The Burning House: Wong Jane

The Burning House

In the first instance, the table cloth doesn’t catch fire. Alexander strikes another match. This time the cloth is set alight.

Wordlessly, the flame travels from the starched corner to envelop the house in its entirety.

Under the impossibility of any reprieve, the white curtains billow in the smoke, few film frames before succumbing to the same fiery fate. *

Running towards the staggering man and the scene of what was once home, the wife cries his name.

‘Alexander!’

‘I did it…Say nothing, ask nothing!’ *

We are approaching a limit, the limit of a film. Spanning over ten minutes, Alexander’s house by the sea, at its furthest point of destiny, is in a state of luminous destruction. Engulfed in flames, facades fall away, rooms disintegrate and all possessions are consumed, exposing to the landscape the bare skeleton of the house. What we witness at the end of Tarkovsky’s last film ‘The Sacrifice’ (1986), is not merely a house burning, but the burning house.

At the centre of the act of immolation, the two constituents - Alexander’s house as the object, and the fire initiated from the second match - can each no longer sustain their autonomy as a building or as a flame. They become one. Disembodying the house, the site of the most violent intimacy, the fire becomes the very soma of the dwelling. It is a simultaneous procedure: the fire becomes intrinsic to and fully internalised into the concept of the house, whilst the conventional distinctions of the interior and the exterior of the building are utterly dissolved in the intensity of heat. The burning house possesses an irrevocable status: the building can be rebuilt but cannot return to its original state; the fire can be extinguished but the burning cannot reverse upon time. The film ends with this aporia - a destructive irrevocability that is not produced by an accident, but by an act of sacrifice.

I did it…Say nothing, ask nothing!

Such are the words of the madman. A retired stage-actor, Alexander pleads for

silence after he commits the deed. Underlying the havoc of Alexander’s

act of sacrifice, in all its inexplicability and unspeakable intents, is the metamorphosis of the house from its most familiar state to its most extraordinary. Despite its long genealogy across cultures and the multitude of forms in which the ritual manifests itself, the sacrifice delivers a precise function: the production of a transformation. In an incredibly thin volume, aptly titled ‘Sacrifice, Its Nature and Functions’ (1898), the sociologists Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss undertook the task of delineating a general system for the ritual. Unburdening masses of anthropological surveys, the general schema they uncovered is direct: the transformative operation involves the presence of a sacrificer, the intermediary being sacrificed (or the victim), and the addressee. And in a brevity of exposition, they provide the following definition: Sacrifice is a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which he is concerned.1 One can attempt to transpose this schema into Alexander’s terms. All the constitutive elements are there - the man himself as the sacrificer, the house as the victim being offered, and the obscure mystic deity that which Alexander is convinced would save the world from an imminent nuclear war. But one can hardly be satisfied with this formula. We follow Alexander over the course of two hours only to arrive at a open field of total annihilation. He enters and completely abandons himself to this territory without trepidation, contrary to established rituals where a deliberate initiation into the religious atmosphere is adopted to facilitate the entrance to the rite. Far from being cleansed and seemingly unfit for such a lofty and serious enterprise, Alexander fumbles around not unlike a deranged man, incapable of orchestrating the affair as a

Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1981. Print. 13.

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consummate sacrificer. Alexander’s schema is bare, with little space for religious or allegorical reading; there is no bath of purification, no anointment, no vigil. In fact any sacrament is already grossly tainted or transgressed by his lying with the Icelandic witch (who, not without irony, bears the name Maria) prior to the act.

Against the crudeness of the entry, the typical atmosphere of constructed theatricality is absent: the site of the act is none other than the most familiar place to Alexander, the house that he (and the camera) already so intimately inhabit. This complication of designation is further augmented by the confusion between the site of sacrifice - the house by the sea - and that which is being offered in the act, the very same house. The separation of the symbolic and the real in a general ritual allows for the consecration of a thing through the destruction of a substitution, a representation that ensures a safe passage for the thing being consecrated to return from the ritual anew and changed, but unharmed. Alexander discards this layer of signification; he operates beyond representation. He does not sacrifice a model or a copy of his house, but his house, in all its irreparability and irreducibility. To save the world from destruction, he offers it his entire universe. The oikos, the host to Alexander’s cherished possessions and most intimate dreams, the alluded adultery between his wife and his guest, and the sanctity of his son’s room, is now placed at the centre of the culminating point of the sacrifice. It is the site of where all interpersonal relations with the other and contentions within oneself - the birth of a child, the erotic transgression, the unawakened unconsciousness - are put to the closest test. Yet all these are latent. It is only with the fire, Alexander’s second match, that will release the potency of such confrontations in the house, making the boundaries between the sacred and the profane amorphous, allowing for the interpenetration to overcome the previous state of distinct worlds. The integrity of the building is no longer confined to its domesticity, but becomes the basis of a wider incorporeal project of the man who inhabits it.

The second match is important to the consideration of Alexander’s undertaking of the sacrifice. It marks another distinction from a general sacrificial ritual which demands a perfect continuity in its execution, that ‘from the moment that it has begun, it must continue to the end without interruption and in the ritual order. All the operations of which it is composed must follow each other in turn without a break. The forces at work, if they are not directed in exactly the way prescribed, elude both sacrificer and priest and turn upon them in a terrible fashion.’2 Alexander violates the continuity when he fails to ignite the flammable tablecloth with his first match. He fumbles, strikes another match, and holds it up to the same corner. This time the cloth blazes, but by virtue of Alexander’s resistance to the accident in his scheme of sacrifice, an anomaly to the otherwise unshakable confidence of the sacrificer in the automatic result of the act. Whereas it is customary to hasten the death of the victim in most given rites, here the unflinching camera reverses the logic of attenuating the operation - Alexander’s burning house exists as long as it needs to, in its intrinsic duration.

This exorbitance of metaphor cannot be fully comprehended without a footnote. In shooting the apotheosis, Tarkovsky insisted upon using only one camera for the scene. The house, which was painstakingly built over the course of five months, was set aflame to the faith of one lens, yet the machine jammed midway into the destruction. An accidental sacrifice, the house was burnt to the ground without being captured on film. The reshooting which followed the aborted ending - (Alexander) Tarkovsky’s second match - came at the agonising cost of reconstructing the house in two weeks. The burning house is thus preserved in the suspension of the second take. We shall not see an end to it. It survives Alexander, the film itself, and does not extinguish.

Like the single piece of extra-diegetic music which resounds again in the last minutes of the film - Erbame Dich from Bach’s Matthew’s Passion - the burning house breaks away from the narrative space and becomes purely immanent, accompanied by the ancient Japanese hotchiku flute. Framed by the vast 2

Ibid, 28.

indifference of the sea, and the immensity of the grey sky, the burning house blazes between the abysm of impotentiality and the complete abandonment to potentiality. In any other act of sacrifice, this is not possible. The unity of the act requires a final exit from the ritual once all rites are accomplished.

After having acquired a sacred character that is distinct from the profane world, it is crucial that the sacrificer is able to return to it, to the domain of everyday life. For Alexander, the distance between his point of departure and a return is too great; in fact there is no return in the case of his sacrifice. He is eventually sent off to the sanatorium, banished from the scene of sacrifice, with the rest of the family in utter dissolution. And as for the burning house on the verge of collapse, the scene ends abruptly without resolution. A cut, but without return.

The scene ends abruptly, because literally the celluloid has reached its physical limit. In the reshooting of the scene of burning, an arduous six minute continuous take, the camera had run through an entire reel at that precise moment where it cuts now in the present film; the take, the basic unit of the medium, exhausts itself in filming the burning house. Tarkovsky’s contemplation of cinema - ‘the possibility of printing on celluloid the actuality of time’3 - is not only that it is capable of capturing the unfolding of a moment in time, but also its incapability of doing so. At its limit, his art is not just the execution of the take, the formal perfection of the shot, but the full suspension and exposition of his medium. The burning house in its intrinsic duration at the limit of celluloid presents the full undoing of Alexander’s project, and Tarkovsky’s. An imperfection in perfect form. The fire does not render the visible, it renders visible.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Print. 63.

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To burn posthumously, like a word.

- Arsenii Tarkovsky the poet, the filmmaker’s father4 *

4

Tarkovsky, Arsenii. My sight, which was my power…(1977)

‘In the beginning was the word.’

Why is that Papa?

Alexander cannot return, but his absence burns posthumously as the last word of the film. Unseen, his apparition enters in form of the universal word that language identifies him by - ‘Papa’ - when his mute son speaks for the first time in his absence. Oblivious to the scene of violent destruction, his son (who is also affectionately called ‘Little Man’) lies under the tree which he has earlier planted with Alexander at the beginning of the film. Against the bareness of the tree with two emptied buckets beside him, the Little Man mutters to himself, quoting his father’s earlier reference to the Book of John (1:1), almost with the simplicity of chanting a nursery rhyme. Just as Alexander contemplates his world from the brink of a disaster, the Little Man contemplates language at its frontier. Offscreen, the phaos of the burning house infects the last sequence with the light that illuminates without being seen, enabling the son to vocalise the apophansis - in the beginning was the word - a pronouncement (or, a revelation) between light and language that concludes the filmmaker’s entire oeuvre. To end on an unanswered question between father and son - Alexander and the Little Man, Arsenii the poet and Andrei the filmmaker - Tarkovsky sends us back to the beginning of the project of the burning house. Arsenii writes, Live in the house - the house will not fall down.

Whatever century I summon up, I shall enter it and build a house.5 If the burning house finds its origin in poetry, or more precisely poiesis (‘to produce’ in the sense of bringing into being)6, then perhaps the house stands for poetry itself, and the fire is that which consumes the poet utterly - ‘I’m a candle, burnt out at the feast. / Gather my wax in the morning / And this page will give you a hint / Of how to weep and where to take pride, / How to distribute the final third / Of jollity, to die easily, / Then, sheltered by some chance roof, / Flare up after death like a word.’7 To burn posthumously; a Life, Life. (1966) from Tarkovsky, Arsenii, and Kitty Hunter-Blair. Poetry and Film: Artistic Kinship between Arsenii and Andrei Tarkovsky. London: Tate, 2014. Print.142.

5

Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content. Stanford, CA: Stanford U, 2008. Print.

68.

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7

Tarkovsky, Arsenii. My sight, which was my power…(1977)

complete undoing. Contrary to praxis (‘to do’ in the sense of acting), poiesis is the experience of ‘pro-duction into presence, the fact that something passed from nonbeing to being, from concealment into the full light of the work.’8 Just as the fire does not render the visible, but renders visible, Alexander’s act of sacrifice is not ‘to cause to appear,’ but ‘to produce into presence.’ The sacrificial act is hence the evocation of the poietic act, an act of creation that is not reproducible or quantifiable in transactional terms. And because it is concerned with bringing-into-presence, its limit is beyond itself; the burning house exists in its present continuous tense (as in the English gerund -ing) within the filmic space but beyond the limit of the screen or the scene. Yet for Tarkovsky, it is precisely at the moment of the burning house where he crosses over from the realm of poisees to that of praxis (etymology linked to ‘beyond’, ‘passage’ and ‘limit’); in his second take of the burning house, he goes through all the way to his art’s limit.

In his seminal lecture ‘What is the act of creation?’ (1987) at the FEMIS (the famous film school in Paris), Deleuze first poses the question, what does it mean to have an idea in cinema? And what does it mean when an encounter takes place cross-medium, between different domains? It is one thing to say that Andrei Tarkovsky’s art has a close affinity to poetry through his immediate kinship with his father, one of the most eminent poets of the Russian language of his time. But that would not do either justice. Instead of an adaptation of the poetic idea, for the Tarkovskys, it is rather the situation where the poetry of poetry is revealed through an idea in cinema that finds correspondence and resonance with the poetic word. The encounter between Andrei’s burning celluloid and Arsenii’s posthumous word, nothing less than miraculous, engenders a cinematographic idea that has its own autonomy from the domain of the word or a symbolic meaning. Referring to his other film The Stalker (1979), Tarkovsky laments: ‘People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone…’9 Just as the zone is a zone, the burning house is the burning house, without seeking to represent the words of the late poet. In 8

Agamben. 68.

9

Tarkovsky, Andrei. 200.

the earlier parts of the film, Tarkovsky includes a book with illustrations of Russian orthodox icons, somewhat alien in the context of the Swedish landscape. The burning house as a time-image is akin to the Russian orthodox icon in that the icon does not seek to portray a realistic portrait for the faithful believer. The burning house does not provide a coherent answer to the audience who are left confounded by the meaningless of the sacrifice.

We do not know if Alexander has averted the nuclear apocalypse, if his family’s unity has been restored, or if he regains sanity. The more haunting and urgent question in his act of sacrifice remains, what is his act of sacrifice?

What is the act of creation?

Deleuze ends his lecture with a simple equation. Quoting André Malraux’s concept that art is the only thing that resists death, Deleuze posits that every act of creation is also an act of resistance: ‘The act of resistance has two sides. It is human, and it is also the act of art. Only the act of resistance resists death, whether the act is in the form of a work of art or in the form of human struggle.’10 The film’s extra-diegetic refrain - Bach’s Erbarme Dich - is an act of creation which is also an act of resistance, ‘an active struggle against the partitioning of the profane and the sacred.’11 And so in the same thread, we can consider Alexander’s act of sacrifice as an act of creation that not only resists the external threat of the world, but also its own impotentiality. The burning house, the work of fire, sits between the contemplation at both ends: If the poet Arsenii Tarkovsky avows that ‘whatever century I summon up, I shall enter it and build a house,’ Hölderlin returns an equally necessary pronouncement Their judgement Is that his own house He destroy and what is dearest to him, He treat as an enemy and father and child, He bury under rubble.12

Deleuze, Gilles. "Qu'est-ce Que L'acte De Création?” (What is the act of creation?) FEMIS, Paris. 1987. Lecture.

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11

IBID.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. Print.

129.

12

Tarkovsky inscribes this potentiality and impotentiality within Alexander, who has long relinquished his art as a stage-actor, and removes his last function as a character in the film, transforming him into an agent of time, empowered to change the medium of the film itself - its rhythm. In his transformed schema of the act of sacrifice, there is no exchange, only the interruption in the continuum of linear time. Alexander destroys himself, he destroys the house that he inhabits, and no longer possesses a before or an after. Open to all, come destruction, come devastation, come disaster. Come day, in the light of the burning house.

March, 2015

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content. Stanford, CA: Stanford U, 2008. Print.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Qu'est-ce Que L'acte De Création?” (What is the act of creation?) FEMIS, Paris. 1987. Lecture.

Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1981. Print.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Print.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. The Sacrifice (1986) Tarkovsky, Arsenii. My sight, which was my power…(1977) Tarkovsky, Arsenii. Life, Life. (1966) Tarkovsky, Arsenii, and Kitty Hunter-Blair. Poetry and Film: Artistic Kinship between Arsenii and Andrei Tarkovsky. London: Tate, 2014. Print.