeing,
11

exhibiting the essential rather than the accidental, showing interrelations that may lead to
a quite different view from the one that we get when a phenomenon is considered in
isolation.4

However, before Husserl, Kant had used this method to study the phenomena as opposed
to the thing in themselves that in his opinion is hidden behind the appearances. Hegel had also
used the term for denoting the many manifestations of mind or spirit which reveals itself
dialectically through perception.

Husserls work has influenced several of the existentialist philosophers directly such as
Heidegger who was one of his students. However existentialists have tried to use
phenomenology in a different way though Husserl was not happy with their phenomenological
approach. While Husserl in his phenomenology lays stress on essence, the existentialist
philosophers lay stress on existence. As Macquarrie points out:

They reject the Kantian Dualism that supposed some hidden noumenon of which the
phenomenon is merely the appearance. Similarly they are not interested in the Hegelian
attempt to show a dialectical unfolding of the phenomenon.5

Macquarrie also notes how Heidegger rejects the idea that behind the phenomena there
could be an utterly inaccessible thing in-itself. We can know only the phenomena as they show
themselves in themselves. Like Heidegger, Sartre also rejected the dualism in which, a
phenomenon is contrasted with a mysterious thing in-itself.

1.5. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

Martin Heidegger in Being and Time6 explores the meaning of being as defined by
temporality, and analyzes time as a necessity for the understanding of being. In his attempt to

4
5

John Macquarrie. Existentialism. (U.S.A: Penguin Books Ltd., 1972). p 10

Ibid. p 10

12

establish his philosophy as fundamental ontology he reexamines the nature of positive sciences
theories and finds out that their theories are not ontological but only generalizations. They have
claimed that they are universal but according to Heidegger it is ontical, and not yet
ontological. Is it not possible for us to conceive of this world apart from the Marxist notion of
class struggle or that of the Freudian notion of the Oedipus complex? Obviously, it is possible
therefore that it cannot be transcendental and that it is only generalization. For Heidegger all
these are only ontical therefore all metaphysics prior to him is also ontical. What Heidegger says
is that we have to move from the ontical to the ontological. Heidegger himself also talks about
anxiety, care, concern, thrownness and other concepts as being universal characteristics of the
human being. However, he says that without these characteristics there is no way in which we
can conceive of a human being. If we are human beings we will have these characteristics
because this is a transcendental condition. No being which is not human being has those
characteristics. All ontical notions are generalizations and not absolute universal like the
definition of man as a rational animal which is again a generalization and cannot be universal.

What Heidegger means by to be ontological means not merely confining to the

phenomena alone and ontological is that which is common to all the phenomena namely the is,
no matter how different they are. This is the structure that underlies and appears in all
phenomena. The structure of is which is the inquiry of the ontological and therefore distinct
from the ontical which presupposes the is. That is why we have to go to the ground (Philosophy
as a tree by Descartes)7 because whatever inquiry we make in the ontical level like what it is to
be a chair already we have to take into consideration that the chair is, or else we are not able to
inquire what the chair is. So this is in whole Heideggers notion which is why it is a primordial
fundamental ontology.

According to Robert Solomon, the function of fundamental ontology, the function of the
Heideggerian project is to allow the being to be itself. So far we have not allowed the being to
6

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edwars Robinson. (New York:
HarperSanFrancisco,1962).

Martin Heidegger. Existence and Being. 1949.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/.../works/.../heidegg2.htm. Accessed: 23.09.09. 7:35 a.m.

13

be itself. We have already made the being to be representational so that it cannot be itself.
Therefore, being has never been inquired as itself. So Heidegger is trying to make being free and
allowing being to be itself. In other words being is not to account for thought, thought is to
account for being. Language has to make itself appropriate for being, this is the Heideggerian
notion, because as long as that does not happen the being cannot reveal itself as itself.

For Heidegger forgetting the ontological, the basic question of is, is what constituted
the fallenness of man (we have forgotten the soil). He believes that in our quest for the ontical
we have forgotten that which makes the ontical ontical namely the ontology, the question of
is. Since the ontical presupposes the ontological and since the notion of is is ontological, all
ontical inquiries will presuppose is while they do not know the meaning of is itself. He says
that the analytical of is has to be done now because what is the use of having big things in
ontical inquiries until our most foundational and core concept of being itself is so dark and
mysterious? This is what Heidegger calls philosophy as fundamental ontology.

1.5.1. The notion of Being and its relation with Dasein

The Being metaphorically functions as the light which reveals other beings. The light
conceals itself by making other things visible in a dark room. So in other words, Being conceals
itself in its making and appears to us as beings. Now inquiring into light itself is what Heidegger
calls fundamental ontology. So metaphysicians are like those who, are engrossed by the revealed
things in the light while they have forgotten the light itself and taken it for granted according to
Heidegger. Beings are beings because they are lit up by the light of Being. So these beings are
either a subject or an object but the Being is neither of them, it is between them and makes the
object visible for the subject. Therefore. our language fails to grasp it, as it always operates in
terms of object and subject.

The analysis of Dasein is a ground of preparation for the main project that is fundamental
ontology, the question of the meaning of Being in general. For this we have to have a very well
structured question and for a well structured question we must be explicitly clear about that
which is being interrogated and that which is interrogating as well. Therefore, the inquiry into
14

Dasein becomes important. Dasein is an entity which does not occur among other entities.
Rather, it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for
it.8 Dasein is the only entity that Being can reveal itself to it and in no other entity. Since Dasein
is in essential relation to Being, therefore, in some sense of the term in Dasein, Being reveals
itself. What is distinctive about Dasein is the fact that in its ontical structure Dasein is
fundamentally ontological and that means Being is the precondition of Dasein. The first thing
which makes Dasein distinctive from any other entity is that only Dasein exists because it
responds to Being in general whereas other entities only react and do not respond. Therefore, to
exist is to respond to Being and not merely to react and to be.

The second thing which makes Dasein distinctive from any other entity is that Dasein can
choose, therefore freedom is an essential characteristic of Dasein. Existence is something which
is peculiar to Dasein as Heidegger says; to exist is not merely to react but also to respond. So it is
only Dasein which exists and decides its own existence and not any other entity. Dasein has the
possibility to choose or to neglect. Dasein is that which does not merely respond but it responds
to Being itself therefore in some sense of the term Being reveals itself in the ontological structure
of Dasein.

The third peculiarity of Dasein is that it is only Dasein which is capable of being
interested in doing sciences. The notion of knowledge is confined to Dasein and it is the only
being which interrogates Being itself.

1.5.2. Analysis of Dasein

Since Dasein is essentially in relation to Being which is the constitutive part of it,
therefore, it means it must essentially respond to Being. So it implies that Being is essentially
Being-in-the-world, the world which Dasein always responds to. By Being-in we understand
Being in something so there are at least two entities which are in relation to each other. The
relation of two entities which is highlighted by the term in is that of spatial location. In such

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time, Translated by John Macquarrie and Edwars Robinson. (New York:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1962). p 32.

15

relation where Being-in implies spatial location is what Heidegger calls Being-present-athand.
In the case of Dasein, on the other hand, Being-in is a state of its Being; it is the
ontological feature of Dasein to be in whereas in all cases of in pertaining to Being-in where
in denotes spatial location, the relation denoted by in is ontical relation and not ontological. It
is not, for example, fundamental need for the water being in the glass and so on but for Dasein
since response is a constitutive feature, Being-in-the-world becomes absolutely essential and
because of this constitutive ontological feature of Dasein, it stands distinct from other entities.

Heidegger disagrees with traditional philosophy which has always considered the world
only as things which is the totality of present-at-hand. He says that the relationship between
Dasein on the one hand and other entities on the other is always considered to be in essential
relation of knowing. Along with the notion of knowing comes the subject-object relationship.
There is always the knower and the known which govern the world in traditional sense. Insofar
as the subject can be known it can be reduced to the object and from onward the object gets a
predominant place in the world and therefore according to traditional philosophy the world
consists of totality of objects. Since Being is neither the subject nor the object the question of
Being never arises in the traditional philosophy. Heidegger rejects this duality of subject-object
and knowing as fundamental state of the world by asserting that the relationship of Dasein with
the world is not that of knowing but that of dealing. Since the constitutive feature of Dasein is
that of response, therefore dealing becomes governing the relation between Dasein and other
entities. Therefore, the primary understanding of other entities by Dasein becomes not presentat-hand but ready-to-hand. In other words Dasein will understand other entities in relationship to
them. There may be some entities which Dasein does not respond to so the relation is not that of
dealing but only of knowing the entity which is present-at-hand. So entities are primarily
understood as ready-to-hand rather than present-at-hand according to Heidegger. Knowing is
derived from dealing. Dasein primarily does not know entity but encounter entity as ready-tohand. Heidegger uses the term equipments rather than entities since they are ready to use as
equipments.

16

Heidegger says that knowing how is more primary than knowing that. In fact all
knowing that are derived from knowing how because our primary relationship with things is
of dealing and not knowing. To know the how is to be aware of the use. To know how is
traditionally ignored.

Since primordial relationship of Dasein with other entities is that of dealing as

ontological feature of Dasein so essentially there is the notion of concern. Concern and care are
ontological features of Dasein. Daseins primary concern is not that of knowing for the sake of
knowing but rather that of use. Any entity which is encountered with concern is called
equipment. How to use the equipment is the matter of concern and care. When an entity ceases to
be equipment (tool) it becomes suddenly present-at-hand.

By talking about care as an ontological characteristic of Dasein and equating Dasein with
care Heidegger means that every Dasein has an attitude towards the world. He also mentions that
this attitude Dasein has towards the world is that of care. Since care is an essential structure of
Being-in-the-world it indicates that Being-in-the-world essentially has a possibility to take into
account the future possibility, which is called as projection. This characteristic of Dasein that is
the capability to look into future possibility is what Heidegger calls as living ahead which is an
ontological feature of Dasein. The very fact that Dasein is being in a world already implies that it
is a being which is beyond itself. Dasein in its existential structure has the following three
characteristics:

a) Existant: the relation of Dasein with other entities and its relation to the world. By
existant we mean two basic things: i) possibility of projection, ii) ability to respond.
b) Facticity: By the word facticity Heidegger means that Dasein always find itself in the
world and it is aware of itself that it is. It is a brute fact that Dasein is which has no logical,
rational or scientific explanation according to Heidegger. The notion of thrownness comes from
the notion of facticity. Anxiety in Heidegger is a mood that is to be in tune with the world.
Dasein never can escape mood since Dasein is Being in the world and it is always in relation to
the world therefore it must be in some tune to the world. So anxiety is the mood which reveals

17

facticity and thrownness of Dasein. It is different from the term fear which always has an object
but anxiety or angst does not have any object, is fear of nothing.
c) Fallenness: (not in Kierkegaardian sense as original sin) it is a constitutive feature of
Dasein. We are so involved in mundane works as we never think of the meaning of Being. We
are bound to ignore the question regarding the meaning of Being because Being conceals itself.
Heidegger also talks about authenticity and inauthenticity. Authenticity is living fully
aware of these three existential structures of Dasein and inauthenticity is ignoring them. He talks
about the notion of they-self. We all are living like they-self; the self which is living an
inauthentic existence. We are more bothered about what the others say and yet it is easy to live
according to Heidegger. The relationship between one Dasein and the other Dasein is a relation
which is not reducible and it means it is simple and indefinable. It is about authentic Dasein but
inauthentically we are all ready to hand.
1.6. Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
In 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Nause 9 which serves in some ways as a manifesto of
Existentialism. The novel deals with a dejected researcher called Roquentin, who encounters in
his everyday life with the fact that inanimate objects and situations remain absolutely indifferent
to his existence, an ontological reflection over the meaning of existence in the Heideggerian
sense. The emphasis of the novel is on the fact that existence is meaningless which is almost
present brutally and oppressively which finally leads to anxiety. Nausea is the result of mans
realization of his existence not as necessity but contingency. Through nausea we experience two
important phenomena namely freedom and terror. The main idea is that we are, as humans,
condemned to be free, there is no escape from it and hence we are the creator of the world in
which we are living. Since we are free therefore we are responsible for our existence so in this
case we experience terror.

In one of his lecture titled Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre clarifies the principles
of his philosophy in order to save it from being misunderstood. He distinguishes three different

Jean Paul Sartre. Nausea. Translated by Robert Baldick. (New Delhi: Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 2000).

18

kinds of existence such as human existence, artifact existence and natural object existence. In the
case of human beings existence precedes essence which means that:

[] man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world and defines himself
afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin
with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes
of himself.10

So it indicates that man is free to choose and to portray his life therefore he will be
responsible not only for what he is but also for the whole mankind because by choosing himself
he chooses for everybody, in fashioning myself I fashion man.11 With this profound
responsibility of man upon the world comes the sense of anguish, despair and abandonment.
In the introduction to Being and Nothingness12, Sartre details his rejection of Kants
concept of noumenon. Kant was an idealist, believing that we have no direct way of perceiving
the external world and that all we have access to, is our ideas of the world, including what our
senses tell us. Kant distinguished between phenomena, which are our perceptions of things or
how things appear to us, and noumena, which are the things in themselves, which we have no
knowledge of. Against Kant, Sartre argues that the appearance of a phenomenon is pure and
absolute. The noumenon is not inaccessible, it is not simply there. Appearance is the only reality.
From this starting point, Sartre contends that the world can be seen as an infinite series of finite
appearances. Such a perspective eliminates a number of dualisms, notably the duality that
contrasts the inside and outside of an object.

Sartre talks about two modes of being; being in-itself (en soi) and being for-itself
(pour soi). Being in-itself is that mode of being which is concrete, lacks the ability to change,
and is unaware of itself without any possibility and temporality, whereas for-itself is conscious

10

Jean Paul Sartre. Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm. Accessed on 08.12.09. 06:00 p.m.
11
Ibid.
12
Jean Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E.
Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).

19

of its own consciousness but is also incomplete. For-itself is the being through which
nothingness and lack enter the world, and consequently, for-itself is itself a lack.

Pour soi has two modes of consciousness as reflective and pre-reflective consciousness.
Consciousness is always consciousness of something. In pre-reflective consciousness we can be
conscious of our act of consciousness by taking it as an object. This pre-reflective consciousness
is the basis for Sartres phenomenological description because consciousness is always aware of
its being conscious. That is why it can examine its act of consciousness and develop the
description of what consciousness is about.

Some other characteristic of consciousness in relation to pour soi: i) Temporality which

gives the idea of past, present and future. ii) Transcendence; the pour soi is always ahead of
itself, it can always be other than what it is because its possibilities. iii) Facticity: pour soi
always find itself there in a situation. Since pour soi has freedom therefore it has the capacity of
choosing in a situation but there is always a tension between the pour sois freedom and the
constraint of the situation.

Being-in-itself just is what it is. It does not refer to itself as an object in the way Beingfor-itself does. It is not transparent to itself. Being in-itself cannot even be what it is not, it is
beyond becoming. It is complete in-itself. So there is no necessity and possibility in in-itself
but only contingency.

One of the characteristic of for-itself is the ability to separate itself from itself and be
present to itself whereas in-itself cannot be present to itself. All presents require duality. We
need that which is present and that which it is present to. To be present to oneself, one needs to
separate itself from itself. The separation of for-itself from itself is nothingness. It is the prereflective consciousness which always shows that for-itself is in distance from itself. The beingin-itself is an autonomous substance whereas being-for-itself is not. In in-itself there is no
movement as it is fullness of being however it is only for-itself which is always moving towards
in-itself futilely. This movement of for-itself is in order to achieve the fullness and stability of
the in-itself. However it can never reach in-itself because for-itself by nature can never be in20

itself. That is the futility of man as Sartre says man is a futile passion. Sartre rejects the existence
of God because for God to exist it has to be pour soi and en soi at the same time which is an
impossibility therefore God is also an impossibility.

Sartre also talks about the notion of bad faith as it is the rejection of our freedom.
According to Sartre we are absolutely free and we can experience freedom more when we are in
constraint. Since pour soi cannot bear the burden of its freedom therefore it pretends. It is much
more comfortable and secure for pour soi not to have to make choice all the time and takes on a
role that others give to it. It is not an authentic existence because it is going away from pour soi
and ignoring its possibility. Bad faith is a lie not to anybody but to oneself.

Pour soi is for-itself and also for the other, it comes to know about evidence of the
presence of the other internally and not as something outside itself and pour soi experiences that
only by being looked at. Sartre gives the example of looking through a keyhole while being
caught at the same time by others presence and look. That is the moment we feel shame and
dispossessed. The feeling of shame is enough evidence for Sartre to establish the existence of the
other as consciousness. We experience the encounter of the other ontologically as a threat to our
project.
1.7. The Influence of Existentialism on Cinema
Existentialism, as we have seen, did not remain confined to the domain of philosophy
alone. It touched almost all spheres of arts and aesthetics. It is no wonder therefore, that cinema,
one of the most popular and dominant mode of artistic exploration in the twentieth century,
started showing a clear influence of existential philosophy. It was most prominent after the
Second World War especially in European cinema when Europe was devastated by the war and
innumerable people were killed. Rationality as one of the important characteristic of human
being lost its significance. Man was held responsible and blameworthy for the catastrophes of the
twentieth century and this attitude showed itself in various ways in the post war cinema
especially in Europe. Existentialism considerably influenced cinema after the second half of the
twentieth century, and continues to influence even to this day.

21

In accordance with two major branches of existentialism we can also distinguish two
different existential cinemas. One, which focuses more on the structure of society and may
question the place of the individual in that society, or may simply look into the nature of life,
love, responsibility, authenticity, freedom and individuality, the crisis of identity, the feelings of
alienation and loneliness consequent to being in a world of indifferent others, a theme common
in twentieth century works. These films may involve crime, but the real source of interest is the
characters and how they relate to society. It is a kind of social existentialism. The other one
which focuses on the innermost issues like the consciousness of death and its fear, the existence
of God, religion and the lack of faith, anxiety, despair, hopelessness etc. that are considered as
religious existentialism. All these themes are subjects which link cinema to the philosophy of
existentialism. Nevertheless, these two kinds of cinema sometimes overlap each other and it is
very difficult to draw a distinct line between them. But it is correct to mention some filmmakers
who are more preoccupied with one than the other.
1.7.1. Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
In the late 1950s French New Wave cinema started as an example of European art
cinema. The New Wave filmmakers were engaged with the social and political crisis of the era
while trying to do some radical experiments new to the world cinema through their editing,
visual style and narration in opposition to conventional cinema. The films featured unusual
methods of expression, such as improvised dialogues, long tracking shots, jump cuts, odd camera
angles and with almost no plot. They were concerned with existential themes such as questioning
society and focusing more on the individual and asserting the absurdity of human existence. One
of the most prominent figures of the New Wave cinema was Jean-Luc Godard.
Godards stylistic approach was so bold and direct that he was accused of having
contempt for his audience. On the one hand his works were a desperate struggle against the
mainstream cinema of the time and on the other hand an insulting attack on the viewer's naivety.
Breathless (1960) is the first feature film directed by Jean-Luc Godard and the first films of
French New Wave. The film has all characteristics of unconventional techniques and disregard
for the rules of classical cinema which includes using a jump-cut style of editing which gives the
film a more realistic or documentary air, hand-held cameras, location shooting, improvised

22

dialogues with characters looking directly into the camera. There is no strong dramatized scene
in the film while half of the film is simply dialogue between the two main characters with no real
action.
Godards films explore the lives of couples who are alienated not only from themselves
but also from the environment that they inhabit. It is a world of uncertainty and mistrust where
commercialism reigns supreme. In such circumstances individuals act arbitrarily and the results
are often tragic. This is depicted in My Life to Live (1962) which has a documentary structure
and tells the tale of existential trauma in the life of a Parisian woman who abandons her family,
her husband and child, in the hope of becoming an actress. However, she falls into the life of
prostitution and this, results in her tragic end. The film was divided deliberately into twelve parts
which Godard claimed was a means of applying the Brechtian theatrical method to make the
audience aware of the artificiality of the whole process and prevent them from getting involved
emotionally. Thus, the audience always remains distanced from the work and is able to view it
intellectually.
In Godards 1965 film A Married Woman, he would once again use the film theatre as a
location. The film, which dealt with the philosophical implications of an adulterous affair, is also
notable for its examination of the Holocaust and its defining relationship to the personal and
collective memory.
In Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) Godard depicted the life of a
housewife who works part time secretly as a prostitute and thereby highlighting the evil side of
the consumerist bourgeois society.
One of the important elements in Godards cinema in all aspects technically and
thematically was to de-familiarize the audience with the everyday world. In his article (Post)
Modern Godard: VIVRE SA VIE Shun-liang Chao compares Godards metaphor brought to
light with that of Heideggers notion of disclosedness13 as follows:
Godards metaphor of having things brought to light recalls Heideggers notion of
disclosedness. In classical cinema, the elegant quality of image and sound has become

13

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edwars Robinson. (New York:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1962). p105.

23

akin to what Heidegger calls the ready-to-hand; the viewer has been accustomed to their
elegant effects and thus takes them as real. Hence, to deprive image and sound of those
effects is to let them, in Heideggers terms, lose their character of readiness-tohandiness, to let them disclose themselves.14
1.7.2. Robert Bresson (19011999)
The other significant French film maker, Robert Bresson, has established a quite a
different cinema. His films are slightly devoid of plot which he believed is a novelists trick. He
did not believe in dramatic stories. He was concerned about internal drama which happens in the
mind rather than the external drama which happens in front of camera and only creates emotional
involvement with the audience. According to Bresson:

Dramatic stories should be thrown out. They have nothing whatsoever to do with cinema.
It seems to me that when one tries to do something dramatic with film, one is like a man
who tries to hammer with a saw. Film would have been marvelous if there hadnt been
dramatic art to get in the way.15

For that matter his films look cold and dull which is difficult for the common audience to
digest. In Bressons films, characters do not develop in a conventional way. Therefore, their
inner conflicts and their struggles are never outwardly released. Bresson removes the external
additions from his characters and presents them as bare and stripped. In the process, what is left
before the audience is nothing but a concentration of suffering. Also, it should be noted in this
context that most of Bressons characters exist in solitude carrying an individualistic fight
against the system. As Andre Bazin points out:

Eschewing psychological analysis, the film in consequence lies outside the usual
dramatic categories. The succession of events is not constructed according to the usual
laws of dramaturgy under which the passions work towards a soul-satisfying climax.

14

Shun-liang Chao. (Post) Modern Godard: VIVRE SA VIE, 2005.

http:// www.synoptique.ca/core/en/articles/leon_godard/. Accessed on 05.03.10. 6:40 p.m.

15

Paul Schrader. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. (Berkeley: Da Capo Press, 1972). p 65.

24

Events do indeed follow one another according to a necessary order, yet within a
framework of accidental happenings.16

For Bresson form is prior to content. In fact, for him the content is a pretext through
which the form operates. As he says, I am more occupied with the special language of the
cinema than with the subject of my films.17 The language of cinema for Bresson is summed up
in form which is the universal element rather than content which is mostly different from culture
to culture.

I attach enormous importance to form. Enormous. And I believe that the form leads to
the rhythm. Now the rhythms are all powerful. Access to the audience is before
everything else a matter of rhythm.18
The recurrent theme in his films is to seek freedom and release from a society that
restricts, a society that is diseased at its core. Though his characters may appear fatalistic at first
glance, yet it would be wrong to understand his characters as cowards. In fact, there is an
element of hope and joy behind the initial layer of negativity and pessimism. For example, many
of the characters in his films attempt suicide. However, understanding suicide as a cowardly act
we would miss the whole point behind Bressons cinema. Rather suicide here becomes a way to
reach a better condition. In Mouchette (1967), Mouchettes choice of killing herself at the end,
does not leave us surprised. Rather, it is presented in a way that we not only accept it but also
actually understand it.
Bresson was strongly religious. His films are permeated with religious undertones,
theological references and sacred iconography. In fact, many critics have referred to Bressons
Jansenism as a crucial foundation for his spirituality. Most of his films in some way share the
same foundation such as predestination versus. free will. The way one tries to free oneself from
the burdens one has to bear. In Jansenism the emphasis is more on the fate than free will. Most of
the characters in Bressons films seem to be under the influence of events which are out of their
16
Andre Bazin. What is Cinema? Vol. I. Translated by Hugh Gray. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, London: University
of California Press, 1976). p 134.
17
Paul Schrader. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. (Berkeley: Da Capo Press, 1972). p 61.
18
Ibid. p 61.

25

will. Paul Schrader (b. 1946) in his book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer
comments:
The four films of the prison cycle deal with the question of freedom and imprisonment,
or, in theological terms, of free will and predestination. All of Bressons films have a
common theme: the meaning of confinement and liberty, Susan Sontag writes. The
imagery of the religious vocation and of crime are used jointly. Both lead to the cell.
All of Bressons prison cycle films concern spiritual release: in Diary of a Country Priest
(Le Journal d'un Cur de Campagne, 1950) this release occurs within the confines of a
religious order, in A Man Escaped (Un Condamn Mort S'est Echapp, 1956) it occurs
escape from prison, in Pickpocket (Pickpocket 1959) it occurs with imprisonment, in The
Trial of Joan of Arc (Le Procs de Jeanne d'Arc, 1961), it occurs both within the confines
of religious belief and a physical prison.19
1.7.3. Michelangelo Antonioni (19122007)
Michelangelo Antonioni was one of the most acclaimed and controversial filmmakers in
the Italian cinema in the 1950s. Antonionis cinema was an exploration of existential themes
such as subjectivity, identity, authenticity, anxiety and alienation. Antonionis characters usually
suffer boredom and loneliness and their lives seem empty and purposeless apart from the
gratification of pleasure or the pursuit of material wealth. They live in an isolated world with
lack of communication, unable to solve their own personal mysteries they often disappear, leave,
submit or die. The idea of abandonment is central to Antonioni's formal depicting of people,
objects, and ideas. His films are as enigmatic as life: they show that the systematic organization
of reality is a process of individual mediation disturbed by a profound inability to act with. Most
of the films are about social alienation.
The Adventure (1960), The Night (1961) and The Eclipse (1962), these three films are
commonly referred to as a trilogy because they are stylistically similar and all concerned with the
alienation of man within the modern world. His first colour film, Red Desert (1964), deals with

19

Ibid. p 60.

26

similar themes, and is sometimes considered the fourth film of the trilogy. According to Seymour
Chatman:
The central thematic of the tetralogy is the perilous state of our emotional life.
Narcissism, egoism, self-absorption, ennui, distraction, neurosis, existential anxiety:
many terms have been proposed for the complex state of mind that was first defined
clearly by Kierkegaard and that has seemed particularly afflicting since world war II.
These terms struggle to characterize a life lacking in purpose, in passion, in zest, in a
sense of community, in ordinary human responsiveness, in the ability to communicate, in
short, a life of spiritual vacuity.20
Film historian David Bordwell describes Antonionis world as:
Vacations, parties and artistic pursuits are vain efforts to conceal the characters' lack of
purpose and emotion. Sexuality is reduced to casual seduction, enterprise to the pursuit of
wealth at any cost.21
1.7.4 Federico Fellini (1920-1993)
Federico Fellini another Italian director was well known for his intense autobiographical
feature films. Fellini's films generally intertwine memory, dreams, and fantasy, symbolism and
surrealism. In his earlier films he was the follower of Neo-Realist tradition but from the
beginning he was interested in the internal conflicts of characters by portraying them from a
quite humorous or rather ironical angle.
In his trilogy of loneliness The Road (1954), The Swindle (1955) and Nights of Cabiria
(1957), Fellini established a completely new genre of cinema which moved away from his earlier
Neo-Realism to a more philosophical approach of Christian existentialism by using religious
concepts.

20
Seymour Chatman. Antonioni: Or, The Surface of the World. (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of
California Press, 1985). p 55.
21
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. ( New York: McGraw-Hill Companies,
Inc., 2003). p 427.

27

With The Road (1954) is a poetic and expressive story of two unlikely souls moving
towards salvation, an innocent, simpleminded young woman who is sold by her family to a
brutish strongman as his assistant in a traveling circus. Both characters represent the tragic side
of life. While the man is a brute and abusive character he has some affection if not love towards
the woman but his tragedy is that he never reveals it.
The Swindle (1955), is an impressive portrait of an aged mans redemption from a life of
crime and deception. It is Fellinis recurrent themes of redemption and the consequences of ones
own self delusions. The Swindle is depicting struggle, loneliness and guilt in the human
conscience.
Nights of Cabiria (1957), is a humorous and ironical film about hope and survival. Fellini
depicts the story of a prostitute searching for love and happiness down to its fundamental
substance. Though she is a prostitute by profession but she is not morally lost as she is quite
spiritual, optimistic and trusting. She is good by nature but what makes her a tragic figure is that
she is forced by her circumstances to live desperately as a prostitute. It is a metaphoric story
about life, a constant battle of hope and misery in humans life and above all the victory of
human spirit.
Federico Fellinis 8 (1963) is about the struggles involved in the creative process, both
technical and personal, and the problems artists face when expected to deliver something
personal and profound with intense public scrutiny, on a constricted schedule, while
simultaneously having to deal with their own personal relationships. It is, in a larger sense, about
finding true personal happiness in a difficult, fragmented life. Finally, like many Italian films of
the period 8 is about the alienating effects of modernization. Peter Bondanella describes
Fellinis cinema in this way:
Fellini poked gentile fun at the characters he created who tried to make their illusions and
dreams a reality, he was nevertheless more interested in the subjective side of life and the

28

power of illusion and fantasy than he was in so-called objective, materialistic, and
ideological issues that occupied so many Italian film critics.22

1.7.5. Ingmar Bergman (19182007)

Ingmar Bergman the Swedish filmmaker was famous for his serious and personal films
about family relationships often marked by bleak depictions of human loneliness. His films
usually deal with existential questions of mortality, loneliness, God, faith and alienation. The
other themes that are strongly linked with Bergmans cinema are fear and solitude, which he
regarded as a curse. Religion is also present from his early films due to his connection with God.
He associates it with the inevitable tragic vision of the Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard. He was
criticized for his pessimistic existentialism chief among them, how to derive meaning from life
in the apparent absence of God. His characters are skeptical about authority, God, the Church,
marriage, and they are afraid to admit their doubts because they would have to suffer the
consequences.
In this way, the religious element in Bergmans films is really an image of lack rather
than belief. As Hamish Ford notes:
The metaphysical problems in Bergmans films [...], they express not so much belief, as
doubt, perhaps an eternally human and existential state of crisis, a revolt against an
absolute authority who might be God, fellow human beings, or marriage.23
The Seventh Seal (1957), Bergman's most famous work is an allegory set during the
period of the Black Death. The Seventh Seal was blatantly existentialist entertainment, a version
of Albert Camus' The Plague; the story of Knight returns with his squire from the Crusades and
finds that his home country is ravaged by the plague. To his dismay, he discovers that Death has
come for him too. In order to buy time, he challenges Death to a chess match, which allows him
to reach his home and be reunited with his wife after ten years.
22

Peter Bondanella. The Films of Federico Fellini. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). p 23.
Hamish Ford. Senses of Cinema: Ingmar Bergman.
http:// www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/bergman/. Accessed on 13.04.10. 07.00 p.m.

23

29

One of the recurrent themes in Bergmans films is the relationship of man to eternity.
However, he includes in his films greater concerns like the condition of the modern man and
issues relating to the threatened existence of man on earth. He used even more philosophical
question in an early'60s trilogy that addressed God's indifference and his own spiritual crisis:
Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), The Silence (1963).
Through a Glass Darkly is the first film of Ingmar Bergman's religious trilogy and like
most Bergmans films is a portrait of loneliness and alienation and the emptiness of life. It is a
search for the existence of God, and the desperate need for love. The film is visually spare, stark,
and metaphoric.
Winter Light is the most spiritually bleak and visually stark of Ingmar Bergman's
religious trilogy. The film is successful in conveying its fundamental essence: God's silence. The
use of monologues, prolonged silences, and extreme close-ups portray character introspection
and emotional isolation. Furthermore, the barren landscape, seasonal climate, and priests' illness
serve to further reflect the cold emptiness of his soul.
The Silence is arguably the most abstract and nihilistic film of the trilogy. It is an
examination of emotional isolation in a world without God, where salvation lies in human
connection. It is morbid and despairing but Bergman himself saw The Silence as almost hopeful,
telling in one way that Life only has as much meaning and importance as one attributes to it
oneself. Meaning and importance are things Bergman's films never lacked and his works have in
abundance.
We can along with Jorn Donner conclude about Bergmans ideas as reflected in his films
in the following manner:
If Bergman is an existentialist, he is a positive existentialist. Life does not exist only for
the end, death. All forces, even those of death, can be transformed to serve life. Man is
not condemned to the impossible. He continually finds escapes. He revises his earlier

30

views, and faces new decisions in order to try, as an outside risk, the right ways of
living, which he earlier rejected. 24

1.7.6. Werner Herzog (b. 1942)

New German cinema is a period in German cinema which lasted from the late 1960s into
the 1980s. It saw the emergence of a new generation of directors, working with low budgets, and
influenced by the French New Wave. These new generation were claiming that the German film
should concern itself with contemporary German problems; the materialism of post-war society,
the morality of the bourgeoisie, the alienation of youth, and the moral disaster of the Nazi legacy.
Disdainful of artistry and entertainment, they believed that film should serve as a forum for the
dissemination of ideas and philosophy which challenged the established order.

One of the most controversial of this generation is Werner Herzog (b. 1942) who has
constantly crossed the line between reality and fiction. For him both documentary and fictional
works are the same, depicting life in their respect. In fact, he has made more documentary films
than fiction. His feature films are often shot like documentaries. His films often portray a dark
and bleak world full of murder and destruction ultimately leading to the death of the individual.
According to Herzog

Film images, he believed, should return people to the world as it is, but as we seldom see
it. People should look straight at a film [...] Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. And
film culture is not analysis, it is agitation of the mind."25

In his first feature film, Signs of Life (1968) Herzog emphasizes on the absurdity of the
individual in the war situation which entails ultimately to the self destruction. It is this mood of
self destruction that can also be seen in the kind of landscape that Herzogs films portray. The
landscapes in his films rather than being idyllic and beautiful, serve the purpose of reflecting the
24

Jorn Donner. The Films of Ingmar Bergman: From "Torment" To "All These Women". (New York: Dover
Publications, 1972). p 24.
25
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies,
Inc., 2003). p 619.

31

inner condition of the human mind which is full of collective dreams and nightmares. One of the
fears that Herzog seemed to voice was the fact that the present world seemed to him to be
suffering from an exhaustion of images for which he held the consumerism and television
responsible. This according to Herzog was a death of imagination:

I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out, they are
abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the
rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the
images and advertisements that surround us in magazines or I turn on the television, or if
I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious and rickety
image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging
here. The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins
our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not
having tossing hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills
our imagination and what we end up with are worn out images because of the inability of
too many people to seek out fresh ones.26

In Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) which is based upon Spanish conquistador Lope de
Aguirres doomed expedition to find El Dorado, he shows how man in his greed for conquering
nature is doomed to madness and solitude. Aguirre fails in his ambition since first of all he fails
in establishing solidarity with others and then invading nature as he proclaimed himself superior
to nature.

In the Enigma of Kasper Hauser (1974) for example, Herzog dwells on the question of
language. It is based on the true story of a young man who was imprisoned for the first sixteen
years of his life and then let loose into a nineteenth century German city without any concept of
civilization whatsoever. In such a society Kasper is an outsider and in turn a misfit. It is this
bourgeoisie society that ultimately brings about the destruction of a character like Kasper

26

Werner Herzog-Biography. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001348/. Accessed: 10.07.10. 3:30 p.m.

32

Hauser, whom Herzog himself had described as full of basic and uncontaminated human
dignity.27

In his next fictional feature film titled Stroszek (1976) Herzog would ironically examine
the false hope and disillusionment that the concept of the American Dream entailed. Here again
we are given the example of how another society becomes responsible for the destruction of an
individual.

Many of Herzogs films deal with the question of faith, be it in the individuals own
ambitions or in some religious or superstitious ideals which is opposed to conventional reason.
This interest in faith would converge into a film titled Fitzcarraldo (1982) which is regarded as
one of Herzogs best. It is perhaps one of the most ethnographic of Herzogs films as the
question of modernism and civilizations are contrasted with the notion of primitivism. In such a
comparison, the fragility of our modern culture becomes more and more evident. Herzog seems
to be holding forth the view that long after the civilized world has exhausted itself with war,
pollution and destruction, the earth will still continue to exist, triumphant over humanity which
once tried to rule on it.

In my discussion above, I have noted how different film makers have looked upon and
handled themes of existentialism in their cinema. Though many of them resisted the label of
existentialism, their films do certainly explore and contribute to such themes. My focus in this
chapter has been on European film makers, which has not afforded me the scope to study the
existential films made in America and other parts of the world. Still there are many other
filmmakers whom I could discuss however the scope of thesis does not allow me to look upon all
of them. However, it is important to mention that films with existential themes are still being
made and will continue to be made and explored so long as human beings keep questioning their
role and existence in the universe.

In the following two chapters I would attempt a study of two important film-makers,
namely, Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) and Theodoros Angelopoulos (b. 1936). Though
27

Paul Cronin. Herzog on Herzog. Edited by Paul Cronin. (USA: Faber and Faber Inc., 2002). p112.

33

traditionally they are not discussed within the domain of existential cinema, my attempt here
would be to try and locate the recurrent themes, techniques and characteristics of both these filmmakers from an existentialist perspective. I intend to illustrate with suitable examples from both
Tarkovsky and Angelopoulouss cinema the existential themes and motifs that are abundantly
available there.

34

When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He
moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn`t explain. What should he explain
anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the
most willing of media. Ingmar Bergman

CHAPTER II

An Existential Interpretation of Andrei Tarkovskys

The Sacrifice

1.1. Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986)

Andrei Tarkovsky, Russian film maker, was one of the most prominent figures in the
realm of European cinema from the mid twentieth century. His idealistic perception of art and
above all cinema, his theoretical standpoint of artistic creation and his sense of moral obligation
towards the society has marked him as one of the most principled artists in the history of cinema.
His films sound prophetic in the way they focus profoundly and vividly on the human sufferings
and that is why they are strongly impressive. As he himself ideally assimilated the true artist with
a prophet who propagates beauty along with a moral duty in the world. According to him:

The true artist always serves immortality, striving to immortalise the world and man
within the world. An artist who doesnt try to seek out absolute truth, who ignores
universal goals for the sake of accidentals, can only be a time server.28

Tarkovsky has discussed in his book, Sculpting in Time about his aesthetical and moral
principles in art. His view of art and artist in general is linked in some way to romanticism where

28

Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting In Time: Reflection on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. (London: The
Bobley Head, 1986). p 168.

35

he constantly talks about spiritualism, immortality, absolute truth, beauty, inspiration and
centrality of the artist in the work of art. He believed:

[] art must carry mans craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out
towards it, that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the
artists version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition
to it, otherwise life becomes impossible!29

As the artist is conscious of the world in which he is living, he becomes the voice of
those who cannot express themselves. For that reason Tarkovsky believed that the artist is never
free, he is bound by his responsibility towards others. However, in Tarkovskys view: Modern
art has taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to
affirm the value of the individual for its own sake.30

Tarkovsky was preoccupied with the alienation of the individual in the face of modern
civilization, the detachment from his inner world at the cost of the social and technological
progress. Human progress cannot be judged through only technological progress which will be
misleading but mostly by those elements which are the characteristics of human being such as
individuality, freedom, responsibility, morality, spirituality, faith, love and so on. For Tarkovsky,
this technological progress runs contrary to the spiritual and moral progress of the human being.
In the modern world owing to social and economical constraints, the individual leads an
uprooted existence of indifference and lack of freedom. According to Tarkovsky:

Modern mass culture, armed at the consumer, the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling
peoples souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial question of his existence,
his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.31

It seems that human being has lost his capacity for attaining the truth about his existence
in the modern world. While all his efforts so far have been oriented towards the society his
29

Ibid. p 192.
Ibid. p 38.
31
Ibid. p 42-43.
30

36

individuality has been neglected. Therefore, the result is a civilization without any sense of
personal commitment and responsibility. In Tarkovskys view:

The pattern of social relationships has formed in such a way that it is possible for people
to ask nothing of themselves, to feel exempt from all moral duty, and only to make
demands of others, of humanity at large. They can invite others to be humble and
sacrifice themselves, to accept their role in the building of the future, while they
themselves take no part in the process and accept no personal responsibility for what is
happening in the world. 32

The world of Tarkovskys films is based on intuitive elements beyond rational

understanding. Most of the characters in his films undergo a spiritual and existential crisis.
Tarkovsky once said that all his films talk about the same thing; all his characters have rather the
same characteristics. They are inexhaustibly in search of the meaning of their lives, being faithful
to themselves and to others and manifesting their love for humanity through their sacrifices. In
fact, all of his films can be described with this phrase: in the quest of faith. Without faith man
loses his moral stand. Tarkovskys films are a protest against the pathetic and pitiful condition of
human being in the modern world. According to Tarkovsky our world is the world of crisis full
of anxiety, war, loneliness, oppression, suffering and so on and every attempt to change the
situation seems futile. In this chaotic condition the only hope is the self awareness of each and
every individual in the spiritual level in order to take the responsibility of oneself towards the
future rather than shifting it to others.

Tarkovsky emphasized on two kinds of freedom; social and democratic or an outer

freedom which is thought to be always progressing especially in the western world. On the other
hand the notion of individual freedom as an inner freedom though not thought to be progressing
is of vital importance to Tarkovskys philosophy. This inner freedom, which is individualistic in
nature, Tarkovsky considers to have been forgotten in the undue emphasis laid on social and
democratic freedom. Added to this condition is a monstrous and self evident spiritual crisis

32

Ibid. p 218.

37

which haunts individual existence. Tarkovsky strongly believes that it is only at the level of inner
freedom that change can be sought. According to him:

Naturally the opportunities for asserting your free will are limited by the will of others,
but it must nonetheless be said that the failure to be free is always the result of inner
cowardice and passivity, of lack of determination in the assertion of your will in
accordance with the voice of conscience.33

This is what underlines Tarkovskys characters; uncompromised, unfit for the society,
their capacity to love and to sacrifice becomes difficult to explain in terms of the
commonsensical notions of the day to day affairs of life. It is in attributing a certain sense of the
uncommon to his characters that Tarkovsky is able to raise his heroes to a level of strength which
could probably be equated with the ethical. Tarkovsky himself notes this strength of his
characters when he says:

Looking back now at the films I have made so far, it strikes me that I have always wanted
to tell of people possessed of inner freedom despite being surrounded by others who are
not inwardly dependent and unfree; whose apparent weakness is born of moral conviction
and a moral standpoint and in fact is sign of strength.34

Notwithstanding Tarkovskys pessimistic depiction of the world in his films there is

always a ray of hope at the end. As he himself believed that no artistic work can create a sense of
hopelessness in itself though it may depict hopelessness which is transitory. There must always
be a way to rebuild the disrupted human relationships in the work of art.

In Tarkovskys view, man needs to introspect in order to regain the spiritual life once
again. He has to choose either a material life which is based on technological progress and
consumerism or a spiritual life based on moral values. A man, who has lost the capacity to
sacrifice for others in fact, ceases to be a human any more. But unfortunately:

33
34

Ibid. p 222-223.
Ibid. p 180-181.

38

Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation
of self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at
the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of our human calling.35

In all his films the recurrent themes of root links with memory, childhood, family house,
religion, tradition, modernism, war, country and earth was always of great importance. He made
seven feature films in his whole career; Ivans Childhood (1962), Andrei Roublev (1966), Solaris
(1972), The Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979) and the last two films, Nostalgia (1982) in Italy
and The Sacrifice (1986) in Sweden. During the making of The Sacrifice he was ill; he had
cancer. The Sacrifice was his last attempt to express his world, inviting the people to search for
their lost faith within themselves which was his prophetic mission. Shortly after finishing his
film on 29th December of 1986 he died in Paris.

1.2. The Sacrifice: Synopsis

Alexander, a retired stage actor is living in a remote island along with his family; a
younger actress wife, a teenage daughter and a young son who is referred as Little Man in the
film, and is mute throughout the film. In his birthday Alexander comes face to face with the
impending nuclear catastrophe announced on television. He and his family undergo a
tremendous breakdown. In despair, Alexander vows to God to sacrifice all that he loves if and
only if this terrible act of fate may be undone. Then Alexander is informed by the postman,
Otto, that he has a solution to save the world, including his dear young son, if only he will sleep
with the solitary Maria, Alexanders servant, who Otto insists is a witch. To this end Alexander
sleeps with Maria in a mysterious scene. When he wakes up the next morning in his room
everything seems normal, but whether Alexander dreamt the whole episode is never made
explicit. Nevertheless, Alexander at the end sets forth to give up all he loves and possesses,
burning his house and being driven off in an ambulance.

35

Ibid. p 38.

39

1.3. An Existential Analysis of The Sacrifice

1.3.1. Thematically

a) The Notion of Sacrifice

To begin with the film beforehand one needs to understand what the term sacrifice
means in its foundation. It is easy to define the term in words however; it is rather difficult to
understand or to justify it as it is the matter of faith and therefore an irrational act. Such irrational
dimension of sacrifice can be noted in two important episodes in human history. One is Abraham
sacrificing his son, Isaac, and the other is Christ redeeming humanity through his sacrifice. In the
Genesis36 we have the remarkable story of Sacrifice where Abraham takes his son, Isaac, to the
Mount Moriah to sacrifice in order to maintain his faith in God. However at the last moment he
is prevented by Gods command to sacrifice a lamb rather than his son. This incident established
Abraham as the father of faith. In analyzing the Abraham episode Kierkegaard noted:

There was one who relied upon himself and gained all, there was one who secure in his
strength sacrificed all, but he who believed God was greater than all. There was one who
was great by reason of his power, and one who was great by reason of his wisdom, and
one who was great by reason of his hope, and one who was great by reason of his love ;
but Abraham was greater than all, great by reason of his power whose strength is
impotence, great by reason of his wisdom whose secret is foolishness, great by reason of
his hope whose form is madness, great by reason of the love which is hatred of oneself.37

Kierkegaard compares Abraham to a tragic hero. A tragic hero is one who must make a
decision between what may socially be right and what is needed and required at the moment.
However, Abrahams situation is very different. His actions surpassed the ethical side of things
and reached for the supreme or divine purpose. Abraham cannot be brought into the category of
36

The Bible: New International Version. (London, Sydney, Auckland, Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989).
Soren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Walter Lowrie, 1941.
http:// www.wehavephotoshop.com/.../Kierkegaard. p 7. Accessed on 20.10/09. 12:00 a.m.

37

40

the universal. However in the case of Christ the sacrifice can be looked upon as being universal.
That is to say Christ takes the burden of sin of whole human kind on his shoulders. Thus Christ
crucifixion becomes the means of saving the world. Here the individual sacrifice has a larger
purpose, rather an universal one, of saving the whole of mankind. Like Christ, Alexanders
sacrifice can also be understood in its universal dimension.

His sacrifice can probably depict the condition of the modern man. He sacrifices his
material world as if ironically it is the most precious belonging and achievement of the modern
man. He is the modern Abraham but rather than sacrificing his son he sacrifices his material
properties. What derives a modern man like Alexander to act in this way in a seemingly godless
world is a longing to regain his spiritual strength to lead a meaningful life. Tarkovsky clears this
by saying:

In the face of disaster on that global scale, the one issue that has to be raised, it seems to
me, is the question of a mans personal responsibility, and his willingness for sacrifice,
without which he ceases to be a spiritual being in any real sense. 38

What makes sacrifice viable is the unconditional commitment of the individual who
sacrifices. It is an individual choice without any certainty about the consequences. It is the same
with Alexanders case however; he has to fulfill his promise. He is alone in his horrible and
painful act while his sanity is in the danger of being questioned by others as we see at the end
Alexander is taken away by an Ambulance. Some critics have taken a critical look on
Alexanders sacrifice. Mark Le Fanu, for example, in his book The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky
questions the authenticity of Alexanders sacrifice when he says:

It seems to me that Alexanders promise becomes complicated, from our point of view,
on account of its unilateral basis: it is his renunciation, not his familys. Yet the flaming
pyre initiates a suffering which logically is just as much theirs as his. Can sacrifice be
sacrifice if it implicates innocent people? To put my question another way: is this the

38

Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting In Time: Reflection on the Cinema, Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. (London: The
Bobley Head, 1986). p 220.

41

sacrifice which, in speaking of a didactic work of art, we would specify as clear or

sublime?39

The above argument seems to overlook the fact that Alexanders sacrifice cannot be
understood in the domain of the ethical. Mark Le Fanus view is based on a rational approach
which seems to be inappropriate in such situations, as we cannot argue rationally about the
domain of the irrational. This paradox has been explored at length in Kierkegaards Fear and
Trembling. In this book, Kierkegaard deals with the story of Abraham and Isaac and tries to
defend Abraham by introducing the concept of the teleological suspension of the ethical.40 This
notion probes into a domain which is ridden with problems, but is fascinating in its ability to
raise and answer some questions which has always puzzled humankind. Kierkegaard gives the
example of Abraham to elucidate the condition of man in his religious domain. As he believed
religion is the matter of faith based on an individual choice. It is an unconditional commitment to
an absolute like God. In the religious domain ethical principles lose their strength as it was with
Abraham. He was ready to sacrifice his son, Isaac, in order to fulfill the divine purpose and prove
his faith in God. As far as ethics is concerned it is not justifiable, it is murdering but as far as
religion and faith are concerned it is the highest position that an individual can achieve.

In the same way we can justify Alexanders behavior; in order to fulfill his vow to God
and save the world in his religious mode he surpasses the ethical boundaries by his act of
sacrificing. It is not justifiable ethically for one to destroy his properties or to sleep with
somebody even for a divine purpose while one is married. As we see Alexander experiences
tremendous fear and trembling while he is overpowered by the frightening news of the nuclear
catastrophe which makes him anxious. This condition leads to a renewal of his lost faith in God
and in his enterprise he undermines his sanity in the face of the rational and the materialistic
world.

39

Mark Le Fanu. The cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. (London: British Film Institute, 1987). p 125.

40

Soren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Walter Lowrie, 1941.

http:// www.wehavephotoshop.com/.../Kierkegaard. p 28-38. Accessed on 20.10/09. 12:00 a.m.

42

b) The Monk and the Parched Tree

In the beginning of the film, Alexander while planting a tree tells a story to Little Man
about a monk who used to climb a hill every morning to water a parched tree and come back in
the evening. Eventually after three years one morning the dry tree came to life again. This first
and the last scene of the film where Little Man is shown watering the planted tree, are very
significant in relation to the message Tarkovsky wanted to convey through the film. As
Tarkovsky himself, noted:

Has man any hope of survival in the face of all the signs of impending apocalyptic
silence? Perhaps an answer to the question is to be found in the legend of the parched
tree, deprived of the water of life, on which I based this film which has such a crucial
place in my artistic biography: The monk step by step and bucket by bucket carried water
up the hill to water the dry tree believing implicitly that this act was necessary and never
for an instant wavering in his belief in the miraculous power of his own faith in God. He
lived to see the miracle: one morning the tree burst into life, its branches covered with
young leaves, and that miracle is surely not more than the truth.41

This miraculous truth is a truth based on the individual faith. Kierkegaard also believed
that faith is outside the domain of reason and therefore is not rational. For him, passion and
commitment are two important integral parts of the subjective truth. The Monk in the foregoing
story achieves this truth not by a sort of habitual act of watering the parched tree repeatedly,
which is merely mechanical, but by a passionate commitment towards his faith in blossoming of
the parched tree. Therefore it is a matter of seriousness and inwardness. Kierkegaard in his book
The Concept of Dread talks about seriousness in the following manner:

The originality of seriousness in the course of its historical development evinces

precisely its eternal character, and for this cause seriousness can never become habit. [...]
41

Bart Tolleson. Materialism and the Messiah: Tarkovskys The Sacrifice. http://www.regent.edu/tolleson.html.
Accessed on 21.04.10. 2:30 p.m.

43

The serious man is serious precisely through the originality with which he comes back in
repetition. [...] In this sense seriousness means the personality itself, and only a serious
personality is a real personality, and only a serious personality can do anything seriously,
for to do something seriously one needs first of all to know what is the object to which
seriousness is directed. [...] This object every man has, for it is himself, [...].42

We can interpret these remarks in this way that the man himself is the ultimate truth and
if he realizes that then he is able to do everything seriously. His source of seriousness therefore
will be issued eternally from within himself which is also the matter of inwardness. Otherwise
whatever he does it becomes habitual which ends gradually. Only a serious person is capable of
coming back regularly every time with the same originality to the same thing.

However, Alexanders own belief in the story of the parched tree for us is questionable.
Here he says that if we every single day at the same time perform the same act systematically
like a ritual the world would be changed. However, then he gives the superficial example of
getting up every morning at a certain time pouring a glass of water from the tap and flushing
down the toilet. Such an act cannot be the matter of seriousness as also Kierkegaard says:

It is in this sense that Constantine Constantius said in Repetition (p. 6) Repetition is the
seriousness of existence and that it is not lifes seriousness to be a royal equerry, even if
such a man every time he mounted his horse were to do it with all possible seriousness. 43

c) In the Face of Crisis: The Characters

Kierkegaard believed that the individual existence is discovered in the face of the crisis.
The individual usually is forgetful about his existence in the face of day to day life. He leads a
kind of habitual life avoid of any meaning. What can shake him only is his confrontation with

42

Soren Kierkegaard. The Concept of Dread. Translated by Walter Lowrie. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1957). p 132-133.
43
Ibid. p 133.

44

death. Tarkovsky himself also says:

I believe that it is always through spiritual crisis that healing occurs. A spiritual crisis is
an attempt to find oneself, to acquire new faith. It is the apportioned lot of everyone
whose objectives are on the spiritual plane. And how could it be otherwise when the soul
yearns for harmony, and life is full of discordance. This dichotomy is the stimulus for
movement, the source at once of our pain and of our hope: confirmation of our spiritual
depths and potential. 44

We can see this in the transforming nature of all the characters especially of Alexanders
when they come to know about the nuclear threat in the course of the film. Alexander is such a
character that cannot adopt himself to the situation as other characters do. He is the only one,
feeling responsible not only for his family but at a higher level for the whole world. Tarkovsky
adores such people when he says:

I have always liked people who cant adapt themselves to life pragmatically. There have
never been any heroes in my films [...] but there have always been people whose strength
lies in their spiritual conviction and who take upon themselves a responsibility for others
[...]. Such people are often rather like children, only with the motivation of adults; from a
common sense point of view their position is unrealistic as well as selfless. 45

In the beginning Alexander while addressing his son reveals his boredom and exhaustion
about the human life. His passive contemplation and expectation for change in the current
situation shows him vulnerable in face of the forthcoming crisis. He is the representation of
human conscience which tragically undergoes a great change in the course of the film. His
boredom turns to anguish, fear and despair. In one of the important scenes he who did not seem

44
Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting In Time: Reflection on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. (London: The
Bobley Head, 1986). p 193.
45

Ibid. p 207.

45

to believe in God earlier, in his despair now kneels and utters the following words while he is in
tears:

Lord! Deliver us in this terrible time. Dont let my children die, nor my friends... my
wife...Victor...All those who love Thee and believe in Thee...All those who dont believe
in Thee because they are blind...Those who havent given Thee a thought...Simply
because they havent yet been truly miserable. All those who in this hour have lose their
hope, their future...their lives and the opportunity to surrender to Thy will. All those who
are filled with dread....who feel the End coming closer...Who fear, but not for themselves,
but for their loved ones, all those whom no one, except Thou can offer protection.
Because this war is ultimate war, a horrible thing, and after it, there will be no victors and
no vanquished...no cities or town, grass or trees, water in the wells, or birds in the sky. I
will give Thee all I have. I will give up my family, whom I love. Ill destroy my home
and give up Little Man. I will be mute and never speak another word to anyone. I will
relinquish everything that binds me to life...If only Thou dost restore everything as it was
before...As it was this morning and yesterday. Just let me be rid of this deadly sickening,
animal fear! Yes, everything! Lord! help me, I will do everything I have promised Thee.

What makes him act in this way is his critical condition. In fact, it shows that he
possesses that kind of inner freedom which makes him able to take the responsibility of those
who are not inwardly free. In one of the early episodes in the film, we had seen Alexander,
talking aloud to himself about how tired he is with the whole idea of just talking and not doing
anything. Later, with the news on television about the impending nuclear catastrophe,
Alexanders wife in her hysteric fit asks those present there to do something. Alexander does not
speak much in this whole episode. It is as if he is trying to resolve the deep seated conflict within
himself, the conflict between words and action. The expectations of those around him, and also
probably his own tiredness with the world of mere words, makes Alexander take the step which
no one else in the film could have taken, and thereby resolve the conflict through his sacrifice.

This choice that Alexander makes can be looked upon as an existential (ethical) paradox
in Kierkegaardian terminology. The existential paradox unlike the Hegelian conceptual paradox
46

does not have any synthesis. One has to choose either this or that and proceed in life without any
certainty about the consequences of his choice. There cannot be any set of paradigm to prescribe
the better option. Therefore, it becomes a very personal and individual choice and the individual
experiences a very deep anxiety. This is true in Alexanders case when he is in this existential
paradox, the conflict within him of whether to sacrifice or not to sacrifice best illustrates this
condition. A little later in the film Alexander would encounter another such paradox in deciding
whether to sleep with Maria or not in order to save the world. Before the crisis, there is no
paradox, no tension in Alexanders life who is a mere observer. However, this observer status
changes to active participation in the face of the catastrophe.

The other characters in the film are depicted as being mere victims of the crisis situation.
They all seem to be largely obsessed with the forthcoming danger, but none of them are shown
making any conscious choices. One of the significant characters in the film, the postman, Otto,
also depicts some existential traits. In one episode in the film Otto has the following lines:

We all are waiting for something. All my life, in fact, Ive felt as if I were waiting in a
railway station. And I have always felt as if the living have had so far hasnt actually
been real life, but a wait for it, a long wait for something real, something important.

Ottos life has been a long wait and the above lines testify to that fact. He has been
waiting for his whole life passively for something real and important to happen. Samuel
Becketts Waiting for Godot46 also talks of a similar wait which never ends. Vladimir and
Estragon, the two tramps in Becketts play absurdly wait; probably acknowledging the futility of
the action but also cannot do otherwise. Otto is impressed by Nietzsches theory of eternal
return when he says to Alexander:

Sometimes I get silly things in my head, things like this eternal rotation. We live; we
have our ups and downs. We hope. We wait for something. We hope, we lose hope, we
move closer to death. Finally we die and are born again. But we remember nothing. And
everything begins again, from scratch.
46

Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot. Edited by GJV Prasad. ( Noida: Faber and Faber, 2004).

47

Nietzsche in some of his works mainly Thus Spake Zarathustra talks about eternal
47

return. According to him, there would be no other world, neither better as Heaven, nor worse
as Hell, after death. We will be born and die again and again only in this world. We will live the
same life exactly without any memory of the past life.

Ottos life appears meaningless in the face of the repetitive life that he has been leading.
He lacks that inner freedom and insight which leads Alexander to sacrifice. He seems to believe
in the law of predetermination which probably in certain ways prevents him take any action in
his life. However Alexander does not believe in the eternal return of Nietzsche but he has a
Nietzschean tone in talking to Little Man:

Man has defended himself, always against other men, against Nature. He has constantly
violated Nature. The result is a civilization built on force, power, fear, dependence. All
our technical progress, has only provided us with comfort, a sort of standard. We use
the microscope like a cudgel! No, thats wrong Savages are more spiritual than we! As
soon as we make a scientific breakthrough, we put it to use in the service of evil. And as
for standard, some wise man once said that sin is that which is unnecessary. If that is so,
then our entire civilization is built on sin, from beginning to end. We have acquired a
dreadful disharmony, an imbalance, if you will, between our material and our spiritual
development. Our culture is defective!

There is a kind of cynicism in Alexanders view towards human being. In his criticism of
civilization he puts the whole responsibility on human being and what makes him responsible
and blameworthy for the present situation is his freedom. It indicates that man is free to build his
life and at the same time his society. It is completely opposite of Ottos fatalistic idea about
eternal return of life which consider no freedom for man and therefore no responsibility,
everything happens as it has been before.
47

Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Translated by Thomas Common. (New York : Dover Publication,
Inc., 1999). p 155-156.

48

It is Otto who suggests some solutions to Alexander when the latter is in fear. Otto
suggests Alexander to sleep with Maria whom he considers to be a witch and believes that such
an act on Alexanders part would help them overcome the crisis situation. On the other hand,
Otto even in such a crisis situation is depicted as passive and only capable of making suggestions
but not doing anything practically. Otto gifts a map to Alexander and terms it a sacrifice.
However, in the face of real danger and necessity, Otto is unable to sacrifice in the real sense of
the term. It seems as if his understanding of sacrifice is limited to the extent of parting with
personal possessions when they are to be materially gifted. On the other hand, Alexanders
notion and understanding of sacrifice encompasses the whole of humanity and involves greater
and almost unimaginable deeds in practical life which Otto would never be able to understand.

Unhappiness and dissatisfaction seems to pervade the entire film. All the characters are in
certain ways dissatisfied and unhappy with their lives, professions and with whatever they have
been doing so far. For example, Victor, the doctor and Alexanders friend who intends to move
to Australia to change his life in certain ways asks Alexander:

Have you never felt that your life was a failure?

This very question reveals that Victor himself is also contemplating the futility of his life
and career. Alexanders answer to Victor also illustrates a mood of dissatisfaction:

I prepared myself for a life. A higher life, so to speak, I studied philosophy, the history of
religion, aesthetics. And I ended up putting myself in a chain of my own free will.

In another episode, Adelaide, Alexanders wife reveals her mind and heart and those
undeclared thoughts in her mind after coming to know of the nuclear catastrophe:

Why do we always do the opposite of what we want? I have loved one manand married
another, why?

49

All the characters in the film seem hopeless in the face of the catastrophe. Hope is
manifested only in the character of Alexander through his sacrifice and is metaphorically
represented in the figure of Little Man. Little Man, Alexanders son we learn has brought hope in
the latters life. Before Little Man, Alexanders life was filled with despair and meaninglessness.
In fact, everybody is concerned about Little Man in the film and wants to keep him away from
the catastrophe. While planting the tree with Little Man Alexander plants his faith and
commitment in his son. At the time of the crisis Alexander becomes desperate to save his hope,
his Little Man from destruction.

It seems to me that there is a contrast towards the end of the film where we witness a
strange behaviour on Alexanders part. He seems to be satisfied on having made his sacrifice.
There is a childlike innocence in Alexander when he runs around with others trying to get hold
of him. His behaviour remains incomprehensible to others and even to a certain extent for the
audience. That is why his family thinking him to be insane, sends him to the hospital.
Nevertheless, on a closer and more attentive look, we recognize that Tarkovsky wanted to imply
something much beyond ordinary madness in Alexanders behaviour. Having put Alexander to a
test of faith, faith around which the whole human existence revolves, Tarkovsky shows us that it
is faith that can and will save the world. This faith has been passed on from Alexander to his son
Little Man, who we see faithfully continues to water the parched tree at the end of the film. He is
a mature individual when we compare him to the last image of Alexander that we get.

In the face of death Tarkovsky left the world with the conviction laid down in this film,
that it is the lack of spiritual values that threatens our existence and it is faith alone that can
override such a situation.

d) Kierkegaards The Three Stages in The Sacrifice

In the film Alexander talks about his experience on the stage as an actor in the past, and
how he gradually started feeling that he is losing his identity by acting different roles. He says:

50

For some reason I started feeling embarrassed on stage, I was ashamed to impersonate
someone else, to play others emotion, but worst of all I was ashamed of being honest on
stage. What I mean is that an actor identity dissolves in his roles. I didnt want my ego
dissolves.

In some way we can say that he was at this stage in the aesthetical mode of existence.
According to Kierkegaard, it is the life of moment and each moment includes a period, this
period can be one hour, six months, two years or the whole life. So in this way we can look at
each role as a moment that has been personified by Alexander on the stage. The desire for
creating every role in the best way gives pleasure and satisfaction to the actor. He lives for that
moment on the stage every day. Therefore, that moment repeated itself by every performance
through different roles. Each moment or each role is meaningful in itself but when Alexander
thinks about his life as a whole he finds that his whole life has been meaningless, just repetition
of different roles on the stage. It leads Alexander to boredom. Then he feels he is losing his own
identity, so this realization makes him leave the acting stage for ever and walk to the next, that is,
the ethical stage.

In the beginning of the film when we see Alexander we find him in the ethical mode,
which is the life of reason. He judges about history of mankind in a very ethical way. What gives
us more proof to consider him as an ethical person is that moment when Otto asks Alexander
about his idea of God and Alexander answers Non Existent. In the ethical mode of existence
God does not have any place, everything including morality is based on universal reason. There
is another moment when Otto suggests to Alexander to sleep with Maria in order to prevent the
catastrophe, Alexanders first reaction is laughing at him because he cannot imagine sleeping
with other woman while he is married. He is committed to his wife. He apparently refuses to do
it at that moment.

In his encounter with death he walks on to the religious stage. It is the life of faith and it
happens by a leap. In the religious mode of existence everything is possible because it is the
domain of irrationality. As we see in a very desperate mood Alexander kneels and vows to God
that he will give up all his life, his property just to save the world and above all his family. He
51

not only sacrifices his property but also in another sense he sacrifices his morality by ignoring
his ethical principle and sleeping with Maria. These acts of sacrificing can be justified and
understood only through religion. He is ready to do whatever he can just to prevent the crisis. So
we see how Alexander at the end when everybody is out burns his house.

1.4. Technical Aspects of The Sacrifice

1.4.1. The Unity of Image in Space and Time

The Sacrifice like other films by Tarkovsky contains the same technical characteristics
which make him quite distinct from that of the rest of contemporary film makers though also
there are some similarities between his style and that of others like Bergman, Bresson, and
Antonioni and so on. In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky at length discuses about the film
image. For him the power of artistic image lies in the fact that it is able to express the totality of
the universe that which we are not able to comprehend personally. For him an artistic image is an
impression of the truth elusive and indivisible even in its simplest manifestation. A true artistic
image gives the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory,
sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings.48 A sheer example of this phenomenon can be
explained through the Japanese poetry (Haiku) where the poet expresses his observation of
reality in three lines. What captivates Tarkovsky about Haiku is:

[...] the refusal even to hint at the kind of final image meaning that can be gradually
deciphered like a charade. Haiku cultivates its image in such a way that they mean
nothing beyond themselves, and at the same time express so much that it is not possible
to catch their meaning.49

Under this impression Tarkovsky attempts to capture a universal meaning in every day
detail in his films as he believes that life is richer than imagination. One of the ways in which,
48

Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting In Time: Reflection on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. (London: The
Bobley Head, 1986). p 109.
49

Ibid. p 106.

52

Tarkovsky tries to achieve this quality is through using camera as a means of observation. The
powerful factor concealed in using long takes, depth of focus and tracking shots in Tarkovskys
cinema lies in the fact that the images reveal themselves in actual time and space which run
through the frame. This method leads to the unity of the image in space and time which
according to Andre Bazin:

Objects and characters are related in such a fashion that it is impossible for the spectator
to miss the significance of the scene. To get the same result by way of montage would
have necessitated a detailed succession of shots.50

In Tarkovskys cinema the characters are depicted in constant relation to the surroundings
and nature and this wouldnt be possible by using montage but long takes. This is evident in both
interior and exterior scenes. In The Sacrifice, interior shots with the constant interaction of the
characters freely with the actual time spent in each shot give us the sense of reality.

The eerie, mysterious and nightmarish moments also in the film are created by long takes
and slow camera movements whereas Montage by its very nature rules out ambiguity of
expression.51 These techniques not only affects on the structure of the film but also it affects
the relationships of the minds of the spectators to the image, and in consequence it influences the
interpretation of the spectacle.52

50

Andre Bazin. What is Cinema? Translated by Hugh Gray. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of
California Press, 1967). p 34-35.
51
52

Ibid. p 36.
Ibid. p 35.

53

The most memorable scene in The Sacrifice is the scene where everybody is running
frantically in front of the burning house. In this scene the spectators are allowed to see the whole
scene in one shot without interruption with its actual time and this creates an impressive and
unforgettable moment not only in the film but in the whole history of cinema.

This notion of unity of image in space and time is completely opposed to Sergei
Eisensteins theory of montage. In Eisensteinian montage there is no place for spectator personal
interpretation; the director dictates his idea of the film to the spectator whereas Bazin believes
that the interpretation of a film or scene should be left to the spectator. In the same way
Tarkovsky also rules out the importance of editing in his films by using long takes in order to
preserve the unity of image in space and time.

Eisenstein believed that montage is the formative element of cinema and the rhythm of
the film is determined mechanically by the length of the edited pieces. Whereas in Tarkovskys
belief time becomes the very foundation of cinema: as sound is in music, colour in painting,
character in drama.53 He believes that the course of time which runs through the frame
constitutes the rhythm of the picture. It is called time-pressure. Therefore editing for Tarkovsky,
means only the assembly of the shots on the basis of time-pressure within them. For him editing
only creates the structure of the film and not the rhythm. Therefore, the image and its timepressure has to be captured while shooting and not on the editing table. As he explains in his
book:

53

Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting In Time: Reflection on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. (London: The
Bobley Head, 1986). p 119.

54

The cinema image comes into being during shooting, and exists within the frame. During
shooting, therefore, I concentrate on the course of time in the frame, in order to reproduce
it and record it. Editing brings together shots which are already filled with time, and
organizes the unified, living structure inherent in the film; and the time that pulsates
through the blood vessels of the film, making it alive, is of varying rhythmic pressure.54

1.4.2. Painting: Adoration of the Magi

The film starts with a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi which is
unfinished. It appears that the whole message of the film in some way is hidden in this painting.
The Virgin Mary and Child (Jesus) are depicted in the foreground with the Magi kneeling in
front of them in adoration. In the background is visible a palm tree. We need to note in this
regard that the palm tree has had different significances in various points in history. For example,
in ancient Rome the palm was a symbol of victory. In Christianity on the other hand, the palm
tree came to symbolize martyrdom, which can also be interpreted as a victory over death. Thus in
both these cases the palm tree can be looked upon as denoting victory or triumph.

In the very next shot we find Alexander is planting a Japanese tree beside the river. It
seems to me that the image of the tree in Da Vincis painting is related metaphorically to the tree
that Alexander plants. We must remember here that in the last shot of the film the image of the
same tree returns with Little Man watering and lying down under the same tree. In both these
shots (first and last) the element of hope seems to recur. In the first shot we have infant Christ

54

Ibid. p 114.

55

symbolizing hope. In the final scene Little Man as if epitomizes the same kind of hope but in a
different world. All the images of the tree therefore seem to be connected intricately in the film.

This painting by Da Vinci appears many times in the film. One such important moment at
which the painting appears is when Alexander kneels down and prays to God. Here again we are
shown the same painting in the background. It is as if the painting again brings some element of
hope in an otherwise hopeless world. Alexander looks at the painting and starts uttering a prayer
which probably he has not uttered in many years. If this painting is the source of hope for
Alexander it is the source of fear for Otto. In another episode exactly at the moment before the
T.V news of nuclear threat Otto talks about the same painting and expresses his fear in the
following words:

My God, how sinister it is! Ive always been terrified of Leonardo.

It is as if Tarkovsky uses Otto as his spoke person to express his own feelings of dilemma
towards Da Vincis painting. In his book Sculpting in Time Tarkovsky says:

There are two things about Leonardos images that are arresting. One is the artists
amazing capacity to examine the object from outside, standing back, looking from above
the world-a characteristic of artists like Bach or Tolstoy. And the other, the fact that the
picture affects us simultaneously in two opposite ways, it is not possible to say what
impression the portrait finally makes on us.55

55

Ibid. p 108.

56

While examining one such painting by da Vinci, The Lady with a Juniper, Tarkovsky
explains how this mixed feeling is evoked. According to him, it is difficult to either completely
like or dislike the character in the painting because:

She is at once attractive and at the same time repulsive, fiendish. And fiendish not at all
in the romantic, alluring sense of the word; rather beyond good and evil. Charm with a
negative sign. It has an element of degeneracy and of beauty. 56

The character who epitomizes some of these features is Maria. It is noteworthy how she
has been depicted in the film. Some of her close shots remind us of da Vincis portraits. In fact,
Marias character is shrouded in some kind of mystery like The Lady with The Juniper. Maria
evokes mixed feelings in the audience. On the one hand her strange look frightens us while on the
other hand she is the redeemer in whom Alexander seeks refuge.

Thus the paintings play a vital role in communicating Tarkovskys ideology to his
viewers. All the paintings shown in the film (Alexander flips through the book of painting, a
birthday gift given by Victor to him) depicts a world which has been lost. There seems to be an
element of lament for the past which cannot be retrieved.

1.4.3. Three Narrations

In the film there are three narrations told by the characters. The first narration is the story
of the Monk and the Parched tree narrated by Alexander to his son. It is the most important story
56

Ibid. p 108.

57

which carries in itself the message of the film. The film opens with planting a tree by Alexander
and his son and closes with the watering of the same tree by the son. What makes these two shots
significant is only the narrated story by Alexander. The story is a maxim which emphasizes on
faith that is neglected as the most important element for human salvation in the modern
materialistic world.

The second narration is told by Otto to Alexanders family. As he mentions in the film he
is a collector. He collects incidents which are unexplainable logically but true. He tells the story
of the widow and her son:

In Konigsberg, a widow was living with her son. But then war broke out and was drafted.
He was 18 years old. They decided to see a photographer and have a keepsake photo
taken. The mother and her son were photographed together. Then the boy was sent off to
the front. A few days later, he was killed. In the midst of all the commotion and calamity,
the widow, of course, forgot about the photos. The fact is, this woman never fetched the
photographs. The war ended. She moved to another town far from her memories. Some
years later, I think it was in 1960, the widow visited a photographer to have her own
photo taken. She intended to give it to a friend. The photo was taken but when she got
the prints she saw not only herself on them, but her dead son, too. In the photos he was 18
and she was as old as she was when these last photos were taken.

Otto has collected many such incidents which are beyond human understanding.
According to him we have lost our ability to understand these irrational incidents. He believes
that we are simply blind and we see nothing. And it is all due to our rational and scientific
approach towards human life. As we are leading a materialistic life in confrontation with
immaterial phenomena we have failed to understand them rationally. We can perhaps look at this
story (The widow and her son) that we may lose our loved ones but their memories continue
their life in our mind. They are not dead in this sense as we miss them only physically. The
mother sees his dead son in the photo beside herself after many years as he is part of her life and
memory and it is only the matter of love.

58

The third narration is a memory of Alexander told to Maria: the story of the garden and
his mother. He says:

Her house, a little cottage, was surrounded by a garden a little garden, dreadfully
neglected and overgrown. No one had tended it for many years and I dont think
anyone had ever been in it. Even then, my mother was very ill. She almost never left the
house. Still, amidst the ruin of the garden there was something that was, in its way,
beautiful. Yet, now I know what it was. When the weather was fine she often sat at the
window looking out at the garden. She even had a special chair by the window. Once,
though, I decided that I would tidy things up in the garden, that is. I wanted to mow the
grass, burn the weeds, prune the trees. On the whole, I wanted to re-do the garden in my
own taste with my own hands. Yes, simply to please my mother. And for two solid
weeks I went at it with shears and a scythe. I dug and cut and sawed and
weeded I kept my nose to the garden, literally. And I took great pains to get it ready as
soon as possible. My mothers condition grew worse, and she kept to her bed. But I
wanted her to be able to sit by the window and see her new garden. In short, when I
was finished and everything was ready I took a bath put on fresh underwear, a new
jacket, even a tie. Then I sat down in the chair to see what Id made, through her eyes, as
it were. I sat there and looked out through the window. I had prepared myself to enjoy
the sight. Anyway, I looked out the window and saw what did I see? Where had all the
beauty gone? The naturalness of it? It was so disgusting. All that evidence of violence! I
remember once when my sister was young she went to a barber and had her hair cut. It
was the fashion then. Her hair was unbelievably lovely. Golden yellow, like lady
Godivas. She came home pleased as a punch. Then my father saw her. He began to cry. I
think it was the same with the garden.

Through this episode Tarkovsky subtly points to the disjuncture that has already
happened between man and nature. In the modern world, man has lost contact with nature in its
naturalness. Whatever connection man has with nature seems to be that of interference, where he
makes bombs and nuclear weapons which in turn can only destroy nature. Narrating this story to
Maria at this particular point in the film is significant. Alexander sees in Maria the figure of the
59

saviour, one who is close to innocent nature, and therefore is capable of helping modern man
connect back to nature again.

Tarkovsky uses such narrations technically and elaborately as a means in order to enrich
his story. These narrations enhance the poetic and philosophical appeal of the film. The core
message of the film is hidden in these narrations. These three narrations in the film respectively,
emphasize on faith, love, memory and mans intrusion into nature.

1.4.4. Cinematic Codes

In this film Tarkovsky has used several cinematic codes which need to be decoded by a
conscious and trained observation of the film. One such important code refers to the relationship
of Alexander and Maria. There are two interesting moments in the film where Alexanders final
intimacy with Maria has been foreseen owing to the way in which they are captured in two shots.
Once in the beginning when outside the house they are talking about the miniature house which
Little Man has made for Alexander as his birthday gift. Here Alexander stands in such a position
with respect to Maria that their close proximity suggests has further implication. Alexander
stands behind Maria in such a way he seems bodily attached to Maria.

The second shot is when Alexander goes to Marias home to sleep with her in order to
save the world of the impending catastrophe. Again here Maria is fixed in her place beside the
table and Alexander walks towards her and stands behind her in such way that Maria helps to
cover Alexander. He is silent to Marias curiosity about why he has come there.

60

These shots can possibly be interpreted into two different ways. One way of looking at
them would be to look upon Maria as Alexanders ultimate refuge in the face of crisis. The other
possible reading of these would be a foreshadowing of the physical intimacy that Alexander and
Maria would share towards the end of film. Alexander in his despair kneels in front of Maria
and begs Maria to save them. Maria feels compassion towards Alexander and tries to comfort
him. It is interesting to note the mystical atmosphere of the love making scene, where we see
them almost revolving mid air.

1.4.5. Nightmares

Alexanders nightmares in the film, owing to his critical condition can be looked upon as
a technical device used by Tarkovsky to reflect the inner world of Alexander. Originally these
nightmares were longer and more explicit but while editing Tarkovsky had to shorten them
because of the long period of the film. Now it is difficult to say what exactly they mean in the
course of the film. They are mostly in black and white.

The first nightmare is in the beginning of the film where Alexander in a self reflection is
talking to Little Man sitting under a tree. Suddenly Little Man falls on Alexanders head. He
faints then next shot we see an empty narrow street full of garbage scattered everywhere. The
camera tilts down slowly we see a crashed down car, some broken chairs here and there and at
the end camera reaches a mirror and the reflection of some buildings in it. This scene creates a
kind of apocalyptic feeling of the modern civilization. In fact it is a foreboding of the imminent
nuclear catastrophe. The music accompanying this scene also helps in building the atmosphere of
destruction and doom. The eerie traditional chants of the Swedish forests used by farm girls to
61

bring back the cattle from the forest pastures, is used here. The music can be interpreted in at
least two ways. Firstly, it echoes a harmonious past where nature was in its prime un-intruded by
human machinery. Secondly, the deserted look of the scene with traces of destruction all around
creates an ambience of emptiness and void. It reminds one of the dead past peeping into the
modern world which is best symbolized by nuclear bombs and wars. Interestingly from the
nightmare there is a direct cut to the pictures of the Old Russian icons. It seems as if Tarkovsky
is contrasting the achievement of the modern society which epitomizes destruction to that of
classical world of values.

The second nightmare happens after Alexander prays to God. In his exhaustion
apparently he falls asleep on the sofa. It is very difficult to say what this nightmare is about. The
same eerie Swedish music plays in the background. The grey atmosphere, the ambiguous
movement of the camera, the overlapping chaotic images, swampy ground, scattered coins, the
naked Marta (Alexanders teenage daughter) calling to Victor for help and the other images give
a vague insight into Alexanders restless mind. He gets up into reality by the harsh sound of a
plane which echoes from the nightmare into reality.

The third and the last nightmare happen after he lies down with Maria. Here we have the
same image of the narrow street as in the first nightmare. However, it is not an empty street this
62

time. We have many people running here and there. They seem to be frightened and
directionless. With the camera movement we reach to the image of Little Man sleeping
somewhere while his face is hidden. Then some other images like Maria sitting beside Alexander
lying under a tree and again Marta running in a room naked followed by Adoration of the Magis
image and Alexanders wife standing behind the curtain while holding a glass. Here apart from
that eerie music we have also a Japanese flute playing in the background. We can hear also
Alexanders hysteric groaning.

However, we cannot be certain about what actually happens between Maria and
Alexander. With the end of third nightmare we have Alexander sleeping on the sofa in his room
indicating as if the whole previous episode (when Otto wakes up Alexander and suggests him to
sleep with Mari as a last alternative to avoid the imminent danger) was also part of the
nightmare. When he gets up in the morning everything seems normal and still the Japanese flute
is going on. Instead of the gloomy atmosphere now we have bright sunshine and sharp colours in
the room. However, the whole episode is full of ambiguities because we cannot be certain about
when the nightmare begins and when reality ends.

The above study is one of the several different ways of understanding Tarkovskys The
Sacrifice. Given the highly ambiguous nature of the film and its images, each viewer may come
up with a distinct reading of the same film. Despite such obstacles it goes without saying that this
last film by Tarkovsky leaves us contemplating many important questions about the crisis of the
modern world in which we live. As Tarkovsky has noted about his films in general:

In one form or another all my films have made the point that people are not alone and
abandoned in an empty universe, but are linked by countless threads with the past and the
63

future; that as each person lives his life he forges a bond with the whole world, indeed
with the whole history of mankind. But the hope that each separate life and every
human action has intrinsic meaning makes the responsibility of the individual for the
overall course of human life incalculably greater.57

The Sacrifice is the complete representation of Tarkovskys principles towards cinema

and above all the life itself. By the time of his death in 1986, Tarkovsky had become a symbol
of the cinema of artistic conscience. He influenced the European cinema during the 1970s and
1980s by his unique artistic approach. Tarkovsky as a self-conscious auteur demanded that art
should be a moral quest: Masterpieces are born of the artist's struggle to express his ethical
ideals.58

57
58

Ibid. p 205-206.
Ibid. p 27.

64

Angelopoulos watches things calmly through the lens. It is the weight of his calm and the sharpness
of his unmoving regard that give his films their power. - Akira Kurosawa

CHAPTER III

An Existential Interpretation of Theo Angelopouloss

The Suspended Step of the Stork

1.1. Theodoros Angelopoulos (b. 1935)

Theodoros Angelopoulos is a contemporary Greek film maker. The world of

Angelopouloss cinema is built on a ground with multiple layers which need to be deciphered in
order to be understood. Each of his films is a journey towards history, an everlasting journey in
search of lost identity, cultural roots and their relation to present time. We can find an
interconnection among themes, characters, locations, names in Angelopouloss works, which go
beyond history itself to suggest connections, echoes, and relationships. What makes
Angelopoulos look back into the history of twentieth century Greece is to address the issues
which have been ignored due to the political situations. His films explore the present condition of
Greece against the backdrop of it being regarded as one of the oldest historical civilizations in
the world. As Andrew Horton in his book titled The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of
Contemplation, notes:

Angelopoulos has throughout his career been completely fascinated with history. []
For his cinema leads us to question both what history itself is and what it means to be
Greek or, for that matter, an individual within any state.59
59

Andrew Horton. The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation. (Princeton, New York: Princeton
University Press, 1997). p 9.

65

For Angelopoulos, cinema is an aesthetic as well as a cultural medium which forces the
audiences into the role of co-author as they have to meditate on the images and events that
unfold on the screen. Angelopoulos commented once on the art of his cinema in the following
way:
The world needs cinema now more than ever. It may be the last important form of
resistance to the deteriorating world in which we live. In dealing with borders,
boundaries, the mixing of languages and cultures today, I am trying to seek a new
humanism, a new way.60

Angelopoulos belongs to a group of filmmakers whose cinema needs to be understood in

the context of their culture. Horton finds some similarities between Angelopoulos and a number
of other directors, including the Hungarian director Milks Jancso, for his long takes and exterior
tracking shots; Japanese film makers Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiros Ozu for their use of silence
and off-camera space; Orson Welles, for his exploration of deep focus; and Eisenstein, for his
dialectical approach to history and cinema. There is also a parallel between Angelopoulos and
Andrei Tarkovsky in their handling of culture and history. Both of them go beyond conventional
cinema to establish their own distinct voices.

Angelopoulos shares some of the elements of French realism with Robert Bresson
through his simplicity and minimalism. Bresson expresses his philosophy brilliantly that less is
definitely more in respect to cinema by saying, Build your film on white, on silence, and on
stillness.61 Angelopoulos also gives us the freedom to experience the realism of the image as it
unfolds in real time with a minimum of camera movement. As Angelopoulos claims:

I draw techniques from everything Ive seen [] I continue to love [] very much the
films of Murnau, Mizoguchi, Antonioni. More recently: Tarkovskys Stalker, Godards
Every Man for Himself and of course Ordet []. But the only specific influences I

60

Ibid. p 30.
Robert Bresson. Notes on Cinematography. Translated by Jonathan Griffin. (New York: Urizen Books, 1977).
p71.

61

66

acknowledge are Orsen Welles, for his use of plan-sequece and deep focus, and
Mizoguchi, for his use of time and off-camera space.62

However, with respect to these similarities it is difficult yet to mistake an Angelopoulos

film from that of any other director. His style of long shots, 360-degree pans, lengthy takes,
extended tracking shots, scant dialogues, and deliberate paces are the collective mark of an
uncompromising individuality. The heart of his work lies in his poetic use of time, and
particularly his intertwining of the past and the present, history and myth, melancholy and desire.
As Horton points out, Angelopoulos reconfigures time, most notably in his practice of spanning
different historical periods in one shot. The technique encourages the spectator to think not only
about the process of the unfolding of a moment or moments as they occur in time and space but
also, more importantly, to step beyond the image on the screen and establish meaning.

1.2. The Suspended Step of the Stork: Synopsis

The film opens with helicopters circling over the dead bodies floating on the sea at
Piraeus, the port of Athens. The main character, Alexander, a television reporter, explains in a
voice over that he was on his way to a border town to do a story on refugees. The bodies are
those of stowaways who were refused asylum by the Greek authorities, and rather than returning
to their own countries, jumped to their deaths.
In a small border town called the Waiting Room, by the local people, thousands of
refugees are waiting for the Greek authorities to give them their papers to go elsewhere.
Alexander beside the riverfront market, spots for the first time a person who looks very similar to
a famous Greek former politician who had inexplicably disappeared some years ago. In order to
get some information Alexander meets the former politicians French wife. He comes to know
that the first disappearance of the politician was after he had written a controversial book,
Despair at the End of the Century, and his return as another man and then shortly after that he
disappeared the second time for ever.

62

Andrew Horton. The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation. (Princeton, New York: Princeton
University Press, 1997). p 73.

67

Alexander in refugees town, at the bar of a hotel confronts with a mysterious girl staring
insistently at him. Eventually, she follows Alexander back to his room and spends the night with
him apparently. Later on Alexander in his another encounter with the girl comes to know that she
is the same refugee mans daughter. In order to find out the truth Alexander tries to arrange a
meeting between the former politicians wife and the refugee man who he believes to be her
ex-husband. In their encounter she denies that he is her ex-husband.
Then the colonel informs Alexander that there will be a wedding between a refugee girl
and her childhood friend, who lives across the border. Alexander comes to know that it is the
same girl, the refugee mans daughter, with whom he has spent a night a few nights before. In
the next scene in the morning, a small group of people with the bride and her father, the refugee
man, go on the Greek shore of the river that marks the border. They face another small crowd
standing on the opposite shore with the groom. When the priest arrives, the wedding commences.
Alexander and his crew at the same time are filming the ceremony.
The next morning the Colonel informs Alexander that several people have given different
accounts of the refugee man leaving the town. The Colonel further states that he is unable to
confirm or deny these stories about the refugee man. The film ends with a striking scene of
men in yellow jackets on the top of the telephone poles which run along the border of the river,
stringing telephone wires from pole to pole.
1.3. An Existential Analysis of The Suspended Step of the Stork

The beginning of war in the Middle East from the eighties onwards on the one hand and
the collapse of Communism and Balkan wars in the early nineties in Eastern Europe on the other
hand brought huge changes in those areas. These events were accompanied by a period of
political and economic instability and tragic events. Therefore, the hardship of life and economic
suppression forced the people to emigrate from their countries to the western countries.

With the increasing ethnic turmoil in the Balkan region during the nineties, Angelopoulos
returned to the theme of cross cultural migration to examine the artificially divisive nature of
geographic borders. In The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), he illustrates not only the painful
68

absurdity and human consequence of arbitrary, man-made frontiers, but also humanity's innate
capacity to transcend these restrictive barriers: a theme that is illustrated in the parting shot of a
line of yellow jacketed workers climbing telephone poles that extend beyond the horizon. The
film tries to focus on these issues in order to question the human condition at the end of the
twentieth century. The film starts with some important questions which are narrated by
Alexander, the television reporter, over the floating bodies of stowaways on the sea; How does
one live? Why? To go where? The film attempts to provide some answers to such universal
questions which plague human beings everywhere. However, it does not suggest that there is any
definite formulaic answer to such questions. Rather, the ambiguity in the film points towards the
difficulty of answering such questions in the first place.

1.3.1. Thematically

a) Identity

According to the existentialists of the mid-twentieth century we create our own identities.
We make ourselves what we are. Therefore, we are what we will to be. According to Sartre:

Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world and defines himself
afterwards [] Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a
conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be,
but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing as he wills to
be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of
himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.63

Sartre believed that humanity has no objecting identity. Man first of all exists, then he has
to decide what his essence will be and therefore he will be responsible for what he will become.
Derek Layder in his book Social and Personal Identity64 discusses about personal identity as
existential dilemmas. The existential dilemmas are basically about what we make of ourselves in
63

Jean Paul Sartre. Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm. Accessed on 30.08.10. 10:00 a.m.
64
Derek Layder. Social and Personal Identity, Understanding Yourself. (London: SAGA Publications Ltd., 2004).

69

the world. They are about who we are, and who we are in the process of becoming, as well as
how we live our lives and the quality of our relationships. In this process the self is both the
medium and the outcome of engaging with the existential dilemmas. But at the same time
personal identity is forged at the intersection between two distinct but overlapping realities, that
of individuals and that of society. These realities are interdependent but at the same time they
have their own distinct characteristics. Psychologists and philosophers have tended to emphasize
the self as emerging exclusively from individual factors. On the other hand, sociologists and
cultural commentators have tended to see the self as a reaction of purely social forces. Both
views overlook the complexity and subtlety of the relationship between individual and social
realities, as well as how their distinctive characteristics differently influence the creation of the
self in everyday life.

The notion of identity as one of the most complicated elements has been explored in the
whole film. The story happens in a small town near the Greece Albania border which is called
Waiting Room by locals. In the abandoned part of this town the people are living together with
different nationalities from the Middle East like Turkish, Kurdish, Iraqis and Iranians to Eastern
Europeans like Polish, Albanian and Romanian etc. They are all refugees who seem to be living
there for a long time to be granted an asylum mostly political by Greek authorities till they can
go elsewhere, a mythical elsewhere which is mentioned in the film. Most of them do not have
any identity papers, their names is what they have only stated. By granting them asylum, in fact,
they are given new identity. This waiting which seems everlasting sometimes cost them their
lives but they can do nothing about it, they even cannot go back to their countries. On the other
hand, as this town seemingly is the town of unidentified people whoever steps in it seems to lose
his identity. In the scene when the ex-wife of the former politician confronts him, she does not
identify him as her ex-husband. In another scene Alexander, the television reporter, asks the girl
why she has called him by another name. A waiter also tells the story of how their mothers
carved a wound as a sign on their childrens arm with a knife to preserve their race as Greek
when they grow up.
These people try to hold on to their identities but some external forces prevent them from
doing so. A town has been divided in two parts by a river as a border line but what can cross this
border virtually is race and cultural attachments of the people. However, the problem arises when
70

the individual choices coincide with social and geographical divisions. For example, the refugees
in the town are there by their own volition but on the other hand it is also a situation which has
been imposed on them by social and geographical restrictions, which they cannot overcome or
avoid. This duality is repeatedly explored in the film and becomes important in understanding
the notion of identity in its complex dimension.
The people are able to leave their land but cannot leave or ignore their cultural roots. The
cultural roots are threads which attach them to their identities. What we get from the film shows
that the idea of identity is beyond all these artificial boundaries. Therefore, we see that people
have different paradigms of living rather than only geographical boundaries.
In his last message on the cassette the politician refers to his selfless condition in his
journey. He is a mere nameless visitor who has to borrow a name once a while. He carries no
identity marks, no belongings, only a painful wound which is also a secret. The town is a
transitory place to go elsewhere, a mythical elsewhere, a suspended condition of the modern
world at the end of the twentieth century.

b) Boundary and Freedom

While Sartre does continually illustrate the absurdity of existence but he urges us to
challenge this absurdity through our freedom, which is then naturally both our condemnation and
our liberation. Sartre instructs us that we are to invent meanings for our lives through sheer acts
of freedom, creating those meanings out of nothing. According to Sartre, man is free. In fact, he
is condemned to be free. This is the positive side of Sartres philosophy in his claim by which he
shifts the whole responsibility from any external force to man himself. What was specific to
man, as distinct from animals, was this freedom to shape and to construct human beings. For
existentialism, authentic freedom was located in the space of everyday life, in the world, among
things and men.

71

The situation of man is that he cannot escape the necessity of choice; even not to choose
is a choice. Thus for Sartre, freedom is always an ontologically conditioned freedom. As he
believes:
There is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom.
Human-reality everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created,
but these resistances and obstacles have meaning only in and through the free choice
which human reality is.65

In Being and Nothingness Sartre explains that freedom is secured against a background of
constraints. These limitations arise from the constraints of the modern world, from other people,
from our own bodily existence, and even from our fear of freedom in and of itself. As we see in
the film the refugees are living in a situation suppressed by external authorities. Their plight is
the result of their being free to choose, to cross the border by considering the fact that they were
also free not to cross the border and stay in their country irrespective of the danger they would
face in their country. Therefore, they are responsible for what they have made of their lives. The
consequent situation still will rest upon their choices. As Sartre believed, people usually desire to
surrender their freedoms to external authorities. However, any denial of their freedom will lead
them to bad faith as they are even responsible for their very desire of fleeting responsibilities.
Paradoxically, on the other hand, Sartre believes, the more oppressed we are externally,
the freer we can be in our own decisions, in our single lives.66 It indicates that we are able to
realize our freedom much more in an oppressed situation. Freedom would mean nothing if there
were no obstacle in human life. Freedom for Sartre was not a victory over others and over things,
a tribute to self discipline and cunning. On the contrary, it was the realization of authenticity, the
emergence of men as men and things as things.
The sad irony about these refugees is that they have crossed the borders to achieve
freedom as it is said by the Colonel in the film, but they have ended up there again with other
65

Jean Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness, An Essay on phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E.
Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956 ). p 489.

66

Marjorie Grene. Introduction to Existentialism. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). p 96.

72

borders. In the beginning the Colonel while walking towards the border line asks Alexander: Do
you know what borders are? And then after some steps while standing suspended on the border
line he himself somehow answers the question: If I take one more step Im elsewhere or I
die.

We can interpret the Colonels statement in this way; being elsewhere so far as
geographical borders are concerned but being dead as far as religious or political borders are
concerned. This incident reveals how the border lines which are man-made, create the idea of
nationality, and carries in them the notion of culture, religion, politics, language and race. Here
in the film Angelopoulos tries to explore the notion of boundary. The border literally indicates
limitation. These refugees have crossed the geographical boundaries but it seems they are unable
to cross their political, cultural and religious boundaries. Though the border lines themselves are
an absurd phenomenon, they signify the very notion of identity.

It seems that they have in this long journey also carried with them all their problems.
Thus, freedom even if it is achieved would always be a burdened one, and thereby would defeat
the very idea of freedom. It is this absurd human condition in all his boundaries that is truly
captured through Angelopouloss camera. It seems that crossing geographical boundaries is not
the ultimate solution while man is bordered by his prejudices. In one scene the refugee man
tells the Television reporter: we crossed the border but we are still here, how many borders must
we cross, before we are home? This also leads us to ponder on the very idea of home. Where
can we feel at home? What is the main characteristic of home? The answer can probably be
figured out in one word: freedom. Wherever we feel free there we feel at home, otherwise we
73

will be a stranger even if we live in our own homeland. Without freedom there is no home which
is the condition of all these refugees in this town. Therefore, it is a journey towards freedom
which seems everlasting. We seem to be trapped by our own man-made boundaries and still have
many boundaries ahead of us to cross till we achieve freedom and reach home.

Beside these refugees are the native people who are living there for so many years. They
have something in common with the refugees and that is being captivated by the border line. As
Angelopoulos tries to show in the film while their town has been divided in two parts (one part in
Greece and the other in Albania) by the border line but as far as culture and race are concerned
the border lines cannot separate the people, the only separation is geographical separation. The
most beautiful example is the marriage scene in the film.

In this scene, we see how the people who have been divided by the geographical border
conduct a marriage ceremony from the opposite banks of the river. This scene highlights the fact
that geographical boundaries have failed to separate people from their communal roots, in fact
this marriage episode can be looked upon as the most unique way in which a community exerts
its freedom and the marriage ceremony remains a means of unity. By choosing to marry (though
apparently absurd) in this manner people across the banks reiterate that they are not different
from each other no matter how hard boundaries may try to divide them. Despite the restrictions
of geographical and political boundaries the necessity of such a marriage is the need felt by these
people to marry within their community and thereby preserve their communal identity.

74

c) Bad Faith and Authenticity

Sartre believed that man creates his essence from loathsome emptiness, from that
sorrow and despair of realization that existence has no meaning, to make his self. It is from his
freedom that he does this. And this freedom and creation never end. Man is always becoming.
Sartre defines consciousness as a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness
of its being. An authentic man is one who accepts the heavy burden of his humanity, that he is
condemned to be free. With this freedom comes the burden of making choices and being solely
responsible for them. Sartre believes that this staggering responsibility makes people anxious and
ultimately leads them to deny both their freedom and responsibility. Sartrean authenticity may be
radically described as the affirmation of human reality of its lucidity, spontaneity and freedom. It
is when man confronts the dreadful truth of his existence, and starts to live with it that he begins
to live an authentic life. Authentic life is achieved by accepting the facticities of existence and
having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibility and risks
that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate.

In The Suspended Step of the Stork, we come to know from the report how the former
politician leaves the parliament while he is supposed to make an important announcement.
However, he changes his mind and ends up by reciting a very short poem and then leaves the
parliament. He remains silent afterwards even to his wife. Before leaving the home forever he
puts his last message on a cassette. As the message indicates that he is starting a personal journey
with no destination, a kind of wandering through the world. It is not clear why he behaves like
this as his wife was also confused by his act. One of the ways in which we can go about
understanding this incident is that there is a kind of protest or revolt against the present situation,
a kind of awakening. It seems that according to him, words carry no meaning and we are not able
to understand each other anymore. By leaving the parliament in fact we can say he leaves even
his very own established self as a great politician there in the parliament. What remains is a
stranger without carrying any identity, only a physical similarity to the former politician,
unknown to everybody. His awakening is a sheer act of self consciousness. In the existential
context it is an authentic choice which irrespective of its being wrong or right comes from within
an individual consciousness. With this kind of authenticity the individual comes out of the crowd
75

and establishes himself as a free individual. Authenticity and bad faith are opposed to each
other. Bad faith technically means a refusal of being and thereby an attempt to constitute the self
as being what it is not. This flight from our freedom, this attempt to apprehend ourselves
as an other , or as a thing in order to have an excuse for our conduct is what Sartre calls bad
faith. When faced with the exigency of making a choice the man in bad faith refuses to choose.
In fact, in bad faith one denies ones freedom and therefore responsibility in order to get away
from ones anxiety. However, still of course, he has to make a choice although it is a denied one
since he denies the possibility of choice while making one.
We can feel in the film that the reporter himself undergoes a gradual transformation. He
comes with his group to the town to make a report about the refugees. The similarity of a refugee
to a former politician who had disappeared for a long time takes his attention. In his scrutiny
about the truth he falls in a mysterious love relationship with a girl who is the daughter of the
same refugee. All these incidents make him aware of the fact that till that time as a reporter he
was only a mere passive observer without any emotional involvement, detached from his
subjects in front of the camera. He gradually becomes conscious about himself and his work. We
feel his transformation more prominently when we see his crew are enjoying their day to day
works without any concern for what is happening around them. He starts feeling sympathy
towards the refugees even towards the Colonel who also feels lonely. During the film we hear his
internal monologues and his anxiety to understand the truth. But it is at the end when in his
consciousness something intuitively is revealed to him about the refugee man or the former
politician who again puts up another journey. What is revealed to him at the end in fact is very
difficult to guess as it is the matter of personal realization but we can be sure he is not the same
person as he was in the beginning.
d) Despair
In Sartres Being and Nothingness, the question of freedom, responsibility and its
consequence as despair occupies a central position. According to Sartre:

Freedom is the nature of man. In anxiety, man becomes aware of his freedom, knows
himself responsible for his own being by commitment, seeks the impossible reunion with
76

being-in-itself, and in despair knows himself forever at odds with the others who by
their glances can threaten a man, turning him into a mere object.67

As an important corollary to the freedom of man, emerges the notion of anxiety. Anxiety
appears only when one disengages oneself from the world in which one is engaged. Thus,
anxiety occurs when one calls back into question ones project of oneself in the world through
which the world had assumed meaning and value. This is why in anxiety, besides having ones
total freedom one is faced with the fact of not being able to derive the meaning of the world
except as coming from oneself. As Gerard Campbell notes in the essay titled Sartres absolute
freedom:

Anguish is the revelation of ourselves to ourselves as nothingness and as possibility.

Since we are outside of' the world we are undetermined. In anguish we discover that
nothingness separates us from our essence, from ourselves-it separates us from our past
and it separates us from our future because the past and the future are not. Why
consciousness of our freedom is revealed to us in anguish is because anguish is the
revelation to us of our conduct, our being, as possibility and as our possibility,
undetermined, bound or constrained by nothing.68

The current mood of the film seems to be that of despair. We see the shadowy gesture of
the refugees wandering here and there in the grey and frozen atmosphere accompanied by a
gloomy soundtrack to create a sense of despair. And above all it is the former politician who
appears to be the embodiment of despair in the film by writing a book called Despair at the End
of the Century before his disappearance in 1980 which caused turmoil and adverse reactions
among political parties in Greece. Before his first disappearance which took forty days he was
supposed to make an important announcement in the parliament in the presence of all political
parties including the prime minister. However, as he brought out his written speech from his
67

Jean Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness, An Essay on phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E.
Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956 ).
68

Gerard T. Campbell. Sartres Absolute Freedom. p 69.

http://www.erudit.org/revue/ltp/1977/v33/n1/705594ar.pdf. Accessed on 19.04.11. 06:30 p.m.

77

pocket suddenly he changed his mind, while everybody was waiting to hear his speech. He gave
a very brief and ambiguous speech which was as follows: There are times when one has to be
silent in order to be able to hear the music behind the sound of the rain. He then left the
parliament. His face conveyed his inner conflict and despair. His despair may be the
consequence of the tragic history of Greece from Second World War onwards.
After the Second World War, Greece went through a horrific civil war between the
communists (left wing) and the anti-communists (right wing), which was probably more
destructive than the Second World War itself. After that, came the period of Junta dictatorship
which was a very hard time for the citizens of Greece. In the late seventies, there was the fall of
the dictatorship government of Junta in Greece and the Democratic government was established
after a long time. Greece became a member of the European community which was a long
awaited event for the Greeks. The strange thing is that the disappearance of the politician in the
film happens after the fall of the Junta. This in certain ways adds to the ambiguity of the film in
general and this character in particular. As it is mentioned in the records he was one of the great
hopes for the renewal of Greek political life. His book ends with an important question: what
are the key words we could use to make a new collective dream come true? By putting this
question beside the speech that he gives in the parliament we can get a clue about his despair. It
seems that according to him the words have failed to convey any meaning, to make any
collective dream come true. Words are meaningless and this is the time that he decides to be
silent in order to hear the music behind the sound of the rain. Later, in the light of international
events his book was considered prophetic. These international historical events were as follows:
first the collapse of Communism in The Soviet Union, which was followed by a similar fall in
the Eastern European countries which in turn created several problems in those countries. The
Yugoslavia federation also collapsed in the early 1990s, followed by an outbreak of violence and
aggression, in a series of conflicts known alternately as the Yugoslav Wars, the War in the
Balkans, or rarely the Third Balkan War. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was particularly the
consequence of unresolved national, political and economic questions. The conflicts caused the
death of many innocent people. These events along with some other events in another part of the
world in the last decade of the twentieth century pushed down the world in despair.

78

e) Abandonment
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre comments on the abandoned condition of man. Man is
abandoned as he has no justification for his being in the world. Sartre in some of his fictional
writings also claims that we are all bastards69 in the sense that we do not belong, that we are
cut off from, and other than the world, that we do not have a proper place in the world.
I am abandoned in the world, not in the sense that I might remain abandoned and passive
in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the sense that I find
myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole
responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this
responsibility for an instant.70
The isolated town along with the refugees personifies the very notion of abandonment.
Though they are considered as refugees, they have been left there without any refuge. They are
just alive but seem not to exist in this world. They have been abandoned from their social and
individual rights. The feeling of isolation is spread everywhere in the town. Living in a pathetic
situation in the frozen compartments of the abandoned trains, no connection with other parts of
the country since seemingly the storm has destroyed the telephone poles are the embodiment of
their abandonment. According to the Colonel, in this God forsaken part of the country things like
loneliness, uncertainty, a feeling of permanent menace assume a different dimension. People go
berserk and it is the border that drives them mad, the boundaries. However, they are somehow
responsible for their plight. The colonel himself is an example of an isolated character as he calls
himself a tragic figure. He talks of being paid to guard the border while his wife is living in
Athens and his daughter is supposed to be studying in London and God knows where they will
dump him tomorrow. He calls it a gypsy life while he weeps. He refers to his loneliness while
leaving the reporter.
69

Jean-Paul Sartre. The Wall and Other Stories. Translated by Lloyd Alexander. (New York: New Direction
Publishing Corporation, 1969). p 84.
70
Jean Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness, An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E.
Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956). p 555-556.

79

The Colonels condition reminds us of the following comment of Sartre in Being and
Nothingness:
The one who realizes in anguish his condition as being thrown into a responsibility which
extends to his very abandonment has no longer either remorse or regret or excuse; he is
no longer anything but a freedom which perfectly reveals itself and whose being resides
in this very revelation.71

The notions of forlornness, abandonment, nausea, and absurdity all are resultant of the
very basic Sartrian premise that the condition of man is necessarily that of isolation and
alienation in which he is unable to relate to the others and is deprived of the capacity to love or
share. The condition of nihilism reigns supreme. Thus, all relations, be it with individuals or the
world or God is that of conflict.

1.3.2. Symbolically

a) The Title of the Film

Symbols are deployed by Angelopoulos to add a significant poetical dimension to his

films and particularly so in The Suspended Step of the Stork. The different symbols used here,
not only add a different dimension but, also helps in enriching the message of the film. Let us
begin by looking at the title of film The Suspended Step of the Stork, which itself is symbolical. It
is one way of describing the ambiguous and insecure condition of the refugees, and therefore by
higher implication, the condition of man in the world. He is suspended and doubtful. While they
have taken one step they are wondering where to put the next step. In one scene the Greek
colonel while taking the position of a stork on the Greece Albania border line, says that if he
takes another step, he will die or he will be somewhere else. It is true with refugees who have
crossed the borders though some of them may have lost their lives on crossing the border, the
others are somewhere else. The non identified refugees in that Waiting Room are suspended for
many years. They do not know where they can put their next step.
71

Ibid. p 556.

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At the same time it seems that Angelopoulos is criticizing the idea of boundaries from
different aspects such as political, religious, cultural and above all geographical aspects. In fact,
it is the condition of man at the end of twentieth century as suspended. The title of the film
beautifully conveys the message of the story.

b) The Ambiguous Identity of the refugee man

The character of the former politician can be looked upon as another domain where the
play of symbols achieves a poetic dimension. It is, as if, this character adds to the rhythm of the
film by being everywhere and nowhere, by being everybody and nobody at the same time. After
his first disappearance for forty days when he comes back again, as we learn from his wifes
story, he was not the same man. He was like a stranger to her. He had a secret wound which he
never revealed to her and it had caused her a lot of pain. He was silent and inaccessible to her.
He then disappeared again this time forever. A month after his first disappearance, strangers kept
calling her from various parts of Greece claiming they have seen him once in a railway station,
another time as a peddler selling flowers in front of a cemetery, someone saw him working on a
construction site, somebody had reported that he was doing factory work, a woman saw him
sitting in a square smoking, others recognized him in a religious procession praying for rain,
sometimes here sometimes there but always heading towards the north. However, now after so
many years his wife believes that he is no longer alive, he is dead.

Now, the television reporter has another report about him, as we can say, that he has seen
him as one of the refugees in a small town near the border of Greece waiting for his political
asylum. The only person who can identify him is his former wife. After their confrontation in the
town, the wife after some moment declines that the man is her ex- husband. The reporter is still
doubtful and tries to catch him by making the man listen to the last message of the former
politician on a cassette. However, as soon as he hears the record, the refugee man starts
pretending to chase a fish in the river. The question whether he is the former politician or not
remains unresolved till the very end of the film. Thus, the politician becomes more a symbol
than a mere character in the film. He is the same politician while he is not, he is everybody while
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he is nobody, and he is everywhere while he is nowhere. The point is that those who knew the
former politician closely like his wife does not recognize him to be the same. However, those
who did not know him closely like Alexander, the reporter, find him to be the same, former
politician. One of the reasons that may be provided for all these contradictions is that, he has
changed internally. Externally he is the same but internally he is not. In his last message on the
cassette he talks about a journey which he has to undertake alone as a visitor. He is a selfless,
nameless visitor, he is nobody who has to borrow once in a while a name and every new name is
equivalent to the new identity. As through the film we hear different reports about him from
different parts of Greece with different identities. In the same way we get to know of different
stories at the end of the film about the refugee man. A forest ranger has seen him standing at
the river bank gazing at the water, at the same time a woman has seen him in the town waiting
for bus, one of the refugees has claimed he was leaving with the workers who repair the
telephone poles along the border, the last eye witness has claimed he was crossing the border
road while the child claims he was walking on the water with a suitcase till he crossed the border
and disappeared. However, none of these were confirmed. So it is a constant journey through
innumerable identities. In other words this symbolic character is the story of every man: once a
politician, another time a peddler, and then a person in a religious procession, once a factory
worker, and then a refugee and so on.

c) Odyssey and the Notion of Journey

The notion of journey gains a symbolic dimension when we read it as the story of the
modern Odysseus who has lost his identity and borrowing different names once in a while, is on
the endless and hopeless journey while his unfaithful wife as the modern Penelope thinks he is
not alive anymore and is married to someone else. Even she is not able to recognize him when
they confront each other. If in Homers Odysseus the old wound on his body made him
recognizable to his wife, in Angelopouloss Odysseus the wound is a secret and therefore
invisible. It is a more painful wound in comparison to Homers Odysseus which is only a sign on
the body. It is a sad irony about the modern man at the end of the twentieth century. As Andrew
Horton remarks:

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The journey and the need for a homepersonal, political, aesthetic, historical, and
geographicstand at the center of each Angelopoulos film. [...] And so on for each of
his films, for the ancient myths of Greece simply mirror the timeless reality of
Greeks: they have been, are, and, one suspects, always will be a nation of travelers,
either by choice or by chance. This central narrative pattern and theme in
Angelopouloss films thus echoes a basic mythic and historic pattern for him and his
culture.72

Horton also mentions in his book the implication of The Odyssey in The Suspended Step
of the Stork:

Angelopoulos once more draws on a combined Homeric and Dantesque use of

Odysseus and his travels as structuring and thematic elements for his film. Telemachus in
this case is young television documentary journalist in search of a story about a famous
Greek politician who went off on a journey and was never heard of again. Odysseus in
this film is an again Greek politician who has either changed identities or is actually
another person. He is not a hero winning the Trojan War for the Greeks as in Homer, but
something of a holy fool who, in a Christ-like manner, has given up everything to live
among the most unfortunate of contemporary humans: the international refugees in
search of a home, real or imagined.73

At the end of the film, as the Odysseus figure walks away with a suitcase in his hand, and
Telemachus, suspended on the riverbank between returning to his home and setting off himself
on a voyage somewhere else reflects in fact Dantes version of the Ulysses theme as the films
Telemachus, the reporter, sets us up for a voyage at the beginning of the film in his voice over,
when he quotes Dantes line about the need to set off on a voyage again, Dont forget that the
time for a voyage has come again. The wind blows your eyes far away.

72

Andrew Horton. The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation. (Princeton, New York: Princeton
University Press, 1997). p 38.
73
Ibid. p 162.

83

The train also acquires a symbolic dimension in the film. It symbolizes journey.
However, we see that the refugees are living in the old compartments of the trains staring at the
camera hopelessly while the television crew is shooting them. The camera motion creates an
illusion as if it is the train which is moving but it is just an illusion. It incarnates their hopeless
waiting to move on. They never seem to go anywhere; they are stuck there as they are living
there. In fact, these abandoned trains signify a bad omen in the film as they have lost their utility.

1.4. Technical Aspects of The Suspended Step of the Stork

1.4.1. The Continuous Image

Angelopoulos helps to reinvent cinema with each film because of his concern for cinema
as an aesthetic as well as a cultural medium. It is one of Angelopouloss characteristic that he
does not preach. The image is simply there open to multiple readings, and evoking a number of
emotions. But clearly the filmmaker has orchestrated form and content to invite us to go beyond
the image itself and establish meaning.

Angelopouloss sense of realism is grounded in the same method which used to be

practiced by French realism. Andre Bazin believed in the realism of the image which emphasizes
on the continuous image rather than montage. Angelopoulos has developed a form of cinematic
narration dependent on long, uninterrupted takes, often involving extended tracking shots. His
shots are stretched out and uninterrupted, which definitely becomes a means of inviting the
audience not only to observe what is going on, but also to be aware of the process in which these
moments unfold temporally and spatially. As Andrew Horton in his book quotes Wolfram
Schutte regarding Angelopouloss method:

His poetic medium is time. This allows the viewer to make his own images from what
is projected on the screenyes, it almost forces him towhile he remains critically
aware of the technical means employed: the long shots, sequence shots, slow pans

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and long takes. They are scenes from a voyage through the world. Their complex
structure sends the viewer on his own inner journey.74

Angelopouloss preoccupation with the continuous image is remarkable on at least two

levels. First, as there is very little dialogue in his films. One can almost consider his films as
silent films. The result is that we are pushed to concentrate on the image completely while we
have extended silent moments. Second, there is frequently a strong musical score with the image
before us. For instance, in The Suspended Step of the Stork, the camera tracks past a stationary
train of open boxcars in northern Greece near the border. The image is like some endless
modern fresco of unrelenting grief, with music adding powerfully to the effect.75

The way in which Angelopoulos depicts the condition of the refugees is different for
example from the simple close ups that are aired always on CNN or ABC. In fact,
Angelopouloss way of storytelling is also very different from the dialogue centered narratives of
the American cinematic tradition. According to Raymond Durgnat this method of long takes
provides a kind of local unity demonstrative of the travelling stage. In fact, Angelopouloss long
shots, meditative actions, ambiguities and uncertainties remind us of the Brechtian theatre in
which the spectators are pushed to contemplate in detached alienation. As Angelopoulos himself
claims, he also does not want his audience to be mere consumers who use only their emotions,
rather he like Brecht wanted a kind of audience who would use their mind.

We can also note that Angelopouloss fascination for the continuous image is in
opposition to the montage cinema that was developed by Soviet cinema, most obviously by
Sergei Eisenstein, in his emphasis on the montage.

74
75

Ibid. p 8.
Ibid. p 8.

85

1.4.2. Cinematic Codes

In Angelopouloss films there are images which are open to multiple interpretations. One
of the striking images in the film is the open scene where two helicopters are turning in a circle
above the dead bodies floating in the sea at Piraeus, the port of Athens. The voice over tells us
about the incident that how these stowaways had jumped to the sea after knowing that their
asylum had been rejected by the Greek authorities. The incident powerfully and ironically gives
us the image of the vultures flying over the dead bodies as soon as they come to know that there
are some dead bodies somewhere. Is Angelopoulos trying to identify the Greek authorities with
the vultures who become concerned only when there are such incidents? Or how such incidents
get the television channels attention and become the subject for mere news hunters?

There is another expressive image when for the first time Alexander goes to the refugee
mans compartment. Through the compartments door we see the image of a crane, and some
cottages. In the background we see the refugee man and in the foreground Alexander. The
image of the crane and the cottages seem to evoke the central theme of the film: the suspended
condition of human existence. The shape of the crane inclined on one side, but not performing
any task, visually connotes the indecisive moment in human lives, when the step is raised but not
yet taken it is the suspended situation of the modern man. This then is contrasted with the more
stable shapes of the cottages which appear to be strongly grounded against the hanging mid-air
condition of the crane. We also need to remember in this context that later in the film, we find a

86

refugee who commits suicide by hanging himself from a crane. It seems as if, the crane in its
suspended condition becomes the image of death and futility of life, symbolizing that moment
when human condition becomes meaningless and insignificant because of its lack of movement
and stasis.

There are some other images in the film which are continuously used by
Angelopoulos. Many times we see the characters either on the screen or through the monitor.
It seems that Angelopoulos is providing us with a critique of the art of cinema itself here. In
the entire structure of the film, it is the art of documentation that has been emphasized. In
fact, we have the reporter at a particular moment of realization talking about how he has just
filmed the people without paying the least heed to their feelings as individuals. Cinema is
capable of captivating human beings in their uni-dimensionality. In doing so, cinema as an
art makes objects of human beings and fails to provide an in depth analysis of human
emotions and feelings which actually make human beings what they are.

As we come to know somewhere in the film that the storm has destroyed the telephone
poles and there is no connection with the outside world. The pole men who are mostly the
refugees work every day to repair the lines. The last scene is one of the most striking scenes in
87

the whole film. We see the whole range of yellow jacket people are hanging on the telephone
poles and repairing the lines. The reporter is looking at them astonishingly and then walks
towards the river and keeps staring at the river. It is the first time we are floated on the river and
look at the river bank. In fact, it is Angelopouloss camera which is crossing the river as the
border line. What it signifies? Does it mean that it is art and above all cinema that can cross all
geographical borders?

1.4.3. Characters

The film carries an absurd tone in itself which entails despair and boredom of the
characters on the one hand and the audience on the other. So it seems there would be no other
way to create this atmosphere unless we use slow camera movements and long shots in isolated
landscapes. We hardly see any close up of the characters through the whole film. Therefore, if
not in close up or medium shot, then in which way can the characters feeling be revealed in the
long shots? So it is a difficult task of not the actors but the director. He has to give in some way a
spirit to the characters who seem moving mechanically in the long shots free from revealing their
feelings in close ups.

Angelopoulos has solved this problem by using some elements continuously which are
very expressive in his film. It seems for Angelopoulos that the locations play an important role in
creating the atmosphere. The landscapes are very expressive about the characters and their state
of mind. We see often the characters in a grey and frozen landscape. In fact, the internal conflict
88

of the characters is revealed through these landscapes. As if these landscapes bear some part of
the meaning of the film which the director wants to convey by the characters. They reflect
somehow the inner side of the characters. As Andrew Horton points out:

The images that make up Angelopouloss films are his language and, like Greek
tragedy, they are offered to the viewer not just as entertainment but as both a critique
and a celebration of the culture they spring from.76

The characters in Angelopouloss films act mostly in an intuitive way and this adds more
ambiguities to the characters and the film itself. In other words they do not behave rationally but
intuitively. There are some moments in The Suspended Step of the Stork which gives us the sense
of acting intuitively. We never know exactly what makes the girl behave like that or what is
going on in her mind. She sees Alexander in the bar and stares at him then follows him to his
room in the hotel and spends the night with him.

The other element which Angelopoulos uses continuously is soundtrack. It intensifies the
atmosphere and helps to convey the tone of the film. Soundtrack instead of being an external
element has been internalized and integrated into the structure of the film in such a way that it
reflects the inner world of the characters. Sometimes soundtrack also interacts with this sense of
intuition in the character. It has a sense of revelation in itself.

A scene after spending a night with the girl when Alexander is walking in a snowy street,
suddenly he stops and then starts running towards somewhere, then he sees the refugee man
76

Ibid. p 47.

89

working on the ground. There is a kind of moment of recognition in him which is beautifully
revealed by the soundtrack. It is not understandable what makes him run like that. We have a
similar incident at the end when he is running towards the border at night. All these incidents add
more to the enigmatic qualities of the characters and give more layers to the film.

One of the most important characteristics of Angelopouloss films is the way he uses
dialogues. Here in this film the dialogues somewhat reveal the complexity of the characters. For
an instance, when Alexander and the girl come back to the bar after their night being together he
says to the girl: you called me by someone elses name.who is he? and then the girl says:
Did I shout again?... Ive got to go. We see that the dialogues are less informative and more
revealing of the characters complexity. It gives also a kind of poetic quality to the film. We can
find many dialogues in the film which seems more like monologues. As if the characters talk
within themselves. The dialogues usually are not communicative but are only revealing of the
characters.

In one scene we see Alexander standing on the terrace of his room and looking at a
yellow jacket man climbing a pole with this monologue: Night was falling.later, coming
from the refugee quarter..I heard the sound of children lighting fires and shouting.in front of
the flames, in the frozen night. I didnt know I didnt know.I hadnt understood then.
These are internal monologues. What is it that he claims that he didnt know? We may get some
hint about the nature of these monologues later on in the drinking scene in the street at night
when the Colonel leaves him, he tells to the Colonel who has left already, The only thing I
knew.was to film other people.without caring about their feelings. Then at the end in the
dancing scene at night with the girl while her father is also there he says to the girl: Its the first
time I feel like this Im hurting a lot. It seems that this character, Alexander, has experienced
an inner change through the film. Now he has sympathy towards these refugees though may be
he is not able to understand them properly.

The film starts with some questions: How does one leave? Why? To go where? These
have been uttered clearly and in a straightforward manner in the first shot of the film by
Alexander. The whole film seems to be a quest, in trying to find answers for these existential
90

questions. The very mysterious end of the film does not give us any clear answer rather, it also
creates several other questions though the last astonishing shot has a ray of hope in itself which
is different from the first shot of the film.

Andrew Horton talks about how Angelopoulos has his own conception of characters. He
is concerned with individuals, but his interest in history and myth and their interaction with
individual destinies has made him go beyond the concepts of psychology, which has been the
basis of so much of Western experience which in turn is a result of the Aristotelian and Freudian
notions of character development. Horton mentions:

Angelopouloss depiction of character stands at odds with two thousand years of

character presentation in the West. In Angelopouloss works, we have no self-conscious
soul-searching dialogues, no simple Freudian motivations. [] Angelopoulos presents
character from the outside, forcing us to search, to study, to view other possibilities that
make up an identity, an individuality, beyond those that have been more readily offered
in the past.77

This in turn leads Angelopoulos to probe the place of the individual in a communal
setting which has obvious reference to his Greek experience. As Horton mentions:

For what the Greeks have given the rest of the world is, in large part, a concern for the
Polis, that is, the city-state, and an ongoing democratic dialogue on how that concern can
best be expressed.78

Angelopouloss cinema therefore, has become an exhibition, of how the past and the
present meet, and interact with each other. So far as communal lives are concerned, his films
undoubtedly focus on the pastness of the past and how it shapes the present. Horton draws a
comparison of Angelopouloss characterization and that of the Greek tragedy masters. He finds

77
78

Ibid. p 11.
Ibid. p 16-17.

91

the cinema of Angelopoulos as being closer to Aeschylus characters than those of Sophocles or
Euripides. It is necessary to quote Horton at length here for our purpose:

Angelopoulos is in fact closer to the spirit of Aeschyluss conception of character than to

that of Sophocles and Euripides, with their emphasis on the revelation of internal conflict
and psychological cause and effect. David Grene notes that the Oresteia as a whole does
not follow a logical or even dramatic course in its development and that its characters
are much more public symbols than individuals with inner lives. Agamemnon, for
instance, hardly appears in Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra is portrayed as a much more
complex figure than her husband: we simply do not completely understand who she is
and why she commits the murder. Contrast Aeschyluss handling of tragedy with
Euripides. There is no doubt by plays end why Medea killed her children in Medea or
why Pentheus had to die in The Bacchae.79

Angelopouloss characters never reveal themselves personally for the audience. This
distancing of the characters is enhanced by the way in which myths and legends, names and
narrative patterns are also part of the characters that we face. Thus, we can hardly look upon the
characters as individuals. Rather, we look upon them as symbols of a lost past.

79

Ibid. p 46.

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CHAPTER IV

Conclusion

The development of art forms in the twentieth century was crucial with respect to the
whole history of arts. The advent of cinema, at first called motion pictures, in the very late
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century opened a new spectrum to the art world. The
artists found new possibilities to express their thought though in the beginning cinema was not
yet considered as an art form. However, gradually cinema started overshadowing other art forms
through its magical powers. Cinema became an intersection of all other art forms such as theatre,
photography, painting, literature, music and so on. The superiority of cinema over other arts was
due to its ability not only to communicate with the elites of the society but also to connect with
the masses by virtue of its entertaining factors. From mere recording of the everyday events in
the beginning, cinema came to establish itself through different genres such as science fiction,
comedy, horror, historical, romance and so on. Gradually cinema created its own language while
it was growing on two sides, both commercially and aesthetically. Like any other art forms
cinema also became a medium in which all historical, social or political movements could be
reflected. The governments gradually realized the power and potentiality of cinema and its huge
influence on the masses. A new technique of mechanical reproduction developed in these
decades which improved the channels of mass-market communication and its manipulative
power. During the two World Wars, cinema was used as a means of propaganda for certain
ideologies. After the Second World War cinema in Europe became a means of reaction towards
those false ideologies. Especially in France, Italy and Germany cinema became a reflection of
social and political issues of the war consequences.

At the same time, following the Second World War, a significant philosophical and
cultural movement called existentialism, burst out mainly through the public prominence of two
French writers, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. This movement was spread all over Europe
and could manifest itself mostly through literary works, theatre and cinema. In fact, that was one
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reason why existentialism became popular even among the common people at the time. The
movement was exclusive only in the European countries but eventually it reached out to other
countries as well. The influence of existential philosophy on twentieth century arts and above all
cinema was immense and is still alive.

In the Chapter One, titled Existentialism and Cinema: An Overview, I dealt with a short
history of existential philosophy and its origin which goes back to the nineteenth century.
Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of philosophers of the nineteenth
century who despite large differences in their philosophy generally focused on concrete human
existence and its conflicts in everyday life. In fact, to understand Existentialism fully one needs
to go back through the whole history of philosophy back to Plato. It is not possible to define
Existentialism due to its different types and usages though still there are some common elements
shared by all existentialist thinkers. The social and economical upheavals of the post world war
were a real ground for Existentialism to flourish widely and become the source of literary, visual
and dramatic works. My focus in the introduction was only on the Existential movement in
Europe and its influences generally on art and particularly on European cinema of the post war
era. Existential cinema deals with existential concepts such as freedom, personal identity,
individuality, authenticity, alienation and death. Absurdity of the modern world with its fatal
technological progress was an urge for existential cinema to reflect over human destiny in the
twentieth century.

In this dissertation the focus was on two branches of Existentialism namely religious or
theistic existentialism and atheistic existentialism. The boundary between these two branches is
rather fuzzy and there are a lot of overlaps between them. I decided to work on two selected
films by two existential filmmakers and it was hoped that a new perspective to such cinema
would emerge. The reasons for choosing Andrei Tarkovsky and Theodoros Angelopoulos among
many other filmmakers who have contributed to existential cinema were as follows. In the case
of Tarkovskys cinema, some research has been done however; such research has not looked
upon Tarkovskys works exclusively from the existential perspective. In the case of
Angelopoulos, there is a lack of awareness even among students studying cinema about his
contribution to world cinema. As discussed in the present dissertation, Angelopoulos is a
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contemporary filmmaker whose concerns are very relevant to the world we inhabit.
Angelopoulos through his cinema raises questions about human existence, the notion of
boundaries, freedom, history which have become very prominent in the post war scenario. The
present dissertation therefore has attempted to discuss Angelopoulos and his cinema as a major
contribution to existential cinema.

In Chapter Two titled, An Existential Interpretation of Andrei Tarkovskys The

Sacrifice, the purpose was to analyze the film, The Sacrifice, by Tarkovsky with respect to
theistic existentialism of Kierkegaard. The film even though it was made around twenty five
years before still looks fresh in its approach to the crisis of the modern world. Alexander in his
confrontation with death clings on to his lost faith in God in order to save his family. He is a self
conscious character and that is the source of all his sufferings. He is alone in his world detached
from the outside world even his family except his little son. He is the only hope whose existence
has bestowed some meaning to Alexanders life and for whom Alexander does his final act of
sacrifice. It is predictable for us to imagine how Alexander would behave in such circumstances
if not for his son. Alexander in one view signifies the modern man who on one hand detests the
world with its scientific and technological progress and on the other hand in his alienated
materialistic faithless world he undergoes a spiritual crisis. This may be the origin of
Alexanders sense of the guilt which he carries within himself and therefore he decides to
annihilate his house, his material world in order to repent and gain his lost spirituality. Carl G.
Jung describes the condition of the modern man in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul as
follows:

The modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his mediaeval brother, and
set up in their place the ideals of material security, general welfare and humaneness. But
it takes more than an ordinary dose of optimism to make it appear that these ideals are
still unshaken. Material security, even, has gone by the board, for the modern man begins
to see that every step in material progress adds just so much force to the threat of a
more stupendous catastrophe.80

80

Carl G. Jung. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. (USA: Harvest Books, 1955). p 235-236.

95

We see how Alexander reflects over the Russian iconic paintings which belong to a world
which does not exist anymore with awe and praise. Alexander resembles the Jungian definition
of the modern man as an individual who is fully conscious of the situation. He is the one who
had foreshadowed the impending catastrophe long before. In the scene where everybody is
shocked after hearing the news from television he says to himself, Ive waited for this all my
life. My whole life has been one long wait, for this! He could guess that such technological and
scientific progress would ultimately lead to catastrophe. Ironically he gets such deadly news on
his birthday. He is solitary even among his family and Jung also believed that only the modern
man is solitary. In every step that the modern man takes towards a fuller consciousness of the
present, removes him from submersion in a common unconsciousness of the masses which
claims the bulk of mankind almost entirely.

It is true that modern man is a culmination, but tomorrow he will be surpassed; he is

indeed the end-product of an age-old development, but he is at the same time the worst
conceivable disappointment of the hopes of humankind. The modern man is aware of
this. He has seen how beneficent are science, technology and organization, but also how
catastrophic they can be.81

In Chapter Three titled, An Existential Interpretation of Theo Angelopouloss The

Suspended Step of the Stork, I tried to analyze the film, The Suspended Step of the Stork by the
contemporary filmmaker, Theo Angelopoulos with respect to the atheistic existentialism of Jean
Paul Sartre. In this film we go through a mysterious account of the disappearance of the once
well known Greek politician. He wrote a book long before his disappearance, Despair at the End
of the Century, a prophetic work with respect to the events which happened at the end of the
twentieth century. He then himself becomes an embodiment of despair at the end of the century
by leaving everything behind. This is the new account of a modern man as the modern Odysseus
which Angelopoulos elaborately intertwines with the figure of the ancient Odysseus. The modern
Odysseus has a secret wound and is not recognized even by his wife. He is a mere stranger with
no returning home, in an everlasting journey. What makes the story more complicated here in the
depiction of the modern Odysseus is the way in which Angelopoulos has interlocked this
81

Ibid. p 230.

96

character to everybody, everywhere in different positions. A person, who lives only in the
present with a borrowed name without any past and with no future and therefore no identity, can
be anybody at any place at anytime. This is the image of the modern man at the end of the
twentieth century, a mere wanderer with no attachment to anybody and anything. According to
Jung:

Only the man who is modern in our meaning of the term really lives in the present; he
alone has a present-day consciousness, and he alone finds that the ways of life which
correspond to earlier levels pall upon him. [] Thus he has become unhistorical in the
deepest sense and has estranged himself from the mass of men who live entirely within
the bounds of tradition.82

In some way the politician in The Suspended Step of the Stork reminds us of Alexander in
The Sacrifice, as he also leaves behind all his belongings, his wife, his professional achievements
or in the final sense of the term he leaves behind his whole history and starts a journey like a
stranger. But here we never come to know clearly what makes the politician act in such a way.
We are shown only the effect and not the cause. Whereas in the case of Alexander it is different,
both cause and effect are clear. In The Suspended Step of the Stork the politician in the
parliament before leaving forever recites a poem and urges everyone to consider the importance
of being silent. Probably he realizes the significance of silence in an otherwise babbling world.
Alexander also in a way vows to God that he would be mute if and only if God rescues the world
from the impending catastrophe. If we can say that The Sacrifice is the story of the modern
Abraham who has to again prove his faith in God by sacrificing his property, The Suspended
Step of the Stork is then the story of the modern Odysseus as a wanderer with no homecoming
because nobody is waiting for him anymore.

So far as technical aspects are concerned, both Angelopoulos and Tarkovsky in their
approach towards cinema, apart from their differences and similarities, resemble each other in
one important element and that is their fascination with the continuous image. Both have not
been in favour of montage cinema and tried to transfer the continuum of reality. They have
82

Ibid. p 227-228.

97

been concerned about the continuity of dramatic space and its duration. Andre Bazin describes
such cinema as:

[] a film form that would permit everything to be said without chopping the world up
into little fragments, that would reveal the hidden meanings in people and things without
disturbing the unity natural to them.83

However, in montage cinema the spectators have to follow the directors choice who will
decide what the spectators should see and here they are expected to have at least a minimum of
personal choice. Whereas, in the continuous image supported by Bazin, the image is open to be
interpreted by the spectators and the spectators are mentally active in the process of deciphering
the meaning which is hidden in the image.

For Tarkovsky, as it is mentioned in chapter two, montage was the secondary element as
the assembly of the pieces on the basis of the time-pressure within the shots. Tarkovsky in his
book Sculpting in Time explains that the most dominant factor of the film image is rhythm,
expressing the course of time within the frame which is also made clear in the characters
behaviour, the visual treatment and the sound. He explains:

Although the assembly of the shots is responsible for the structure of a film, it does not,
as is generally assumed, create its rhythm. The distinctive time running through the shots
makes the rhythm of the picture; and rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited
pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them. Editing cannot determine
rhythm (in this respect it can only be a feature of style); indeed, time courses through the
picture despite editing rather than because of it. The course of time, recorded in the
frame, is what the director has to catch in the pieces laid out on the editing table.84

83

Andre Bazin. What is Cinema? Translated by Hugh Gray. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of
California Press, 1967). p 38.
84
Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting In Time: Reflection on the Cinema, Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. (London: The
Bobley Head, 1986). p 117.

98

In the case of Angelopouloss use of the continuous image, as mentioned by Horton in

his book, apart from other cinematic influences there are also different cultural elements at work.
Angelopouloss visual composition and duration of each individual shot is due to his fascination
by the long tradition of Byzantine Iconography. In Hortons opinion:

Viewed from the Byzantine perspective, Angelopouloss extremely long takes, often
lasting up to ten minutes, suggest the continuous relationship between Byzantine art
and the observer: one could stand and gaze at an icon, a program, or a scene as long as
one wished. In this sense it was the observer who controlled how long his or her
experience would last. While a viewer in cinema is locked into the forward flow of
images, the lack of classical editing and traditional narrative film pacing seen in
Angelopouloss work means that his films are unique in allowing audiences time to look
around within each scene as they please. Such a lack of narrative drive results in the
establishment of a more personal and contemplative relationship between the film and the
viewer, much like that between the observer and the icons in an Orthodox setting.85

In the twentieth century there has been a lot of debate regarding the uniqueness of the
work of art in the age of technical reproduction. Scholars like Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) in
early twentieth century, was contemplating the shift from a manuscript culture to that of the print
medium. The other prominent thinker before McLuhan was Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) whose
most significant contribution lies in his discourse on art and its reproducibility in the twentieth
century.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin argues that
technology is changing art, just like our changing perceptions. He was pondering over the loss of
aura seen in art in the age of mechanical reproduction as aura is not reproducible along with the
original work. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique

Andrew Horton. The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation. (Princeton, New York:
Princeton University Press, 1997). p 29-30.

85

99

existence.86 With the loss of aura, solitary enjoyment of art disappears. However, according to
him the loss of aura opens up the possibility of a new, more universal experience of beauty.
Benjamin believes that in film there is no concentration; it requires no attention. Weve
become

distracted

by

all

these

replicated

art

forms

whereas

art

demands

concentration. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as
follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it [] In contrast, the
distracted mass absorbs the work of art.87
In order to illustrate his view he compares the film screen with the canvas of painting and
says:
The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can
abandon himself to his associations. Before the film frame he cannot do so. No sooner
has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested.
who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though

something

Duhamel,
of

its

structure, notes this circumstance as follows: I can no longer think what I want to
think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images. The spectators process of
association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden
change.88
At the bottom of his philosophy, Benjamin believes that cinema is not an art because it
distracts the audience and does not call for concentration. Therefore, the audience of cinema is
mere thoughtless consumers in front of the screen. It is true that cinema is a mass oriented media
and includes the whole people in the society from top to bottom unlike other art forms like
painting, theatre which are still even in the age of mechanical reproduction limited to a niche
audience. However, it is only in relation to the mainstream commercial cinema, which is just
entertaining that no concentration is required. Whereas, in art cinema as a serious, noncommercial cinema which does not aim the mass audience and requires active involvement of
the audiences mind, an alternative to the mainstream commercial cinema which, calls for
86

Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936.
http://www.design.wishiewashie.com/HT5/WalterBenjaminTheWorkofArt. p 4. Accessed on 10.03 11. 8:00
p.m.
87
Ibid. p 17.
88
Ibid. p 16.

100

concentration despite Benjamin and Duhamels understanding of cinema. Tarkovsky,

Angelopoulos and the other filmmakers as such are trying to force the audience into the role of
the co-author as they must contemplate on the images and events that unfold on the screen. In
literature a similar focus was seen in the reader response theorists who were emphasizing the role
of the reader in the making of a text. As opposed to traditional views of literary production where
everything emerge from the author alone reader response theorists were arguing otherwise. This
shift from the author to the reader was necessary in understanding the complex process of
literary production and reception. In the cinema of Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos the role the
audience gets a similar prominence. The screen can be compared to an open book which the
audience needs to read and interpret. This interrelation between the audience and the screen
would not be possible unless some technical efforts were introduced. In the case of Tarkovsky
and Angelopoulos as it is explained already this technique of putting the audience in the place of
a mediator has been achieved through the unity of image in space and time. They are both
opposed to the idea of the montage by which time is manipulated. In fact, in the age of the
rapidity of montage in the way it is used in commercial cinema and television programs the
audience is not able to concentrate and therefore gets distracted soon. The mass audience of the
mainstream cinema cannot sustain art cinema due to their habituated perceptions and inability to
adapt themselves to a contemplative mode which such cinema requires. Therefore, Duhamels
description of cinema audience as:
[...] a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who
are consumed by their worries a spectacle which requires no concentration and
presupposes no intelligence which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope
other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a star in Los Angeles.89

Duhamels criticism holds good for cinema that is meant for commercial consumption.
However, to ascribe all kinds of cinema to this status would be a sheer disregard to the kind of
contemplative cinema that I have discussed in the course of the present dissertation. It is such
cinema that is able to retain the aura that Benjamin feared had been lost in the age of

89

Ibid. p 17.

101

mechanical reproducibility. The present research in its limited scope has attempted to emphasize
the contribution of such cinema in an era of mass production and consumption.

102

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