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The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

Posted By: Someonelse
The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

The Sacrifice (1986) [Remastered Edition]
DVD9 + DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 16:9 VBR | 02:28:45 | 7,49 Gb + 4,21 Gb
Audio: Swedish AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English
Genre: Art-house

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky (as Andrei Tarkovskij)
Writer: Andrei Tarkovsky (scenario)
Stars: Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood, Allan Edwall

Famed Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's final masterpiece, The Sacrifice is a haunting vision of a world threatened with nuclear annihilation that inspired Andrew Sarris (The Village Voice) to proclaim, "You may find yourself moved as you have never been moved before".

As a wealthy Swedish family celebrates the birthday of their patriarch Alexander (Erland Josephson, Cries and Whispers), news of the outbreak of World War III reaches their remote Baltic island - and the happy mood turns to horror. The family descends into a state of psychological devastation, brilliantly evoked by Tarkovsky's arresting palette of luminous greys washing over the bleak landscape around their home. (the film's masterful cinematography is by Sven Nykvist, Ingmas Bergman's longtime collaborator).

For Alexander, a philosopher troubled about man's lack of spirituality, the prospect of certain extinction compels the ultimate sacrifice, and he enters into a Faustian bargain with God to save his loved ones from the fear which grips them. the director's last film, made as he was dying of cancer, The Sacrifice is Tarkovsky's personal statement, a profoundly moving, redemptive tragedy steeped in unforgettable imagery and heart-wrenching emotion.


This is the best movie I have seen so far. I watch it again about once or twice a year, like a ritual or an annual holiday I would be taking into levels of consciousness where the mind is not really required. I do not understand, and I do not feel like I have to, it is secondary. I feel touched like only pure and silent beauty can touch me, or bliss. It is obviously created around an idea of sacrifice, being both a gift to others but also to ourselves. By offering his life in order to save his family, his grandson and the world, the main character is also giving a true meaning to his own life that had mostly been of artificiality, questionings and shallowness. Every person who enters the house, he starts seeing under a deeper if not more expressionistic light… And when he meets with magic (while making love with the witch) he creates the bridge that will take him from reality into mystery. The whole film is as breathtaking and self-sufficient as a painting, or even more so, a Russian icon. It is ageless. I suppose it will remain with me for my entire life. I consider it Tarkovsky's last will, but even more so a piece of the Human Heritage that should be protected and kept accessible for future generation.
IMDB Reviewer
The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

THE SACRIFICE is a true work of art. It is probably the most beautiful film by the cinematic poet Andrey Tarkovsky. It is also the most accessible among his works: unlike his films prior to this one, the plot of THE SACRIFICE itself is quite simple and easy to catch. A retired actor- journalist-author (some kind of an intellectual superman) hero living in a beautiful sea-shore house suddenly faces the end of the world: a nuclear war. What can he do to stop it? He prays to God, he who never believed in God before, and offers himself to be the sacrifice for saving the world as he knows, a world which for the first time, he realises how much he loves it.

The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

The plot is simple, but its implication is complex. One who believes in God and the absolute love he represents can see this as a story of miracle. An atheist can see this as all being a hallucination of a repressed old man. Tarkovsky makes the film in a way that you can interpret it in whatever way you want. But in whichever way you see it, the film will lead you to our fundamental question; why we live? What is the meaning of our life? How we can achieve the state in which we can say when we face eternity, "I understood the meaning of my life and I fulfilled it"?

The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

THE SACRIFICE was shot beautifully by cinematographer Sven Nykvist, one of the greatest master in the art of creating filmic images, whose talent is perfectly in match with Tarkovsky's narrative strategy of filling the frame with symbolism that the audience can interpret in what ever way he/her wants… it's a must-see film.
The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made just seven feature films during his nearly thirty-year career—including Andrei Rublev, Solaris, The Mirror, and Stalker—and his swansong, The Sacrifice, serves not only as a summation of his life's work, but also as his final thoughts on faith, mankind, and the modern age. Shot while Tarkovsky, then 53, was dying of cancer, the film has an inescapably reflective, elegiac quality, but its inherent sadness is bookended in the opening and closing scenes by a potent symbol of optimism—a tree that will bloom if tended—and it's worth noting that the director dedicated the film to his son Andriosha "with hope and confidence." In his excellent book on film theory, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky himself stated that the film is "a parable" and that "the significant events it contains can be interpreted in more than one way." While theses events are often intentionally vague—there is the possibility, for example, that some of the film, if not most of it, is a dream—the subject of the parable is quite clear: self-sacrifice as an act that's capable of changing individual lives and indeed all of human history.

The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

The Sacrifice is something of an homage to director Ingmar Bergman, as the two filmmakers shared a mutual admiration. (Bergman once called Tarkovsky "the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.") One of only two of Tarkovsky's features to be produced outside the U.S.S.R., the film was shot on the Swedish island of Faro—where the reclusive Bergman lived and set many of his own movies—and the lensing was done by longtime Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist, one of the world's most acclaimed cinematographers. The Sacrifice also stars Erland Josephson, who, like Max Von Sydow, showed up in most of Bergman's important works. These surface similarities, however, give way to deeper shared thematic concerns. Both directors were cinematic philosophers of religion and faith—exploring mankind's uneasy relationship with God—and both had preoccupations with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Of course, there are stylistic parallels between the filmmakers as well, including a fondness for surrealist dream sequences, stark imagery, and long, meandering wide shots.

The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

The Sacrifice opens with one of the latter, a single nine-minute and twenty-six second tracking shot—the longest in the film, and the longest in Tarkovsky's career—in which Alexander (Josephson), a late middle-aged atheist, journalist, and former actor, plants a barren Japanese tree by the seaside with his young son, whom he calls "Little Man." (The nickname is clearly symbolic, as the boy represents the future of all mankind.) While they position the tree in the ground, Alexander tells his son—who has just had a neck surgery, and is temporarily mute—the story of a monk who instructed his pupil to diligently water a similarly withered tree at the top of a mountain until it bloomed. Alexander seems obsessed with the idea of performing a simple act—like the daily watering of a plant—that can produce a positive change in the world. Later, when the island's quasi- prophetic postman, Otto (Allan Edwall), bicycles out to the beach to deliver a telegram, we learn that it is Alexander's birthday. His dutiful doctor friend, Victor (Sven Wollter), has arrived, and along with Alexander's younger actress wife, Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), and their teenaged daughter, Marta, they plan to have a small party at their quaint seaside house, a home that looks not unlike the one in Through a Glass Darkly, the Bergman film Tarkovsky draws upon most here.

The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

The celebration is dampened by the screech of a jet overhead, rattling the wine glasses and knocking over a pitcher of milk, which shatters on the ground. (An image the director previously used in Mirror.) An announcer on a flickering television set skirts around the obvious—World War III has begun, heralded by the launch of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction. The TV screen cuts to black, the phone line goes dead, and an atmosphere of apocalyptic uncertainty descends on the house. Adelaide has a mental breakdown and has to be sedated. Julia, one of the maids, refuses to wake up Little Man from his nap, hoping that if annihilation does suddenly arrive, it will happen while the boy is asleep. And Alexander, a professed atheist who nonetheless feels the world has lost its sense of spirituality, falls to his knees and recites the Lord's Prayer. Bargaining with God, he proposes a Faustian trade: ""I will give Thee all I have. I'll give up my family, whom I love. I'll destroy my home, and give up Little Man. I'll be mute and never speak another word to anyone. I will relinquish everything that binds me to life, if only Thou dost restore everything as it was before, as it was this morning." Salvation comes in the form of love from one of Alexander's maids, Maria (Gudún S. Gísladóttir), who may or may not be a witch.

The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

This is a film that should be felt first and analyzed later. There's an emotional scene where Alexander sits with Maria in her decrepit cottage and describes the memory of trying to tame his dying mother's overgrown garden with shears and a scythe. He breaks down in tears when he recalls looking out the window and seeing that the "order" he thought he imposed on the garden actually destroyed its wild beauty. Replace "Alexander" with "mankind" and "the garden" with "the Earth," and you have a wonderful bit of subtext about environmentalism, but the film's real theme is larger than even that—the need for a turn away from a purely material existence and toward some kind of spiritual, holistic approach to life. There's no getting away from it; Tarkovsky was a professed Christian, and The Sacrifice is one of his most explicitly religious films. But don't let this turn you off if you're not of the same persuasion. There's deep, poetic feeling at work here that's truly universal.

The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

It should go without saying that The Sacrifice is not an "easy" film—although it's arguably one of Tarkovsky's more accessible pictures—and not one to be watched casually. The director's glacially slow tracking shots are both wide and long, distancing us from the characters—there are relatively few close-ups—and forcing us to mentally engage with what we're watching. Those with the patience to see it through will be rewarded with a profound and affecting experience. This was essentially Tarkovsky's deathbed statement—he would die less than a year after making it—and he couldn't have chosen better parting words.

The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

If you like serious cinema, few filmmakers are more poetic and transcendent than Andrei Tarkovsky, and The Sacrifice, his final film, is also one of his finest. Writing or talking about it simply doesn't do it justice—it needs to be seen and soaked in. Kino's high definition transfer unfortunately displays some evidence of digital manipulation, but this is still by far the best the film has ever looked outside of the theater. As a bonus the package includes a DVD with the terrific documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, which helps elucidate the director's themes and methodology. Highly recommended!
Blu-ray.com
The Sacrifice / Offret (1986) [Remastered Edition]

Special Features:
DISC ONE:
- The Movie

DISC TWO:
- "Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky" documentary (97:28, with English subs)
- Trailers
- Galleries
All Credits goes to Original uploader.

No More Mirrors, Please.