Solaris, he lets Tarkovsky into Kubrick’s space, grafts Tarkovsky on Kubrick; or even puts Tarkovsky in the world of American science fiction film. Perhaps, it is because of Soderbergh that Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar became another recent film that brought Kubrick and Tarkovsky together in their indirect dispute?
Tarkovsky’s Legacy
András Bálint Kovács is a film scholar, founder of the Film Studies Department at the Budapest University. Author of several papers and monographs, including Les mondes d’Andrej Tarkovsky (1987), Screening Modernism (2008), and The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes (2012).
The most important legacy of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre is his technique to invest the physical, mainly natural environment with the power of spiritualizing the dramatic scenes of the narrative. This attitude is originated in the Russian orthodox religious rituals, and the techniques Tarkovsky has developed to represent it has proven the most powerful stylistic solution for many-mainly Russian-filmmakers from the 1990s on. The paper shows how Hungary’s most acclaimed contemporary filmmaker, Béla Tarr made use of Tarkovsky’s legacy.
Von Trier as Tarkovsky’s Heir
Anton Dolin is a film critic, film scholar and journalist. Radio presenter at Mayak and Vesti FM, TV host at Evening Urgant and constant writer for Afisha-Vozduh; author of five books.
When a dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky appeared at the end of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, the audience at the Cannes premiere reacted with derisive laughter and booing. How could von Trier-a mocker, nihilist, provocateur and ardent post-modernist-be an heir to the irreparably serious Tarkovsky? The paper attempts to answer this question.
The mutations of cinema, philosophy and even literature from the second half of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st resulted in the fact that the only Tarkovsky possible today is indeed von Trier with his radicalism and intransigence, his hidden pain and metaphysical search. The Russian genius’s heritage is found where no one was looking for it: in a cinematic universe filled with skepticism and vitriol irony, quotes and genre games. Looking at it, we understand that the distance between the two Ts-Tarkovsky and Trier-is not that unbridgeable.
Tarkovsky’s Theatre of Boredom
Nathan Dunne is the editor of Tarkovsky (2008). He also organised The Art of Andrei Tarkovsky, a symposium that took place at Tate Modern. His most recent book is Lichtenstein (2012), a monograph that accompanied the artist’s retrospective in Chicago, London and Paris.
The state of boredom depends on the coexistence of the following components: a state of dissatisfaction and longing, a sense of emptiness, and a distorted sense of time in which time seems to stand still. This paper argues for a definition of boredom in relation to Tarkovsky’s films, particularly Solaris. In particular, the paper focuses on several key scenes within the film, including Burton’s meeting with the Solaris Space Council and the long highway sequence filmed in Tokyo.
Although there are different accounts of what boredom is and does, many thinkers agree that it is inimical to the modern industriousness on which national progress depends. It creates a restlessness or agitation that shifts the focus from the world, either its objects or nature, to the self. In this, we might say that such a focus on the self has the potential to give flight from the dependent mind and to create independence in its wake, where the self is perceptually and psychologically refigured. Tarkovsky’s aesthetic and philosophical sensibility created an alternative theatre for boredom, a space for the ideally «independent» viewer.
«Unplayable»: The Actor’s Living & Presence
Kirill Adibekov is a filmmaker, curator, translator, poet. Winner of the Elephant prize in the Sine Charta category (2013).
When talking about acting in theatre and cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky convinсingly demonstrated that in the former, the actor is largely their own director. Their task is to build and unfold their character in line with the general game. They know (and sometimes choose) what exactly do they play. This has traditionally been a part of the profession.
Cinema requires a different type of professionalism. One that can trust in the director who compiles their film from many fragments (including fragments with actors): separate shots, whole sequences, sounds, bodies, pauses. The director, according to Tarkovsky, is responsible for everything. In this case, the actor’s only task is to live. This requirement can only be understood by a non-traditional type of professional.
Tarkovsky: the actor is not only stripped of directorial functions; they must not show any trace of their attitude towards their character. Add to that the fact that they often do not know the screenplay. Such dictate leads to the uttermost importance of the result at the expense of, for instance, exercise. This approach is partly (and only partly) in tune with Robert Bresson’s experiments who worked with actors as he would work with a material, a physical substance that needs to be endowed with meaning (gestures and words).
On the Problem of Relations Between the Soviet Viewer & Tarkovsky’s Cinema
Maria Milovzorova, PhD, is an associate professor at the Chair of History and Cultural Studies at isuct; curator of the Modern Art Workshop Floor 6, co-director at the Andrei Tarkovsky Research and Project Centre.
Elena Raskatova, PhD, is a professor, Head of the Chair of History and Cultural Studies at isuct, director at the Andrei Tarkovsky Research and Project Centre.
There has been practically no research on how Andrei Tarkovsky’s films were perceived by his contemporaries; nevertheless, this perception was complex and controversial. Tarkovsky himself immensely valued understanding and evaluation of his films-this fact is confirmed by his diaries where he often quotes the audience’s reactions to his work. Among them, he focuses on the reviews that allow him to believe he makes films that appeal to any «normal spectator» (one review is signed like this), who were not so few as bureaucrats and shill critics wanted people to think.
Various types of sources let us conclude that the common perception of Tarkovsky’s films as «elitist» and of their meaning as completely impenetrable for a common spectator can be at least corrected: the strata of viewers who attempted different «readings» of Tarkovsky’s films was wide enough and hardly fit in the strict notion of «elite». It could have been even wider were it not for the cultural and historical circumstances created by the state machine.
Life on the Threshold of Death: The Eschatology of Communism in National Cinema During & After Tarkovsky
Victor Filimonov is a writer, film and cultural studies, scholar; author of Tarkovsky’s biography in the Life of the Famous People series.
The recurrent theme of Andrei Tarkovsky is essentially eschatological. As an artist of the Soviet era, in his work he experienced (explicitly and subtly) the exodus of the national communism as an Apocalyspe in the form of a personal self-immolation and rebirth.
The main narrative of the Russian cinema in the 1920s and 1930s is the end of the previous «chaos» on the threshold of the future «cosmos». The integral part of the collectivist myth is life «in trenches» of a gruelling struggle at the dusk of the old times and at the dawn of the new times. In fact, it’s life outside real history. That «ideology» broke down in the cinema of late 20th-early 21st centuries.
As early as in the 1960s (Paradzhanov, Khutsiyev) and later (Abdrashitov, Averbakh, German, Klimov, Panfilov) the image of the «end of time» showed first signs of crisis-those signs echoed the senescence of the collectivist myth and the national identity that was based on it. By the beginning of the 1980s, the trend had become significantly stronger.
Films by Balabanov, German, Zvyagintsev, and the latest pictures by Konchalovsky have stated the new, transformed problem of the «eschatology of communism» as a dialogic self-identity of the person (ego) in the context of the inevitable co-presence of the Other, whatever or whoever this Other may be.
Alienation & Happiness: Tarkovsky & After
Alexandеr Pogrebnyak is an associate professor at the Chair of Social Philosophy and the Philosophy of History (The Institute of Philosophy, Saint Petersburg State University); associate professor at the Chair of Interdisciplinary Synthesis in Social and Humanitarian Sciences (The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Saint Petersburg State University), invited lecturer at the Department of Political Science and Sociology, European University in Saint Petersburg.
Alienation is the most important notion of modernist thinking; it unites political, legal, historiosophic, existential and psychological content. The conflict behind this notion is one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s topics (perhaps, his main topic): happiness as the human object of desire is questionable due to the super-human law. The line by a character from The Mirror, «Leave me alone; I only wanted to be happy» elicit the image of the hero of Ivan’s Childhood who is radically alienated from the very possibility of such a desire (Jean-Paul Sartre: «For this child, the whole world becomes a hallucination, and he himself-a monster and a martyr-is in this world a hallucination for others»). Cinema after Tarkovsky returns to this topic explicitly and non-explicitly. Thus, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s