The final movement of Beethoven's 9th is the background to Domenico's self-immolation in the square in Rome in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. Remember it is as though scratched or stuck. No glorious celebration of freedom and joy ... the music stutters. What do I hear in this stuttering? A hesitancy within the artwork itself - within a beautiful artwork. A glitch in the beautiful which as it were divides it from its beauty. And it is thus with Domenico's suicide: it is not beautiful. He falls and crawls along the ground, crying out. He dies - it is a martyr's death. Martyrdom? But in the interval between the immolation and his death, he is just a man who has set himself alight.
Here is the mad attempt to negate the world, to draw the whole world into the fire of sacrifice and bring it shuddering back into birth. And this mad action is met with incomprehension that voids it of all beauty. We - the viewers - are not spared the hideousness of his agony. Far away, Gorchakov has heard of Domenico's death. He takes the stub of a candle and begins to walk across the drained pool. It is madness, all of this. But a madness which is bound to the world's plight.
We have seen people die violent deaths (swollen bodies, scattered limbs) and know death is not beautiful. But does the abjection of the martydoms which, in depriving death of its beauty, bear witness to the desparation and horror of suffering (think of the monks who set themselves on fire in protest at the Vietnam war)? Yes, witness is the word I would insist upon (isn't it linked etymologically to the word martyr?)
But then remember Mishima's ritual suicide: he would have cut open his own stomach - terrible pain - and his 'second' beheaded him. As I recall, the 'second' (was his name Morita?) did not slice Mishima's head from his body in a clean stroke. It took several attempts (and wasn't it someone else who delivered the final blow?) In Mishima's aesthetics, was death not also a moment of beauty (it is more complex than that)? - A beauty that, we know, was linked by Mishima to the glory of the old Japanese order, to the emperor? This is not a martyrdom, for it bears witness only to the limitations of a reactionary aesthetic which requires Mishima step from the world of the writer (he wrote at night) into the daylight of the world. Reactionary? Yes, because as Tarkovsky understands, the work of art already bears witness to the world's plight. There is no need to step into the light.
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