The Engine

The Sacrifice (1986, dir Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood) I went to the Arsenal in Potsdamer Platz on Monday 12th of July to see the former Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky´s last film ´The Sacrifice´. It was unbelievably hot in Berlin, but cool enough in the cinema (which obviously must have been air conditioned). The programme began with a charming Tarkovsky short from his earlier period working in the Soviet Union, The Waltz and the Violin. The film demonstrates Tarkovsky´s story-telling capabilities and ability to depict character in a shorthand of disparate images. The film is not typical Soviet propaganda nonsense, but a sensitive depiction of childhood. The main feature, Tarkovsky´s final film ´The Sacrifice´, dating from 1986, therefore wedged in between the final years of the Cold War and the beginning of the era we live in. ´The Sacrifice´ is a concoction of constricted art house pretentiousness and visionary epiphanies that aim to revea