The haunted Soviet landscape and nuclear melancholy in Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexander Gordon’s There Will Be No Leave Today (1959)

Abstract

ABSTRACT A haunting past dominates the work of European filmmakers in the post-war period, and this article addresses the hauntological spectre of war in There Will Be No Leave Today, a very early film of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in partnership with Alexander Gordon. The article draws on Jacques Derrida’s Hauntology, Julia Kristeva’s abjection and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘out-of-field’ theory as a methodology to examine ideas of haunting and abjection in Tarkovsky and Gordon’s fledgling film in relation to the interconnection between spaces and their histories in the work. It also makes connections with contemporary cinema in Europe and as such explores Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour. I examine how the featured cinematic works compare and contrast with Tarkovsky and Gordon’s own stylistic vision and how the landscape in the films is a space of memory and historical trauma.