MOVIE REVIEW: Nostalghia
Early in the film, the main character Andrei makes the claim that “All art is untranslatable.” Seems odd when you consider that this film is translated from Italian and Russian into English.
Translation, in this case, means conveying the same meaning as the original. Now, from having translated some Greek and French in college I can tell you that perfect translation of language is not possible, because no one can seem to agree what a “perfect translation” actually is. Ideally it might be a one to one word translation: “uno” means “one,” that sort of thing. But often there is no one word that captures the essence of the word to be translated. Take translating a Chinese character into English. Yes there is the definition, but there’s also a whole host of tradition and history that any English word just can’t capture.
So it comes down to the translator to pick and choose the words that convey the impression they want. For example, when translating The Iliad Stanley Lombardo opted to emphasize the origin of the piece by doing public readings and seeing what worked and didn’t. Richmond Lattimore, on the other hand, chose a different approach, at the expense of making it more of a “text” than something arising from oral tradition. And this is touched on in the movie: Andrei’s translator says her “translation [of Andrei’s poetry] will surpass the original,” which it can, because translation is also an act of creation.
So there will always be something untranslatable with language, but Andrei says “all art,” so not just poetry and literature. The film itself is a work of art, so why don’t we use it as a test case. Just as in language there will be things that are untranslatable. Again, “translatable” means able to convey the same meaning. In this case, the film has a meaning, but it is unable to convey that same meaning to me. The meaning could come from the symbols used in the film: rain, candles, dogs etc., It could also come from the director: “This film is about X.”
Let’s look at the first case since it is basically the same as language. These symbols in the film form their own language, but the words in that language are very subjective. While I think the dog means loyalty, you might say that it represents his longing to go home, and so forth. So the full meaning, if there is one, is always going to be lacking. Keep that word “lacking” in your pocket for now, I’ll come back to it later.
The second case: that of authorial intent, is shaky because often the message of a piece of art as received by the viewer is so different from what the author says it is. Sometimes the artist can’t fully explain their own art. And anyway, film being a collaborative project, the meaning of the film could be completely different from the director’s intent. Film doesn’t have an “author” in the same way literature has. So the meaning, and there seems to be serious doubt that there is a singular one, does not lie in the author.
Now we come back to this idea of “lacking.” Both those cases only mean that something is lacking, not that the entire message is not conveyed, and this fact seems to be that that results from our believing there is meaning, according to the film. In other words, art has meaning because we think it has meaning. Early in the film we hear that the “madman” Domenico has been jumping into a local hot spring with a lit candle. The locals think he is trying to drown himself and “save him.” Little do they know that he was trying to save them by carrying the candle across the pool and thus preventing the end of the world. This is a meaningless act to most people, but to Domenico it is of the utmost importance, as it becomes for Andrei, so much so that it kills him. He believes, therefore there is meaning.
5/5 This is a classic. It’s a little dull here and there, but the ideas contained within it and the emotion it has is beautiful beyond words.