Vol. 31 No. 4 · 26 February 2009
pages 27-29 | 5863 words
Building with Wood
Gilberto Perez
- BuyTarkovsky by Nathan Dunne
Black Dog, 464 pp, £29.95, February 2008, ISBN 978 1 906155 04 9
- BuyAndrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema by Robert Bird
Reaktion, 255 pp, £15.95, April 2008, ISBN 978 1 86189 342 0
The first film Andrei Tarkovsky shot outside the Soviet Union was Nostalghia – spelled that way because ‘nostalgia’ is too weak an equivalent for the Russian word, the Russian emotion. Made in Italy in 1982-83, it begins with a visit to the Tuscan church where Piero della Francesca painted his fresco of the pregnant Virgin Mary, the Madonna del Parto. But the scene wasn’t shot there. James Macgillivray, in his contribution to a new volume of essays edited by Nathan Dunne, tells us that Tarkovsky had a reproduction of Piero’s painting installed in the crypt of another Romanesque church about 75 miles away. And though he always insisted that film be grounded in material fact – the church is real even if the fresco is not – he took other liberties with reality in his treatment of space and time.
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Letters
Vol. 31 No. 6 · 26 March 2009
From Tony Wood
Gilberto Perez is mistaken in thinking that Tarkovsky spelled ‘Nostalghia’ with an ‘h’ in order to gesture to the specifically Russian character of the emotion (LRB, 26 February). First, there is no ‘h’ in the Cyrillic alphabet; it’s there because he wanted to spell it the Italian way, to reflect the fact that he made the film in Italy. Second, the Russian word nostal’giia is perfectly translatable into other languages, because it was borrowed from them in the first place. The distinctively Russian emotion Tarkovsky might have chosen instead would be toska, which Nabokov defined as ‘a feeling of physical or metaphysical dissatisfaction, a sense of longing, a dull anguish, a preying misery, a gnawing mental ache’. Not to be confused with Tosca.
Tony Wood
London NW5
Vol. 31 No. 7 · 9 April 2009
From John Merriweather
Tony Wood’s phrasing might give some readers the impression that he thinks the Italian word for ‘nostalgia’ is nostalghia (Letters, 26 March). Of course, it isn’t: it’s nostalgia. The spelling of the title of Tarkovsky’s movie Nostalghia is an approximation of the Russian pronunciation using Italian orthography.
John Merriweather
Venice
From Alfio Bernabei
Wasn’t Tarkovsky’s insertion of the ‘h’ – reminiscent of the aching sound ‘ah’, ‘oh’, used in many languages to denote the sense of longing for things/places past – intended simply as the graphic rendering of an absence?
Alfio Bernabei
London NW3
