Reflections on the Experience and the Effect of Nostalgia Seen through Andrei Tarkovsky's Film Nostalghia (1983)

Abstract

The aim of this research is the cultural, temporal, and spatial displacement of an individual from their native country as a trigger for nostalgia. Consequently, the material for this analysis is drawn from the artistic film Nostalghia (1983), the first work of Soviet/Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, shot outside the USSR. As this is a work with autobiographical elements, I approach it as a form of emotional expression. Focusing on the experience of nostalgia, Tarkovsky posits the thesis that it is a burdensome, melancholic, and, in its ultimate reaches, deadly experience. In an attempt to find answers to the question why nostalgia is imagined, experienced, or lived in a particular way, I am guided by the basic assumption that it is not only the ambivalent nature of nostalgia itself, but also its effect of being stuck, which makes it an unbearable burden. Being stuck is not devoid of movement, but it lacks action in terms of efficacy and effectiveness. In interpreting the material concerning the experience of nostalgia, its temporal dimension, and its effectiveness, I will rely on the theoretical-methodological concept framework of the anthropology of emotions and migration, as well as Davis's sociology of nostalgia. This analysis indicates that the burden of this emotion, even its potential deadly outcome, lies in the nostalgic experience as a state of being stuck.