2017
HD-video, 40’45”
director of photography: Camilla Topuntoli
cinematographer: Leif Eiranson, Camilla Topuntoli
music: Patrik Johansson, Per-Henrik Mäenpää
postproduction: Camilla Topuntoli
The film is represented by Filmform
Andrei’s Maria is a film essay about Tarkovsky’s Swedish-made film The Sacrifice, which was shot in 1986 on the Swedish island of Gotland.One of the stars of Tarkovsky’s film, Icelandic actress Guðrún Gísladóttir, returns to the location at the request of Ingela Johansson thirty years after the film was shot with her daughter Vera Illugadóttir, to share her memories of the making of the film. The film is a unique interpretation of and tribute to the central character of Maria, the witch destined to save the world from nuclear disaster. All of this reveals Tarkovsky’s critique of civilisation, while the behind-the-scenes stories are also brought to light from Gísladóttir’s unique perspective, through evocation. The script draws on archival footage and the artist’s conversations with the women who participated in Tarkovsky’s work, whose experiences Johansson considered crucial.
The reminiscences are woven into the original using the film editing technique known as montage. The implementation of montage, which involves analytical deconstruction and synthetic (re)assembling based on a different conceptual logic, gives rise to an interaction of distinct layers of time, creating analogies, unexpected correlations and associations between scenes, objects, sounds and sequences of intonations, and making the events of the past accessible to us by evoking and re-enacting certain scenes in the present. The narrative is thus centred on existential questions, which are coupled with the progression of time and space and are carried forward by the memories of the making of the film. The nonlinear story of the mother-daughter relationship is one of the motifs that aims to show that, projected into time, we are all part of a collective, forward-looking formation in the circular movement of time. The repetitive actions, the compositionally rich, yet minimalist elements of Scandinavian cinema, often evoke formal associations. The juxtaposition and superimposition of timelines may inadvertently lead the viewer to search for possible similarities and differences. It is as if Tarkovsky’s work is manifested in a poetic universe of air, of atmosphere, while Johansson’s work consists of dialogues embedded in a flow of repetitions and rhythms. While Tarkovsky describes the airy space of the atmosphere, Johansson shows the place of objects floating in space. Space is universal, removed, while place, even if digital, is local, akin to the real. Space is universal, place is specific, so the former refers to distance and is typically open, while the latter denotes the bounded and the near, which at the same time has meaning for us.
The differences between these “conceptual twins” can only be defined and understood in relation to one another.[1] In this way, Ingela Johansson’s evocations and re-enactments personalise the abstraction of the original film, which serves the further and more nuanced actualisation and understanding of The Sacrifice.
[1] Agnew, A. John: Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society, Allen & Unwin, 1987.