to the settlement. Many things are left unsaid. The world for him, for Alexander's little son and for the maid Maria, is full of incomprehensible miracles, which exist in their imaginary world rather than the actual world. These characters resemble neither the empiricists nor the pragmatists. They believe in only that which is tangible and this includes their flights of fantasy. All they do is in total contrast to 'normal' patterns of behaviour. They possess the gift of the mendicants, respected and acknowledged by the people of ancient Russia. These mendicants affected 'normal' people not just by their external appearance as shabbily dressed pilgrims. Their prophecies and acts of sacrifice were in sharp contrast to the comprehensible and legitimatized laws of the rest of humanity. The civilized man of today is primarily a non-believer with positivistic tendencies. Even the positivists do not perceive the absurdity of marxist claims about the objective existence of the world and of the accidental on earth. How can it be possible ! Help ! We are being robbed ! Contemporary man is incapable of wishing for the extraordinary or conflicting events which go against 'normal' logic. Man, moreover, is less prepared to allow—even in his thoughts—a miracle or to believe in its magical power. The absence of these qualities has resulted in spiritual bankruptcy. This itself should make one stop and think. It is for man to understand that his life's path is not evaluated by human measures but is in the hands of the Creator. And man should pin his hopes on His will. Many producers today do not, unfortunately, support author's films. They do not treat cinema as an art form but as a means of making more money by turning the celluloid into an ordinary product. The Sacrifice, in this sense, is a total rejection of what commercial cinema stands for. My film has no pretensions of either supporting or rejecting this or that position of contemporary thought or way^ of life. My main desire was to depict and expose the problems of our existence. I wanted viewers to take note of those sources of our existence which man has rejected and cast into oblivion. Films and visual images can express all this just as well as words especially because the word today has lost its mysterious and enchanting meaning, and speech has degenerated into meaningless chatter. According to Alexander the word has ceased to mean anything. We are suffocating from a surfeit of information. At the same time, vital messages which are capable of changing our lives. no longer penetrate our consciousness. Our world is split into two halves: good and evil; spirituality and pragmatism. The human world has been constructed and modelled according to material laws, because man has created his society on the basis of dead matter. He has transferred the laws of dead matter on to himself. That is why he does not believe in the spirit and rejects God—for he feeds on bread alone. How can he Journal of Arts & Ideas 79