Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 masterpiece Nostalghia allows us to rethink our ordinary notion of nostalgia and move beyond the idea of nostalgia as sentimental longing for the past, the fruitless yearning that allows us to avoid living in the present. The film suggests that nostalgia can help us notice that which is not a part of our current situation and to introduce new threads into the fabric of our world. Because of nostalgia, we become aware of perforations in the existing (...) order of things and, as a result, become capable of altering the status quo. The protagonist of Tarkovsky’s film, Gorchakov, a Russian poet visiting Italy, shows us that nostalgia is a violent voyage that never leads home but only helps us find and found a new–and always temporary–dwelling place. Nostalgia, then, is a journey to the home that never was, but to the home that might be. The final sequence of the film beautifully confirms this by placing Gorchakov next to his Russian home that turns out to be inside the ruins of the Cistercian abbey of San Galgano in Italy. This cinematic merging of two very different places and cultures creates a new world for Gorchakov and asks us to continue creating the places in which we happen to find ourselves today. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a reconsideration of the complex concept of mimesis, as it is deployed in the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno, which, I argue, provides some interesting and original avenues through which we may interpret some of the infinitely engaging if enigmatic films of Andrei Tarkovsky. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first, I explore Adorno's development and usage of the concept of mimesis, as well as the latter's fall into disfavour since (...) Habermas's influential 'communicative turn'. In the second part, I undertake to read some of Tarkovsky's work in an Adornian vein, with the hope of reconfiguring mimesis as a valuable and fruitful concept in understanding the somatic and extra-discursive elements within communication. What I call Tarkovsky's 'mimetic method' can be seen to follow Adorno's epistemological principle of the 'preponderance of the object', while testifying to the mimetic potential of non-discursive communication. In so doing, Tarkovsky's filmic work - with Adorno's critical theory - refutes the purely linguistic/discursive grounds of Habermasian communication. This implicit refutation works on two levels. It enacts forms of mimetic construction, at the first level, and calls forth acts of interpretation and mimetic reception, at the second. I argue that these features are in need of greater attention and elaboration. The works of Adorno and Tarkovsky, in my view, provide useful grounds for challenging and enhancing existing understandings of aesthetic and philosophic communication, by more fully appreciating their interconnectedness and complementarity. (shrink)

Despite striking parallels between their philosophies and artistic work, there have been no prior dedicated studies of the reinforcing ideas of Siegfried Kracauer and Andrei Tarkovsky. I contend with other interpreters that Kracauer’s philosophy of film is best understood as a form of revelationism, with strong sociological and ontological theses about the nature of modern psychological life and the medium specificity of film. Essentially, Kracauer felt that certain films which adhere to what he called “truly cinematic” content by depicting (...) the naturalistic “flow of life” have the potential to awaken in viewers a psychological reconnection to the concrete material world, in contrast to the experience of abstraction characteristic of modernity. Having presented Kracauer’s philosophy, I outline strong convergences in the philosophy and aesthetics of Tarkovsky, and illustrate these parallels through close analysis of Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. In the third section of this article, I further explore the converging revelationist philosophies of Kracauer–Tarkovsky by confronting them with critiques which were levied by Theodor Adorno (against Kracauer) and Fredric Jameson (against Tarkovsky). The reconstructed debate between these four critic/practitioners touches on central issues for film criticism, including methodological approaches of ontology versus dialectics and the question of how to represent utopic impulses in cinema. (shrink)

Films and Dreams considers the essential link between films and the world of dreams. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein reveals a common structure of "dreamtense" in the works of major filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Bergman, and Wong Kar-wai.

The science fiction films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1973) and Stalker (1979), are complex responses to the repressive atmosphere of Brezhnev’s rule, after the 7-year delay in seeing Andrei Rublev (1971) released publicly. By using science fiction—a genre that Tarkovsky openly maligned—he was able to fly beneath the radar of State censorship, and develop a nuanced response to the application of Marxist theory of religion in the Soviet experience. Arguing in these films (and in others in his oeuvre) (...) that humans still need the affective dimension of religion (though not the hierarchical, institutional elements of it that Marx had identified with sedation), Tarkovsky hid within his science fiction films a thoroughgoing critique of the Soviet application of Marx. This article uses the concept of “war machine” from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to analyze how Tarkovsky did this, and demonstrates that Tarkovsky’s engagement with Marx’s philosophy in these two films shares much in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s way of understanding human meaning making. (shrink)

En su libro The Cinematic Footprint (2012), la teórica de los estudios sobre el cine Nadia Bozak propone un análisis de la producción cinematográfica basado en su relación con los consumos y los recursos naturales de los que ésta depende. Desde este punto de vista, este artículo parte de tres escenas de la filmografía del realizador ruso Andrei Tarkovsky para examinar, desde las condiciones materiales de su producción, un campo de interacciones entre imagen y transformación del paisaje más allá (...) de la representación. El trabajo de Tarkovsky es entonces analizado en este texto desde el marco de las relaciones trabadas a lo largo del siglo XX entre imagen, extractivismo y crecimiento vegetal. En particular, los planos examinados son puestos en relación con programas de colonización agraria, agricultura de precisión y técnicas de reforestación como el bombardeo de semillas. El contraste entre la naturaleza extractivista de la mediación por la imagen en estos casos y el carácter de "práctica de cine vegetal" con el que ha sido descrito el cine de Tarkovsky (Uhlin 2015) invitan a rearticular la diferencia entre imagen y crecimiento vegetal en términos de los llamados "medios elementales" introducidos durante la última década en el ámbito de la teoría de los medios. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that the films of Andrei Tarkovsky are particularly suitable for inducing feelings of the numinous. This suitability is a formal rather than semantic feature of his films, and is tied indelibly to what film scholars call ‘suture’. I with a summary of what film theorists mean by ‘suture’, before providing a principled defence of the Merleau-Pontian suture theory outlined by George Butte. Second, I will demonstrate that, in spite of the strength of Butte’s formulation, (...) the numinousness of Tarkovsky’s films pose an analytical challenge to his suture theory. Finally, I will then provide my own extension of Butte’s suture theory, arguing that, by virtue of the formal properties they possess, we encounter Tarkovsky’s films more like religious objects than ordinary films. The tenor of these encounters is why Tarkovsky’s films are appropriate loci for feelings of the numinous. (shrink)

En la película de Andrei Tarkovski _Sacrificio_ el mundo vive una amenaza de III Guerra Mundial apocalíptica, a la vez que las relaciones familiares del protagonista se hallan en una crisis que parece definitiva. Pero un último ritual tal vez invierta la situación. El artículo argumenta que el planteamiento y la cosmovisión de este gran clásico del cine pueden interpretarse según los códigos simbólicos de la alquimia, empapados de teología cristiana y de la mitología y la cosmología de la Antigüedad, (...) con Hermes como patrón, aunque el director lo lograra de una manera probablemente involuntaria, debido a sus intereses poéticos y espirituales. (shrink)

In this article I examine Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 film Ivan’s Childhood. The film tells a story about a twelve-year old Russian boy, whose family was killed by the Germans at the onset of WWII. Orphaned and dispossessed, Ivan began to scout for the Soviet troops. Eventually, he was captured, tortured and executed by the Gestapo. Using a wide gamut of mythopoetic “articulations,” in this film, Tarkovsky shows how Ivan’s victimization affected him beyond repair, leading to the erosion of (...) his child identity and the emergence of a traumatic duality. The film therefore is not only a poignant condemnation of the war, but a disclosure of the victim phenomenon carried out by mythopoetic means. In my analysis of Ivan’s Childhood, I approach this phenomenon by focusing on the effects of trauma on the child, with a special emphasis on dreaming. For my theoretic, I employ the phenomenology of the child. (shrink)

At the centre of theories of film form is the idea that the montage of different scenes produces cinematic time. Montage creates a conflict between different shots, and time (as a purely functional relationship between shots) arises out of montage as an abstract element.

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 425-437, May 2022.

'Simulation, Simulacra and Solaris ' examines and contrasts the 1971 science-fiction film Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky with the 2002 film Solaris by Steven Soderbergh. Our text argues for the significance of simulation and simulacra in relation to the conceptual framework of Solaris, adapting as our primary model Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and simulacra.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze evokes dramatization when he suggests that intensities must dramatize the Ideas to condition their actualization. This allusion to an artistic category, in the midst of his metaphysical inquiry, has remained obscure, and despite its cruciality, it is not clear why he appeals to dramatization to explain any actualization and not solely the artistic actualization. This essay attempts to elucidate this ambiguity, by foregrounding a zone of torsional continuity, wherein intensity encounters the Idea and expresses it (...) through dramatization. This process is at play in the actualization of the organic field, social field, and aesthetic field, where an intensive larval subject—embryo, disentangled individual, artist—encounters the biological, social, or artistic Idea. While referring to the artistic encounter, it is shown how dramatization is indispensable to actualize every Idea. Finally, through Tarkovsky and Blanchot, the notion of poeticization is formulated that, while complementing dramatization, unveils certain tacit nuances of the Deleuzian actualization. (shrink)

This article proposes an ecophilosophy of the cinema. It builds on Martin Heidegger’s articulation of art as ‘world-disclosing,’ and on a Whiteheadian and Deleuzian understanding of the universe as a lively and eventful place in which subjects and objects are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming. Accordingly, it proposes that cinema be considered a machine that produces or discloses worlds. These worlds are, at once, anthropomorphic, geomorphic, and biomorphic, with each of these registers mapping (...) onto the ‘three ecologies,’ in Felix Guattari’s terms, that make up the relational ontology of the world: the social, the material, and the mental or perceptual. Through an analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), I suggest that cinema ‘stalks’ the world, and that our appreciation of its potentials should similarly involve a kind of ‘stalking’ of its effects in the material, social, and perceptual dimensions of the world from which cinema emerges and to which it returns. (shrink)

Andrey Tarkovsky _Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema_ Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996 ISBN: 0-292-77624-1 255 pp.

This book explores the shared experiential ground of cinema, art, and architecture. Pallasmaa carefully examines how the classic directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky used architectural imagery to create emotional states in their movies. He also explores the startling similarities between the landscapes of painting and those of movies.

This article is designed to disclose the meaning of sacrifice as it is depicted in Andrey Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice. The film tells about a former classical actor named Alexander who in the face of the nuclear Apocalypse discovers his true calling – saving humanity from imminent destruction. In order to accomplish his calling, he has to sacrifice his “life”, exchanging it for peace that comes about as a reversal of time which happens in response to his prayer to (...) God as well as his intimate encounter with the local witch. The analysis of the film’s narrative imagery is carried out with Jacques Derrida whose essays on gift, name, and language demonstrate the uniqueness of the film maker’s vision of absolute duty and the call of conscience that restores the true faith in the soul of modern man at the time of the ultimate horror. (shrink)

Comment le silence agit-il au cinéma? Qu'est-ce qui permet d'identifier ce phénomène? Implique-t-il la disparition intégrale de la matière sonore ou seulement sa minimalisation à l'intérieur d'un film? Son intervention, ponctuelle ou durable, tend à engager une raréfaction, voire une suppression, des paroles et de la musique, mais pas forcément de tout bruit. Des lieux particulièrement silencieux, ainsi que le mutisme ou la surdité d'un personnage, sont également propices à l'instauration de telles situations audiovisuelles. Cet ouvrage analyse, à travers une (...) approche généalogique et herméneutique, la présence du silence dans le cinéma contemporain sur le double principe d'héritages figuratifs et de ruptures discursives. Il s'appuie sur un corpus de films réalisés entre autres par Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras, Andrei Tarkovski, Theo Angelopoulos, Tsaï Ming-liang, Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa ou Sharunas Bartas. Au-delà des considérations esthétiques, le livre interroge aussi les valeurs anthropologiques, morales, sociales et/ou politiques qui se glissent derrière ces manifestations concrètes du silence. Celui-ci nous invite, tant sur le plan éthique que sensible, à repenser notre rapport fondamental au monde."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

El tiempo constituye la materia que el director de cine cincela y esculpe para crear sus películas. Así lo atestiguan geniales artistas como Andrei Tarkovski, Yashujiro Ozú o Alfred Hitchcock. ¿Qué relación existe entre la creación cinematográfica y la aprensión del tiempo, esa dimensión escurridiza y fantasmagórica sobre la que han reflexionado a lo largo de la historia filósofos como Platón, Aristóteles, San Agustín, Kant, Bergson o Heidegger, entre otros? El presente artículo realiza un recorrido por las reflexiones sobre el (...) tiempo de cineastas y filósofos y aporta ejemplos concretos de piezas cinematográficas que aclaran e iluminan diversos conceptos. El cinematógrafo fue capaz de registrar la realidad en movimiento, es decir, el paso del tiempo, y desde entonces el ser humano puede moldearlo a su antojo gracias al montaje y a los diferentes recursos narrativos de los que se sirve la técnica cinematográfica. Los cineastas trabajan a partir de un tiempo objetivo, medible y mecánico para transformar e incidir en el tiempo subjetivo e interior del ser humano, en el tiempo que según la filosofía de Bergson se forma en la conciencia humana a través de la intuición. Filosofía, antropología y cine se funden en estas líneas para aportar luz sobre una de las preguntas fundamentales de la reflexión del ser humano. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film_ is the first comprehensive volume to explore the main themes, topics, thinkers and issues in philosophy and film. The _Companion_ features sixty specially commissioned chapters from international scholars and is divided into four clear parts: • issues and concepts • authors and trends • genres • film as philosophy. Part one is a comprehensive section examining key concepts, including chapters on acting, censorship, character, depiction, ethics, genre, interpretation, narrative, reception and spectatorship and style. (...) Part two covers authors and scholars of film and significant theories Part three examines genres such as documentary, experimental cinema, horror, comedy and tragedy. Part four includes chapters on key directors such as Tarkovsky, Bergman and Terrence Malick and on particular films including _Memento_. Each chapter includes a section of annotated further reading and is cross-referenced to related entries. _The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film_ is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy of film, aesthetics and film and cinema studies. (shrink)

Cet article s’inscrit dans le prolongement d’une recherche que je mène depuis une vingtaine d’années sur les rapports entre cinéma et pensée. En m’appuyant en particulier sur les réflexions de Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Edgar Morin, j’ai ainsi pu créer les concepts de « complexité esthétique », « noosphère filmique », « cinématographie des flux ». Suite à l’évocation de créateurs-penseurs du cinéma muet d’avant-garde, sont ici abordés des films d’Amos Gitaï, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais et Andreï Tarkovski. (...) L’intitulé, « Les métaphores filmiques du cerveau » indique que l’approche de la relation cinéma-cerveau est d’ordre philosophique, mais également d’ordre poétique. Si le cinéma est à même de donner forme à la pensée, il invente aussi des circuits cérébraux — sonores et visuels — qui lui permettent de devenir forme « pensante ». This paper is a continuation of my research over the past twenty years on the relationship between cinema and thought. By relying in particular on the reflections of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Edgar Morin, I was able to create the concepts of “aesthetic complexity”, “filmic noosphere” and “cinematography of flows”. Following the evocation of creative thinkers coming from avant-garde movies of the silent era, here I discuss films from Amos Gitaï, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Andreï Tarkovsky. My title, “The brain’s cinematic metaphors”, indicates that my approach to cinema-brain relationship is philosophical, but also of a poetic nature. If cinema is able to shape thought, it also invents metaphorical brain paths—audio and visual—that allow it to become a “thinking” form. (shrink)

Mapeando brevemente alguns eventos desencadeados pelo período denominado, por alguns cientistas, como Antropoceno, este estudo busca estabelecer um observatório deste período através da ótica do campo das artes, do cinema e da filosofia. Pretende-se compreender como práticas artísticas podem ser concebidas de forma a sublinhar as incoerências referentes à intervenção humana no sistema e na atmosfera terrestre. Para tal, este estudo recruta trabalhos de artistas como Alice Miceli, Andrei Tarkovsky e Jacob Kirkegaard, em suas potencialidades de prevenção, educação e (...) crítica em relação a distintas implicações relacionadas ao desastre nuclear de Chernobyl. Assim, é compreendida a possibilidade de trabalhos de arte em atuar como revisita histórica e análise geo-histórica, bem como meios de potencializar críticas às injustiças provocadas pelo Antropoceno.Palavras-chave: Arte contemporânea; Antropoceno; Energia nuclear; Justiça Climática. (shrink)

Matilda Mroz argues that cinema provides an ideal opportunity to engage with ideas of temporal flow and change. Temporality, however, remains an underexplored area of film analysis, which frequently discusses images as though they were still rather than moving. This book traces the operation of duration in cinema, and argues that temporality should be a central concern of film scholarship. In close readings of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and the ten short films that make up Krzysztof Kielowski’s (...) Decalogue series, Mroz highlights how film analysis must consider both particular moments in cinema which are critically significant, and the way in which such moments interrelate in temporal flux. She explores the concepts of duration and rhythm, resonance and uncertainty, affect, sense and texture, to bring a fresh perspective to film analysis and criticism. Essential reading for students and scholars in Film Studies, this engaging study will also be a valuable resource for critical theorists. (shrink)

Since early modern times, art has paralleled religion in its response to technology as illustrated by Ruskin’s thoughts on the colour purple. Heidegger also turned to art, especially the poetry of Hölderlin, as an alternative to technology. Against the background of Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’, the question is asked whether the thoroughly technicized art of film can become a focus for such creative counter-technological thinking. A positive answer is developed with reference (...) to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia. (shrink)

Può il brusio di una voce essere anche il luogo di una lingua? E vale questa topica anche nel caso in cui la voce sia quella di uno strumento musicale? Queste domande sono alla base della indagine sulla tecnica compositiva della tintinnabulatio, inventata e sperimentata dal musicista estone Arvo Pärt . I tintinnabuli consistono di due elementi apparentemente contraddittori: la sonorità pastosa dello zvod e l’armonia della triade perfetta. Muovendo da un disco ricevuto in dono e dalla interpretazione in parte (...) inedita di un passo di san Paolo, l’autore cerca di individuare il punto di articolazione dei tintinnabuli, quella “grana” dove – come disse una volta Roland Barthes – una lingua incontra una voce. Il problema musicale sottende le interminabili discussioni trinitarie dell’Oriente cristiano – qui per sfortuna solo accennate – e si manifesta nella figura dell’iconografo medievale Andrej Rublëv, cui il regista russo Tarkovskij ha dedicato, nel 1966, un denso e ispiratissimo film. Could the rustling of a voice be also the place of a language? And does it happen all the same, when the voice at issue is that of an instrumental body? Such questions are the basic ones for any inquiry into Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli—the technique invented and experienced by the famous Esthonian composer . It consists of two seemingly conflicting elements: the doughy resonance of the zvot ; and the harmony of the perfect triad. The present paper moves from the personal memory of listening Pärt’s elegy Silouans Song. The delicate instrumental piece is said to conceal a prosodical calque of the voice of the famous staretz Silouan the Athonite . Silouan’s song —to use Barthes’ words—is the very place where “a language does meet a voice”. Some interpretive consequences lead off such a meeting: from a misunderstanding of a Pauline passage to the art of sacred Icons; and from the Trinitarian controversies of Byzantine church fathers to the medieval painter St.Andrej Rublëv and his most famous icon: “The Holy Trinity”. A work where—as Andrej Tarkovski has shewed in his celebrated movie of 1966—Abraham’s oak is a like a bell concealing the threefold person of God. (shrink)

:This article analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, focusing in particular on the film's remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique of rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-italictic allegory of world-destruction. At the same time, I suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds – cinematic but also cultural and natural – that characterises our historical mood, one that might be described as a deflationary apocalypticism (...) or melancholy modernity. From this perspective, Melancholia belongs to a genealogical lineage that links it with two earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar Bergman's Shame [Skammen] and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice . All three films share a concern with apocalypticism, world-sacrifice, and historical melancholia; but they also explore different responses to the imagined experience of a catastrophic loss of world. By examining these films in relation t.. (shrink)

Com esse texto-experimento e como um cartógrafo, aventuramos nos espaços epensamentos erráticos, nômades, liso, de Stalker, filme do cineasta russo Andrei Tarkovski e doconto “O recado do morro” do escritor João Guimarães Rosa. De certa forma, o percurso elaboradopelas expedições, os três homens de Stalker e os cinco homens de “O recado do morro”, guardamalgumas vizinhanças que se desdobram sobre os problemas nos socius em que percorrem. O sociussobrecodifica os fluxos do desejo, buscando determiná-los, regulá-los. Ainda que sejam olharessingulares, filme (...) e literatura, avultam-lhes sensações problemáticas tendo em vista as maneirasinusitadas com que os caminhos se fazem no conto e no filme. Para esse experimento, utilizamosa geofilosofia imanente deleuzeguatarriana. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to outline a Spinozian-Deleuzian analysis of audio-visual experience and to combine this account with an embodied cognitive perspective on cinema. Thus, film experience integrates affection and intellection and is not a passive and contemplative phenomenon, but a constructive interaction that involves a creative encounter between the screen and the viewer. Furthermore, I will address the role of sad passions and the problematic relation between creation and resistance, also by drawing upon Primo Levi’s work on (...) memory and on the shame of being human. Consequently, I will argue that my Spinozian-Deleuzian perspective involves an idea of cinema and art as ethically productive events since they allow a creative opposition against all those forces that mortify and enclose existence. Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Andrei Rublev offers the possibility to develop this discussion; in this biopic, the life of the famous Russian painter is pervaded by problematic questions upon the nature of God, the necessity of Evil, the role of art within a world of violence and misery and, at the same time, the tension and the marvel in the discovery of the real. Following the ideas on spectatorship outlined by Deleuze and combined with Spinoza’s thought, we can say that the film makes us perceive these issues through the embodiment and the engagement of the relations it describes. At the same time, the movie gives us the possibility to re-discuss these terrible questions revealing the active and productive nature of art, as different sequences (like the enigmatic prologue) demonstrate. A further aim of this article is, then, to show how this assemblage of different concepts is possible through the vivid and interactive dimension of film experience. (shrink)

Inspired by Farshad Zahedi’s audiovisual essay The Petrified Object and the Poetics of Time in Cinema, this article briefly presents three philosophical approaches to cinema’s ways of expressing time – as articulated by Bergson, Tarkovsky, and Deleuze – and questions how absolute time and chronological time are brought to a state of crisis by this modern form of art.

:Given its capacity to stimulate the imagination and resonate across a wide spectrum of human experiences, sacrifice has always attracted filmmakers. From Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc to Pasolini's Mamma Roma to Tarkovsky's Sacrifice to many of Ozu's films to Kar Wai Wong's In the Mood for Love or to Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves and Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jésus, to give just a few examples, sacrifice has nourished, informed and shaped filmmaking. Sacrifice is (...) a fundamental human act, and cinema has always, in some way or another, danced around it. Yet that's not all. In a world like ours from which the gods have mostly withdrawn, but people haven't stopped feeling the need to believe, in an important sense film has taken over the myth-factory. It's on screen that the post-Christian grand narratives are sketched, the new myths rehearsed, and the old ones recycled. Our contemporaries may no longer be church-goers, but they go to the movies religiously. And the sacrificial theme makes.. (shrink)

Since his debut feature The Return (2003), Andrey Zvyagintsev's films have drawn focus from film critics and theorists seeking to investigate a contextual analysis or the director's religious allusions. Hailed as the New Tarkovsky by some, a western-centric perspective has placed Zvyagintsev within the Russian canon from which he originates. However, in doing so, there has been a tendency to overlook a form and aesthetic that seeks to avoid these categorisations. By attempting to engage with his films independently from (...) these frameworks and from a purely humanist perspective of subjectivity, the depth of Zvyagintsev's cinema comes to the surface. We find that the metaphysical reflections of Zvyagintsev's films relate not only to the cinema and its artificial worlds, but also to the position of the human in the real world. Independent of a prior historical or religious perspective, this metaphysical relationship to Zvyagintsev's films focuses on the human and the human consciousness. This article will engage with Zvyagintsev's first two features, The Return (2003) and The Banishment (2007), considering metaphysical aphorisms of one of Zvyagintsev's constant reference points, Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili. This will allow us the opportunity to rethink the relations between cinematic form, the human and the consciousness. (shrink)

During the late Soviet era, science fiction was one of the first zones of its ideological cosmos, registering the exhaustion of the communist utopia precisely within the literary genre aimed at its representation. In this article I consider the history of the “editing to death” of the Strugatsky brothers’ short novel Roadside Picnic as a representative case of the anti-utopian “uneasiness in civilization” of late actually existing socialism. Simultaneously with the censorship taming of the uneasiness, the Strugatsky’s science fiction dystopia (...) underwent a radical interpretation in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaptation Stalker as a Hegelian “good music with text”. In comparison to the censored edition, which is barely a timid emendation, ultimately yearning modestly for a good life during the most consumeristic and moderately repressive years of Soviet power, Tarkovsky’s aesthetically singular re-reading is truly a “Zone” of editing to death. (shrink)

A comienzos de la década de los 80, el filósofo Gilles Deleuze aplicó la teoría de la imagen de Bergson expuesta en Materia y Memoria (1896) a la imagen cinematográfica con la intención de desarrollar nuevas herramientas conceptuales que, a través de un análisis de la historia del cine, permitieran poder delinear mejor tanto la relación cognoscitiva más allá de los presupuestos de sujeto-objeto, como una teoría de la comunicación pre-verbal no estructuralizada fonéticamente que superara definitivamente la concepción lacaniana del (...) lenguaje. Si bien dichos análisis pueden ser vistos también como el establecimiento de unos principios alternativos a las teorías del montaje tanto de Vertov como de Eizenshtéin, el interés primario de nuestro paper se centrará en la redefinición de las categorías espacio-temporales que conlleva esta nueva teoría del cine esgrimida por Deleuze. Concretamente analizaremos cómo la nueva tecnología cinematográfica, especialmente en su desarrollo europeo de la segunda postguerra (Godard, Fellini, Syberberg, Tarkovski) supone una comprensión temporal por completo ajena a cualquier comprensión de causalidad lineal, teleológica o no, de corte cronológico. En su lugar, el cine en tanto que medio de comunicación propio del mundo metropolitano contemporáneo emplea unas categorías temporales más cercanas a conceptos como “acontecimiento” o “haecceitas”, que en algunos puntos lo acercan a la concepción del tiempo desarrollada por Walter Benjamin, pero que por otro lo relacionan directamente con formas aiónicas del mismo ya estudiadas por Deleuze en la década de los 60, y aplicadas al estudio del dadaísmo en la de los 70. (shrink)

Dacă cercetarea fenomenologică are o anumită intuiţie mai mult sau mai puţin vagă a direcţiei în care se îndreaptă, ea nu ştie dintru început unde anume va ajunge, unde anume o vor ghida întrebările. Ca în Călăuza lui Tarkovski, cercetătorul aruncă înaintea sa întrebarea şi apoi o urmează, înaintând oarecum în necunoscut, în orizontul neştiut pe care întrebarea îl deschide. Tocmai de aceea cercetarea fenomenologică este o explorare, o înaintare în necunoscut, fără o hartă sigură, fără o busolă infailibilă, alta (...) decât cea a propriei pre-înţelegeri, care poate fi confirmată sau infirmată pe parcurs. Spre deosebire de alte tipuri de cercetare, care pornesc de la un dat pozitiv deja disponibil, deja asigurat, în fenomenologie cercetătorul trebuie să îşi obţină datul originar, să şi-l asigure constant, să-l extragă din contexte fenomenale în care el este de cele mai multe ori ocultat, mascat şi obturat. Tot aşa şi noi, întrebându-ne dacă şi cum ar putea fi conceput un sens originar şi integrator al trupului, unul care să premeargă şi totodată să cuprindă diversele forme de expresie corporală a existenţei umane, noi nu presupunem că îl avem deja, gata dat, disponibil, apt de a fi arătat cu degetul: iată-l! Dimpotrivă, este mult mai plauzibil ca acest sens originar să ne fie dat întâi de toate prin ocultările sale, prin formele sale derivate, privative sau sărăcite. Explorarea fenomenologică ia atunci chipul unei operaţii de desfoliere, de recuperare a unui strat de sens originar, ascuns în spatele unor aluviuni care îl acoperă şi, uneori, îl fac de nerecunoscut. (shrink)

Untersuchungsgegenstand ist ein systematischer Vergleich zwischen Marc Richirs Phänomenologie der Affectivität und Andrej Tarkowskijs Konzeption des Films als lebendiges Zeitbild, illustriert am Beispiel des Werks „Stalker“. Als tertium comparationis dient der Gedanke einer „archaischen“ oder „elementaren“ Affectivität. Eine solche philosophisch-ästhetische Reflexion eröffnet die Möglickkeit, den architektonischen Status klassische Ideen der Philosophie zu prüfen und umzugestalten. Beide Theoretiker behandeln den Gegensatz von Immanenz und Tranzendenz auf eine Weise, die metaphysische Grundstellung von Ich, Welt und Gott unterwandert und durch ein Denken der (...) Schwelle, der Transition oder Transposition ersetzen. Mithilfe Richirs lässt sich die Struktur der „Zone“ als hyperbolisches Phanomen lesen. Erst inmitten seiner Simulacren un Instabilitäten kommt die Humanität al Rätsel zur Erscheinung, d.h., als Selbstreflexivität eines sich bildenden Sinns. Diese Reflexivität phänomenalisiert sich, so die weitere These, diesseits der Unterscheidung von Denken und Fühlen. Der Aufsatz versucht einen Beitrag zur phänomenologischen Ästhetik zu liefern. Mittels Konstellationsanalyse werden in einer ersten Annäherung allgemein-architektonische Isomorphien und Kohärenzen beider Ansätze herausgestellt. (shrink)

Hooks are the particular elements in works of art that are in fact specially compelling for individual subjects. Hooks have their own kind of aesthetic meaningfulness that is obscured by the calculations of cultural manipulators, on the one hand, and by leading aesthetic theories’ insistence upon subordinating parts of a work to the whole, on the other. Hook appreciation inspires desirable adjustments in those theories.

In the 1972 science-fiction novel, Roadside Picnic, by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, aliens have used Earth as a rest stop on the way to another, presumably grander, destination...