Andrey Tarkovsky: H Θυσία
"...What is most dinstictive about our still from the film? I suggest this: the absence of spectacle, of
show business.
What could be more limpid and serene and unrhetorical than the image which it purports to describe, one of several such in the film, the image of an infant (neither a Hollywodd cuttie nor a glum, unprepossesing, Bergmanesque brat) craning up at the branches of a tree (which itself is uncinematically puny) against the background of a shimmering (but not dazzlingly shimmering) lake and a skyscape of placid (un-baroque, resolutely unapocalyptic) clouds? The notion of a contemporary Hollywood filmmaker being drawn to the same story as that of The Sacrifice - an intellectual, convinced that a nuclear holocaust is about to destroy the planet, swears to God that he will sacrifice everything he is and has, himself, his family, even the little son we see in this still, if only it needn't be so - is unlikely but not unconceivable. He could not for an instant, however, have found a visual style so mysteriously simple and beautiful in which to relate it. The clouds would be rhetorically inflated by time-lapse cinematography, the lake would be straight out of
National Geographic magazine, the tree would be a giant redwood, the infant Macauley Culkin. There is show business, and then there is cinema."
Gilbert Adair:
Flickers - An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema, Faber & Faber, London, 1995