Nostalgia for the Time We Never Used
During the making of Nostalghia, Tarkovsky linked the ungraspable present to nostalgia for unused time.
In 1983, while Nostalghia was taking shape, Andrei Tarkovsky was asked about time.
His answer begins almost as a problem of perception. Time, he says, cannot be separated from the person perceiving it. And the present is especially elusive. "We do not live in the 'now.'" The now is so close to zero, so brief, that it cannot really be grasped.
Then the thought takes an unexpected turn.
Tarkovsky describes the present almost as an abyss between what has already vanished and what has not yet arrived. From there, he moves directly to nostalgia.
Not nostalgia as a longing to return.
Not even, exactly, nostalgia for the past.
What troubles us, in his formulation, is the stretch of time that has gone unused: the time in which something inward was available to us, but we failed to gather it, develop it, or act on it.
Nostalgia becomes regret for an unrealised possibility.
This is a peculiar reversal. Usually the lost object comes first: a place, a person, a period of life. Time hurts because it carried that object away. Tarkovsky makes time itself the lost object — but not simply elapsed time. What is lost is the part of ourselves that might have existed inside it.
The idea appears in a conversation conducted by Gideon Bachmann during the making of Nostalghia. A version was published as "Between Two Worlds" in American Film in November 1983 and later reprinted in John Gianvito's Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews. A related version appeared in the Swedish journal Chaplin the following year.
The distinction matters because Tarkovsky's nostalgia is not passive remembrance. It contains an accusation.
The past is painful not only because it is gone.
It is painful because, while it was present, we may not have used it.
A Note on Sources
Primary publication: J. Hoberman and Gideon Bachmann, "Between Two Worlds," American Film, vol. 9, no. 2, November 1983, pp. 75–79, reprinted in John Gianvito, ed., Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2006, pp. 88–96. A related Bachmann version appeared as "Att resa i sitt inre" in Chaplin, no. 193, September 1984. The Nostalghia.com page is a useful online reference for the Chaplin version and its transmission history; it is not the original English source of the American Film text. Do not treat the idea as unpublished, unknown, newly discovered, or previously unnoticed: it has been cited in scholarship. The note's value is the unusual formulation and the link between the ungraspable present and nostalgia for unrealised time.
Between Two Worlds
J. Hoberman and Gideon Bachmann, "Between Two Worlds," American Film, November 1983; reprinted in John Gianvito, ed., Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2006).