Tarkovsky is one of the most important filmmakers of his generation. Despite having only made seven films (he made a few more short films and a documentary for television, but he made only seven feature films for cinema) they are all true masterpieces, making it difficult to choose the best of them all.
This Sacrifice is the last film by the Russian director, made in the final stages of his life, sentenced to death for the same lung cancer that had killed his wife a few years before. There is, in fact, a strong probability that the lung cancer that would kill Tarkovsky, his wife Larissa Tarkovskaya and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn had its origin in poisoning at the chemical factory where Stalker (1979) was filmed.
The quest for faith is a recurring theme in Tarkovsky's work, at least since Andrei Rublev (1966) and gained quasi-religious tones in the two films after Larissa's death, Nostalgia (1983) and This Sacrifice (1986).
Tarkovsky's cinema is always very complex and open to multiple levels of reading, but Sacrifice, as its title indicates, is a final work by someone who knows he will die soon and wants to leave a message of faith. Not exactly a religious, institutionalized faith, but rather a sincere, individual, ethical, artistic faith, something that came from the previous film Nostalgia and which also had in common the fact that it has the Swedish Erland Josephson as the actor who embodies this mystical revelation. . The Sacrifice is a beautiful, profound and provocative film, as it challenges even non-believers to reflect on faith and the human condition. At all levels it is a work worthy of the position it occupies as the cinematic testament of the great director Andrei Tarkovsky.
This Sacrifice is the last film by the Russian director, made in the final stages of his life, sentenced to death for the same lung cancer that had killed his wife a few years before. There is, in fact, a strong probability that the lung cancer that would kill Tarkovsky, his wife Larissa Tarkovskaya and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn had its origin in poisoning at the chemical factory where Stalker (1979) was filmed.
The quest for faith is a recurring theme in Tarkovsky's work, at least since Andrei Rublev (1966) and gained quasi-religious tones in the two films after Larissa's death, Nostalgia (1983) and This Sacrifice (1986).
Tarkovsky's cinema is always very complex and open to multiple levels of reading, but Sacrifice, as its title indicates, is a final work by someone who knows he will die soon and wants to leave a message of faith. Not exactly a religious, institutionalized faith, but rather a sincere, individual, ethical, artistic faith, something that came from the previous film Nostalgia and which also had in common the fact that it has the Swedish Erland Josephson as the actor who embodies this mystical revelation. . The Sacrifice is a beautiful, profound and provocative film, as it challenges even non-believers to reflect on faith and the human condition. At all levels it is a work worthy of the position it occupies as the cinematic testament of the great director Andrei Tarkovsky.