Nostalghia (1983)-A Fine Example Of Impressionistic Art

Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (1983) is as great an example of Fine Art as I have ever seen in any medium, cinema or otherwise.

The film as a whole can be considered to be a montage of scenes and images that are only very loosely, and at times not at all, connected to each other in a "straight", literal sense. True enough, there is an overarching general temporal sequence in the scenes of the film, but this temporal sequence does little to aid the viewer in a strictly rational answer to the seemingly simple query: "What Is This Film All About?"

As a work of Fine Art, I would liken Nostalghia to the work of Impressionist painters such as Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cezanne. The artistic motivation of these painters was not in any way to portray reality in photographic accuracy, as did painters of bygone eras. Indeed, the invention of the camera made such an artistic motivation superfluous for painters. What the Impressionist painters tried to do, with varying degrees of success, was to portray reality with less than photographic, literal accuracy in favor of a portrayal that has more of a non-rational "impact" on the viewer, on the intellectual and/or emotional and/or visceral levels of experience. As such, the Truth of Impressionist paintings as it is conveyed to the viewer is not an "absolute truth" but, instead, a contextual, even an interpretive truth.

So too, the portrayal of reality, and the subsequent Truth of that portrayal in the viewer's experience of Tarkovsky's Nostalghia is on a non-rational, purely subjective, contextual, interpretive, and perhaps even intuitive level. This film offers a non-obvious mixture of sometimes disjointed dramatic scenes, sometimes deep philosophical dialogue, isolated imagery, sometimes admittedly strange symbolism, innovative cinematography, & sometimes radical editing in an attempt to deliver an "impact", an "Impression" on the viewer on the intellectual, emotional, and visceral planes of his viewing experience.

The exact "meaning" or "truth" of that impact is decidedly intended by Tarkovsky to be unique to the individual viewer of the film, and is incumbent on the individual viewer to decide for himself.