films after emigrating to the West. In Nostalgia, a co-production with Italian television, the film’s rootless and alienated protagonist searches for the spiritual meaning of life and eventually undergoes a kind of inner purification as he relives his life through a series of memories. Finally, although playing on fears of a nuclear apocalypse, The Sacrifice presents a world in which simple acts of faithfulness, honesty and self-sacrifice offer hope and salvation for the human race. Tarkovsky died in 1986.249 Špidlík’s analysis revealed the spiritual depth of Tarkovsky’s films and posed philosophical-theological questions about the tensions human beings experience in the nexus between temporality and eternity. Many passages in the films are difficult to follow on first viewing; a full understanding of certain characters and scenes, and of how the scenes are shot, comes only in retrospect and with knowledge of the meaning behind the whole narrative. Špidlík told me once about an invitation he received to a screening of Nostalgia. Many in the audience found the story unengaging and the long scenes boring; some of them even fell asleep. After the screening, however, when Špidlík explained the meaning behind some of the scenes and illuminated many of the subtle details, suddenly everyone wanted to see the film again. If the hidden mysticism—the truth—in Tarkovsky’s films is to be revealed in anything like its fullness, it is clearly an advantage to have some kind of theological understanding. Špidlík compared Tarkovsky to the author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose novels are as challenging as Tarkovsky’s films despite having been interpreted so many times from a variety of religious and ideological perspectives. Špidlík finds the principal similarity between the two in their anthropological approach to story-telling, a subject much under discussion in the (Catholic) theology of their respective eras:
249) For more on Andrei Tarkovsky and his films, see for example, Lyudmila Boyadzhieva, Andrei Tarkovsky: A Life on the Cross, trans. Christopher Culiver (London: Glagoslav, 2014); Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2008); Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). ( 98 )
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