On the formal argument in Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice (1986) and what it stakes.

The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky's last film, made in Sweden after he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and after he had defected from the Soviet Union. He knew he was dying when he made it.

The film follows a man who, during a nuclear crisis, makes a vow to God: if the catastrophe is averted, he will sacrifice his house and take a vow of silence. The final sequence — the burning of the house — was filmed as a single continuous take and the house actually burned. When the camera broke down during the take, Tarkovsky rebuilt the house and burned it again.

This insistence on reality — on the house actually burning, not burning in montage or miniature — is the film's formal commitment made concrete. Tarkovsky believed that cinema's relationship to time required that what happens on screen actually happens. The house burning is the film's vow.

The silence at the film's end — the protagonist has kept his vow, the child's voice carries — is the only optimistic ending Tarkovsky ever made. Given when it was made and by whom, it has the quality of a final statement rather than a narrative resolution.