The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Andrei Tarkovsky · a film · 1986 · about two and a half hours · written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, his last feature, made in Sweden · in Swedish, with some English and French, as Offret
Mode
Chamber drama of a household turned to religious parable; vow, miracle play and film of the end of the world in one
Mythos
The vow and its payment; Abraham, the father who gives up a son; the dead tree watered until it blooms; the good witch who must be lain with to save the world; the epiphany of the Magi
Phase
About a day: a birthday afternoon and evening by the sea up to the news of war, the night of the prayer, the vow and the ride to the witch, the morning of the fire, and a coda at the tree
Presentation
Feature film of about two and a half hours, in Swedish with some English and French; colour drained toward monochrome, the visions in black and white or near it; Sven Nykvist’s camera; Bach at the threshold and the close, Swedish herding calls and Japanese shakuhachi; long takes, and the fire in one
Register
Long talk on a veranda and in rooms, then near silence; wind, sea and jets; dread and devotion by turns
Scale
One household in one house, a postman and a witch; the fate of the world staked on one man’s vow
Governing Proposition
On his birthday, as jets pass over his house by the sea and a broadcast announces war, a man who has talked about meaning all his life kneels and offers God everything he loves, his house, his family and his speech, in exchange for the world; he lies with a woman he is told is a witch, wakes to a world as it was, and burns his house. The wager of the film is that an act of total sacrifice cannot be recognised by those it serves, that prayer answered and a miracle can be filmed without irony, and that an act that cannot be undone must be shown in time that does not cut.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a painting. Under the credits the camera studies Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, and over it plays Bach’s aria “Erbarme dich” from the St Matthew Passion. Kings bring their gifts to a child. Then the film goes out to the shore of a Swedish island, into a low northern light, where a man and a small boy are planting a dead tree.
The man is Alexander, played by Erland Josephson: once an actor, now a critic, and today it is his birthday. The boy is his son, called Little Man and played by Tommy Kjellqvist; he has had an operation on his throat and cannot speak. As they set the tree in the ground Alexander tells him an Orthodox legend, of the monk Pamve, who set his disciple to water a dead tree until it bloomed. Then he talks, and talks, to a son who cannot answer. It is the monologue of a man who has talked about meaning all his life, and the film lets it run along the shore in long takes.
The film is Offret, The Sacrifice, written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, his seventh feature and his last, made in Sweden in exile and shot on Gotland in 1985, a co-production led by the Swedish Film Institute with Argos Films. Sven Nykvist photographed it, Anna Asp designed it, and Tarkovsky edited it with Michał Leszczyłowski. It was first shown at Cannes in May 1986, and Tarkovsky died in Paris on 29 December of that year. It runs about two and a half hours, in Swedish with some English and French, in colour drained toward monochrome. Its time is about a day, in three parts: a birthday afternoon and evening, a night, a morning; then a coda at the tree where it began.
Movement II
Otto comes on his bicycle. He is the postman, played by Allan Edwall, comic and grave at once, and he collects inexplicable incidents: things that happened to people and cannot be explained. For Alexander’s birthday he brings an old map of Europe, a gift worth more than he can afford. The man who has talked about meaning all his life is visited by a man who collects what cannot be accounted for, and the film has introduced its messenger.
The household gathers at the house by the sea. Adelaide, Alexander’s wife, is played by Susan Fleetwood; Marta, a stepdaughter, by Filippa Franzén; Victor, a friend of the house, by Sven Wollter. There are two servants, Julia, played by Valérie Mairesse, and Maria, played by Guðrún Gísladóttir, who lives apart. There is a model of the house, made exactly, and the film will set it beside the house itself. The afternoon passes in talk on the veranda and in the drawing room: Adelaide’s quarrels, Victor’s plans to leave, the strain of a failed marriage repeated more than once.
The film lets the afternoon run long and level, as a chamber piece. It has a reason. The house has to be loved, shown and filled with people before it can be given up, and the afternoon is the inventory of what will be lost: the rooms, the light, the people, the son. Beneath the talk the household is starved. Its members speak across one another in a beautiful house at the edge of the sea, and none of them is heard.
Movement III
In the evening jets pass low over the house and shake it. A broadcast on the television announces war, and the power fails. After the noise there is a long silence. The fear is the fear of its decade, the bomb and the end of everything, and the film gives it as the end of the world rather than as a policy or a date.
Adelaide collapses. Her hysteria is played at a pitch the rest of the film never reaches, and she is sedated. Through the night the film passes, without any marker, into visions in black and white or near it, among them a ruined street, and back into its drained colour. The viewer cannot say where waking ends, and the film will never say whether the war has happened.
Alexander, alone, kneels. He says the Lord’s Prayer, and then he makes a vow. He offers God everything he loves, his house, his family and his speech, in exchange for the world. The man who has talked about meaning all his life offers his words with the rest. Behind the vow stands Abraham, the father who gives up his son; here the father gives up the son by giving up himself, his voice and his home.
Movement IV
Otto, the collector of inexplicable things, tells Alexander what must be done. Maria, the servant who lives apart, is a witch, a good one, and if Alexander goes to her and lies with her the world can be saved. It is folk matter set beside the Lord’s Prayer, and the film does not choose between them: both are acts of faith in what cannot be explained, and Alexander does both.
He rides to Maria’s house at night. The sound of the night is not music in the ordinary sense but Swedish herding calls, Japanese shakuhachi, wind and the sea, and it makes the night strange. There the two rise together above the bed, held in the air.
In the morning the telephone works, and the world is as it was. No one in the house knows that anything has happened, and nothing outside it says that anything has. If the sacrifice worked, it is invisible: the world has woken as if nothing were owed. Only Alexander knows the terms, and he is the one who must pay them. He keeps a promise that no one knows he made.
Movement V
Alexander burns the house. The film shows the fire in one continuous take of several minutes, held in a single moving frame across a wet field: the house burning, the household running across the grass, the ambulance arriving, Alexander evading the men who have come for him, Maria on her bicycle. There is no cut to soften the act or to let the viewer step away, and an act that cannot be undone is given in time that cannot be undone. The first take of the fire was lost when the camera jammed, and the house was rebuilt and burned again. Alexander is taken away as mad. The one who saved the world, if it was saved, is the one no one around him can recognise.
The coda returns to the shore. The boy carries water to the dead tree, as the disciple did in Pamve’s legend, and lies down beneath it. He speaks for the first time in the film, asking about the opening words of the Gospel. The camera climbs the bare branches as “Erbarme dich” returns, and the film closes on a dedication to Tarkovsky’s son. The father has given up his speech; the son has found his.
The film took over the apparatus of Bergman’s chamber cinema whole, Nykvist, Josephson, a Swedish island, a household under strain, and turned it against Bergman’s theology: on these islands God has been silent, and here prayer is answered. Nostalghia had given a man setting himself on fire to save the world three years before. In the forty years since, the questions have stayed open, whether the war happened, whether the world was saved by prayer, by Maria or by nothing, whether Alexander is a saint or mad, and Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time and Leszczyłowski’s Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1988) stand beside the film. What has lasted is a house given away in a single unbroken shot, and a boy watering a dead tree.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The vow requires everything it consumes, and the film is built backward from that demand: the house must be loved, shown and filled with people before it can be given up, so the birthday afternoon is the inventory of the sacrifice. The dead tree and the legend of Pamve are required, since the coda answers them. Otto’s gift of an old map and his talk of inexplicable things are required, since he is the one who sends Alexander to Maria. The boy’s silence after his throat operation is required, since his first words close the film. What gives is in the household: Adelaide’s quarrels, Victor’s plans to leave and Julia’s business repeat one strain, and the first part’s talk restates the opening monologue. A tighter film would lose little there.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a man who has talked about meaning all his life can reach it only by an act that costs him everything, and that no one around him can recognise for what it is. If the sacrifice works it is invisible. The world wakes as if nothing had happened, and the one who saved it is taken away as mad. A second truth comes through image and sound: a cultivated, comfortable household is starved in spirit, its members talking across one another while the jets go over. Held well below the gate because much of the meaning is asserted in Alexander’s monologues before it is shown, and because the film leaves undecided whether the war happened, which deepens the mystery and weakens what can be stated.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The summits are among the highest in film. The house burns in one take while the household runs across the wet field, Alexander evades the ambulance men and Maria comes on her bicycle. The boy waters the dead tree and lies beneath it, and the camera rises up the bare branches as the Bach returns. Alexander and Maria rise together above the bed. The jets shake the house in the evening, and a long silence follows; visions in monochrome show a ruined street. The herding calls and the shakuhachi make the night strange. The elevation is dreadful and devout by turns. Held well below the top by frequency: the first part is long and level, a chamber piece of talk, and the heights come late, in a few great blocks rather than throughout.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The myth is built, and it bears the structure. A vow and its fulfilment carry the film: a man offers what he loves to God in exchange for the world, is answered, and pays. Abraham stands behind it, the father who gives up his son, here by giving up speech, house and family. The Orthodox legend of Pamve, the monk whose disciple watered a dead tree until it bloomed, frames the film and is enacted at its close by the son. The good witch who must be lain with to save the world is folk matter set beside the Lord’s Prayer, and Leonardo’s Magi frame the whole as an epiphany. Held below the gate because the people carry the myth more than they live inside it: Otto, Maria and the boy are nearer to figures than to persons, and the particular thins where the archetype is heaviest.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Two inheritances. Tarkovsky’s own grammar, settled from Mirror (1975) through Stalker (1979) and Nostalghia (1983): long takes, water and fire, a crisis of faith in a remote place. And Bergman’s chamber cinema, whose apparatus the film takes over whole: Nykvist, Josephson, a Swedish island and a household under strain. The turn is against the second. Bergman’s islands are places where God is silent; here prayer is answered, a miracle is staged without irony, and the film ends in faith. The stake was real: a dying exile making a religious film in a language he did not speak. Held well below the gate because the swerve from his own path is small. Nostalghia had already given a man setting himself on fire to save the world, and the form refines a manner rather than turns it.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The fire in one unbroken take is the clearest case: an irreversible act given in irreversible time, with no cut to soften it or to let the viewer step away. The long takes make waiting, praying and keeping a promise into time endured. The drained colour, and visions that pass into monochrome without a marker, leave the viewer unable to say where waking ends, which is the film’s own question about whether the war was real and the sacrifice needed. Told as a cut drama with the war made certain, it would become a parable with an answer. Held well below the top because the first part is staged as a filmed play, long conversations in rooms, a form any chamber drama could use, a container more than an instrument.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Forty years of return are evidence, though the literature is smaller than around Mirror or Stalker. The questions have stayed open: whether the war happened or Alexander dreamed it; whether the world was saved by prayer, by Maria or by nothing; whether Alexander is a saint or mad; how the Christian sits with the pagan, the witch, the Japanese robe and music, the herding calls. Tarkovsky’s own account in Sculpting in Time and Leszczyłowski’s documentary on the making, Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1988), are primary texts, and readings since run from devotional to sceptical. The form yields on return, in the rhymes between the Leonardo, the model house and the burning one. Held at the figure by span, and because some of the return is to texture and to a last testament rather than to new meaning.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Released in 1986; the field is the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: a demonstration that a film could take an act of faith, and a miracle without irony, as its subject in a decade when serious cinema had largely given that up, and the long take carried to its extreme in the fire. Much of that force belongs to the earlier films, and it is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the slow cinema of the decades since, Sokurov, Béla Tarr, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Carlos Reygadas among it, descends from Tarkovsky’s work, and Lars von Trier dedicated Antichrist (2009) to him; the burning house has been quoted and recalled. That reach runs mostly through the body of work, and what belongs to Mirror and Stalker is theirs.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty years. Form: the film as released survives whole, and restorations since are repair. Presence: continuous exhibition in art cinema and on home release, and a place in every account of Tarkovsky, but a narrower presence than Mirror (8.6), Stalker (8.7) or Andrei Rublev (8.9) has held. Fabric: the surface most fixed to its moment is the nuclear fear of the 1980s. The jets, the television announcement and the dread of the bomb belong to the Cold War, and the film was first shown weeks after Chernobyl; they have aged partly as period. The film treats them as apocalypse in general, so the loss is small, but it is a charge. The narrower presence holds the figure at the bar.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making bears weight. Sven Nykvist’s photography: the low northern light, the drained colour, the slow tracks along the shore and through the house, the fire held in a single moving frame. The sound has the same command: wind, sea, herding calls, shakuhachi, jets, and the Bach only at the threshold and the end. The house and its model, built by Anna Asp, rhyme exactly. Josephson carries the long speeches and the silence after the vow; Edwall gives Otto a comic gravity. The costs: the dialogue, written by a director working through translation, is stiff in places and declaims its ideas; Fleetwood’s Adelaide is played at a pitch the rest of the film never reaches, her hysteria and its sedation staged broadly; Julia and Victor are underwritten; and the first part’s talk is filmed more than made into cinema.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Otto’s comic birthday visit, the postman on his bicycle with his map and his anecdotes, and the house burning the next morning. One law governs both: what is given away is the measure of what is meant, and the inexplicable is real. Otto brings a gift worth more than he can afford; Alexander gives everything he has. The prayer and the night with the witch obey the same law, both acts of faith in the inexplicable, and the film refuses to choose between them. The visions and the waking world are shot under one physics, slow, drained and continuous. The strain is in tone: Adelaide’s scenes run in a register of domestic melodrama that the law does not govern, and the household’s quarrels belong to another kind of film.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Judged on what a film of about two and a half hours holds. Consciousness, in Alexander’s despair and his vow; the family, in a failed marriage, a stepdaughter, a mute son and a friend of the house; the sacred, in prayer, the legend, the painting and the miracle; history and the state, in the war announced on television and Otto’s old map of Europe; art, in Alexander’s past on the stage and his criticism; the natural order, in the sea, the wind, the tree and the fire. One structure holds them, the vow, which binds the family to the sacred and the private act to the fate of the world. What holds the axis lowest: the state and history are a broadcast and a map, labour is two servants and a postman, and the world beyond the house is never entered.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Made at 8.4, and The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Living Form at 8.3. A film that survives whole after forty years of continuous exhibition, its period surface treated as apocalypse in general; photography and sound that bear the film’s weight, from the northern light to the jets and the Bach at the threshold; heights that come late and very high, the fire in one take and the camera climbing the dead tree; a vow and its payment built as the film’s structure, with Pamve’s legend enacted at the close; and a form in which an act that cannot be undone is given in time that does not cut.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: consciousness, the family, the sacred, art, the natural order and the fate of the world are bound by one vow, but the state and history are a broadcast and a map, labour is two servants and a postman, and the world beyond the house is never entered. Above it, The Inevitable, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 7.7: household quarrels that repeat one strain, a turn against Bergman that is real but a small turn from the director’s own path, and a reach that runs mostly through his work as a whole. Then The Unconcealment at 7.9: a meaning asserted in monologue before it is shown, and a war the film leaves undecided.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on one of five: The Imperishable meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls two tenths short of it, The Unconcealment at 7.9 falls six tenths short, and The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 7.7 fall eight tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it covers falls below 7.7, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. The work is held below the summit by four conditions, The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 7.9, and The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 7.7 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.0 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Offret (The Sacrifice) as released in 1986 and first shown at Cannes in May of that year, from the Leonardo under the credits to the dedication: written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, a Swedish and French co-production led by the Swedish Film Institute with Argos Films, photographed by Sven Nykvist, designed by Anna Asp and edited by Tarkovsky with Michał Leszczyłowski, with Bach’s “Erbarme dich” from the St Matthew Passion at the opening and the close. Restorations are repair and not a different object; the first take of the fire, lost when the camera jammed, is a fact of the production and is not judged. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Swedish film; the English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, and nothing here is charged to a subtitle. What is charged to the dialogue is its declaiming of ideas, not the wording of any rendering. No line of the dialogue is held to the word with certainty, so the dialogue is described and not quoted, and the boy’s question at the close is given in sense. The design, the order of the three parts, the imagery and the sound are held with confidence. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact running time and the shorter figures given for some prints, the frame ratio, the full list of co-producers, the player of the shakuhachi, the length of the fire’s take and of the opening shots, the number of shots, the prizes at Cannes, the details of later restorations, the film’s places in polls and what the film implies of Victor’s closeness to Adelaide, are not given.