Social Distancing in Tarkovsky art film

Let’s stop at a particular scene from Tarkovsky’s nostalgia. And certain, the gesture in which the hero sets fire to the public square, on sacks. We notice people “socially distant” two meters away from each other. Watching a show. Without intervening, without being moved by this gesture, as if everyone were drugged. As if they saw a show that is not part of their lives.

Many of Tarkovsky’s scenes are filmed from a distance. Objects, people, animals and things all have a space of distance that ultimately leads to loneliness. And this world proves that it cannot be saved by a candle spun around the pool or by other rituals and beliefs. Can this World be brought to reality by an extreme gesture, by sacrifice? Because nostalgia tells us about a lost world. A world that made sense. In the New World, the hero cannot find his humanity. In the last scene of the film, he is surrounded by old ruins, by the ruins of a church.

In “Nostalgia”, Tarkovsky uses this symbol to express the degree of alienation of man in society. A man sets fire to the public square. The others look like a mirror. Without understanding the gesture. Because suicide is a manifesto. A gesture. Like the one made by the Romanian Liviu Croneliu during Ceausescu’s regime. Czech history and economics student Jan Palach sets fire to the market like the Tarkovskian film, protesting against a totalitarian regime. Because suicide is a symbolic gesture with latent effects that politicians fear the most.

It is irrational to commit suicide out of desperation. It is irrational to commit suicide when life seems difficult to you. This is not suicide, it is desertion, like a coward fleeing from the front line. But it is rational to commit suicide when you are no longer whole as a Man. To be a Man means to accept your death. Like Socrates. Like Jesus. Only sacrifice out of love is an authentic, assumed gesture, which has the consciousness of its own greatness. Never out of despair!

We should pay more attention to the Symbols we find in ourselves, to the dreams we dream, because they are coded information, like the human genome. There is an evolution of Creation, just as a man-made AI can rewrite itself and evolve independently of man.