2012: A Space Olyssey (VI)

VI

The Eternal Return

 

He wrote me, how long before a conflict between east and west becomes reality? In 1912, Kim Il-sung, the founder of North of Korea, was born. A hundred years on, around Christmas time, Kim Jong-il dies and the country crowns its new leader, Kim Jong-un.

The apocalyptic film 2012 has been banned in North Korea as it sheds a negative light on the year that is supposed to be a centenary celebration, as well as the year that will witness the beginning of the nation’s rise to super power status.

Rivals to the status quo are popping up everywhere, and the Pax Americana stairs collapse in the face. The uncertainty of what will ensue renders pension disputes meaningless. Will we tumble into a long dark age, as happened following the collapse of Rome?

History always seems to repeat itself. We witness an eternal recurrence of the same events but with different characters, different effects, or slightly altered scripts. Adaptations, if you will. Or remakes.

  

A hundred years after Scott’s trip to Antarctica, a 15-year-old boy climbs the continent’s highest peak, becoming the youngest person to have ever climbed the biggest mountains of every continent.

 

 

And of course, people couldn’t help but draw comparisons between the crash of the Costa Concordia and the sinking of the Titanic that had occurred a hundred years earlier. And in 2012, we’re also now witnessing the 3D release of the film, Titanic, thanks to Paramount Pictures, who also celebrate their centenary.

Happy returns. A sentiment wished repeatedly to Alexander on his birthday in Tarkovsky’s film made in exile, The Sacrifice. A film shot on the desolate and secluded island of Gotland, a film pregnant with the fear of the infinite unknown presented by an imminent threat of nuclear war.

'The Sacrifice'

Andrei Tarkovsky 

 

It opens with two characters appropriately discussing Nietzsche, a philosopher preoccupied with the eternal recurrence of the same. Nietzsche described eternal recurrence as a great burden of the heaviest weight, a burden that the übermensch, the superman, would embrace wholeheartedly.

 

Tarkovsky had indeed intended at one point to call The Sacrifice ‘The Eternal Return’. It ends where it started, but with one difference: no Alexander. He broke away from the cycle.

'The Sacrifice'

Andrei Tarkovsky 

I felt it necessary to visit the island where all this took place. I thought that if I were to film it, and include it in my map of fragments, I might come one step closer to completing this project of mine.

 

Through a bizarre series of encounters and coincidences that started in Finland, I met Hector. He was kind enough to drive me around to all the places of the island I wished to see and film and, without him, much of the island would have remained out of reach.

At a location that had been used extensively in the filming of The Sacrifice, I marveled at the calls of the lapwings and how similar they were to the eerie sound of the woman's singing in Tarkvosky's film. Simply another coincidence perhaps.