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Ritual (2000, hideaki anno)

Gorchakov, dreaming of a world without borders, appears to long for Babel – the city that united humanity with a single language. He must also be aware that after divine intervention, Babel became a symbol of the impossibility of reaching the realm of the unknowable and of the consequent damnation to the sphere of translation. The fall or relegation to the state where translation is ‘possible’, indeed even essential, occurred, according to the Old Testament, as a result of the unsuccessful attempt to build a super-structure – the Tower of Babel ‘whose top may reach unto heaven’ (Genesis 11: 4). At the centre of the story is the spatial conflict provoked by linguistic unity: ‘Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do’ (Genesis 11: 6). God imposes a certain spatial limit beyond which humans cannot ascend; everything that remains further than this point in space is destined to be beyond human reason and knowledge. The damnation is achieved by means of a confusion of languages with further dissipation: ‘So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city’ (Genesis 11: 8).

Abroad is a key word which is related to the verb to scatter in the King James’s Version and means in this case a state of being ‘widely asunder’; in its modern use, however, it tends to signify ‘any region outside one’s homeland’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Abroad is the condition of Gorchakov since it describes his estrangement: the protagonist is disconnected from his current surroundings (language, people and landscape), he finds himself abroad in the two senses – ‘widely asunder’ and outside his homeland. Language and topography operate as agents of alienation and the film’s aesthetic strategy is to resolve somehow the divergence between the character’s inner aspirations and outer surroundings.

Nariman Skakov, The (im)possible translation of Nostalgia (Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema Volume 3 Number 3, publ. 2009)

Ritual (2000, hideaki anno)

Ritual (2000, hideaki anno)

Andrei at home in Stockholm.