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Tarkovsky told a press conference, "Nostalghia is about the impossibility of people living together without really knowing one another, and about the problems arising from the necessity of getting to know one another. It's very simple to make acquaintances, much more difficult to arrive at a deeper knowledge of another person."

After Nostalghia, Tarkovsky decided not to return to Russia. He directed much of his last film, The Sacrifice, from a hospital bed. A European co-production shot in Sweden by the legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist (Bergman's favorite), the credits roll over Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi as Bach plays on the soundtrack. Alexander, the main character, has learned of the outbreak of a nuclear war. Although he has admitted that his relationship with God is non-existent, he prays to God that if he would only restore the world to the way it was before, he will sacrifice everything he owns, everyone he loves, and never speak again. "God hears Alexander's prayer," Tarkovsky says, "and the consequences are at once terrible and joyful."

"When I was young," he told an interviewer, "I asked my father, 'Does God exist, yes or no?' And he answered me brilliantly: 'For the unbeliever, no, for the believer, yes!'"

At the end of The Sacrifice, a boy says to his own father, "In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?" The father does not answer as the camera tilts up a tree to the sky and a title appears, dedicating the film to Tarkovsky's son.

The final sentences of Sculpting in Time are, characteristically, questions about God and art: "Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?"

Tarkovsky died in 1986, an untimely death by heart attack shortly after his son was allowed to leave the USSR, just as Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost were starting to take root in his homeland. To his death Tarkovsky considered himself a "Russian, not a Soviet" and, ironically, in 1990, he was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize for his "outstanding contribution to the development of cinema art, for his innovative films, which help to affirm universal human values and humanistic ideas."

Tarkovsky was buried in Paris, his epitaph stating simply, "To the man who saw the Angel."

To learn more about Tarkovsky, click here, here, and here.

Filmmakers of Faith, an occasional feature at Christianity Today Movies, highlights directors who adhere to the Christian faith—sometimes strongly, sometimes loosely, and sometimes somewhere in between. This series will include everyone from biblically-minded evangelicals to directors who may only have a "church background" and perhaps a lapsed faith … but their films are clearly informed by their spiritual history.

© Eric David 2006, subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

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