Tarkovsky Research Articles

A Game on Time: The Witness and the Temporality of the Digital Image

This essay addresses the temporality of digital images through a reading of the 2016 puzzle game The Witness. Fusing Paul Ricoeur’s definition of narratives as “games with time” and Alexander Galloway’s description of the computer as “remediating the very conditions of being itself,” I describe The Witness as a game on time. The methodical pace it ties its player to, along with the environmental awareness it elicits, creates, rather than simply representing, relations of time that bespeak the accelerated, non-human temporality—the “protentions” (Yuk Hui)—of digital objects and environments. Taking the game’s embedding of a ten-minute sequence from director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia (1983) within its gameplay as a cue, I develop these ideas in relationship to both the phenomenology of time and the cinema of the “time image,” in particular the work of Abbas Kiarostami. For game designer Jonathan Blow, as for Kiarostami, the digital image is a fundamentally new form of temporal experience that requires new kinds of environmental awareness and care (Sorge).

Building Worlds, Losing Friends

Building Worlds, Losing Friends

History and art pieces in the film “Alexander Nevsky” by Sergei Eisenstein

The heritage of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein nowadays is a serious subject for scientific research. In the last two decades the original articles and books of the great director “cleared” of Soviet censorship and abbreviations, have been published, and the study of existing and lost cinematic works of the master continues nowadays. The film “Alexander Nevsky” (1938) was shot under the conditions of the already existing order for the arrest of Eisenstein, but the final approval of the film by Stalin actually suspended the prosecution of the director. The problem of including images of Russian and world painting in the film frame in Eisenstein’s works is practically not studied – his films (unlike, for example, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky) can hardly be regarded as those ones with direct quotations of certain works of pictorial art. Despite this fact, Eisenstein, as it will be shown in this article, repeatedly resorted to various methods of including in his films certain artistic images borrowed from very specific paintings. It is “Alexander Nevsky” and Eisenstein’s last film “Ivan the Terrible” that are examples of cinematic works where such intersections of frame structures with the pieces of world art become especially noticeable when carefully examined. “Alexander Nevsky” is not only a “defense film”. The attempt to analyze this film from this point of view is a way to miss the entire historical, symbolic, and philosophical subtext of the film. “Alexander Nevsky” is a kind of an epic film, shot in the format of a fresco-film and containing numerous allusions not only to the events of Biblical and Russian history and hagiographic literature, but also to works of pictorial art. In the frames of the film (not so clearly at the first glance), the world of paintings by Vasily Vereshchagin and Nicholas Roerich, illustrations to the fairy tales of Ivan Bilibin comes to life again. The frame image also shows clear intersections with paintings by Caravaggio and El Greco – one of Eisenstein’s the most valued masters of fine art.

Lo jurodivyj in Nostalghia. Genesi ed evoluzione di Domenico nella sceneggiatura di Tarkovskij e Guerra

This article aims to analyze the evolution of Domenico’s character in the different versions of Nostalghia’s script, written by Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra. By comparing the director’s diaries with the twelve original typescripts kept in the Tarkovsky’s archive, it is possible to trace the origin and the evolution of the character, which has some similarities with the holy fool of Russian tradition. In the first versions of the script, in which the character is still vague and undefined, there are some quotes from Dostoevsky’s works that refer to the theme of madness. These references disappear in the latest versions, when Domenico begins to acquire more importance in the narrative and often expresses himself about madness with quotes from Guerra’s works.

Интердискурсивность как лингвокреативная апроприация дискурсов: авангард и Андрей Тарковский

The article explores the category of interdiscursivity from a perspective of its realization in films. As a point of departure, the historical ties of the avant-garde and cinema are ana­lyzed in terms of interdiscursivity. Literary and artistic works of the representatives of the Russian avant-garde are characterized by a number of innovations that are relevant for the understanding of the interdiscursivity in cinematography as art. The established avant-garde foundations of interdiscursivity make it possible to define it as a linguocreative appropriation of discourses and to elaborate a methodology of its study in films. The film “Stalker” is select­ed as an object of research due to the fact that Andrey Tarkovsky’s innovative cinematic ap­proach makes his works akin to the approaches of art innovators of the avant-garde epoch. The specificity of the interdiscursivity of “Stalker” is determined both by a significant degree of transformation of its literary basis and by a varied appropriation of certain types of discourse in the process of making a film as an original artistic-aesthetic object. Elements of different types of discourse act as linguistic and creative means that influence the heuristic potential of the verbal system of a film.

The Child Victim in Andrey Tarkovsky’s Ivan's Childhood

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 (E. Husserl and M. Merleau-Ponty).

Three Perspectives on the Spiritual Qualities of Music

Without containing any verbal or visual concepts, pure music has a deep and immediate power to penetrate into the mind and body. Is it also possible that it provides humans with an awareness of the depths of their nature and of the universe? Can it activate the feeling to be completely free and infinite? In sum, can we attribute to music the power of giving humans spiritual qualities; or to use a better expression, is it possible for humans to discover their spiritual side via musical experience? If the answer is positive, how can it accomplish this mission? In this paper, music’s quality as a means for acquiring spiritual qualities will be discussed. The ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Sogyal Rinpoche will guide the discussion. These three people are from different branches; respectively philosophy, cinema and Tibetan Buddhism; which is thought to provide a discussion on the new perspectives about the spiritual qualities of music. Finally, the music type discussed in the paper is pure music, which addresses the music without words, a subject or a visual representation. In order to constitute a base for the discussion, the books of the three scholars were compiled and their thoughts about music were analysed with the document analysis method, which is used in qualitative research. The films of Tarkovsky were additionally analysed with the same method due to his being a visual artist.

LIKE A STALKER TO THE ZONE

Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker is often understood as both a cinematic masterpiece and an impenetrable mystery. The source text, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel, Roadside Picnic, provides clues to interpretation as well as insights into the evolution of motifs from book to screenplay. By subjecting the texts to a critical reading inspired by Alain Badiou’s philosophy of the event – itself considered enigmatic – this article elucidates novel, film, and philosophy, connecting such shared themes as desire, fidelity, militancy, and truth.

Хроника великой невстречи: Идиот Андрея Тарковского

Der Artikel widmet sich einer der am wenigsten untersuchten Episoden der scheinbar grundlich erforschten Biographie Andrej Tarkovskijs: der nie realisierten Verfilmung des Romans Der Idiot. Dieser Film – der nur auf dem Papier existierte – wird hier aus einer Zeitperspektive betrachtet, wobei ich mich hauptsachlich auf Tarkovskijs Tagebucheintrage zu Der Idiot stutze, die im Laufe eines ganzen Jahrzehnts immer wieder in seinen Tagebuchern auftauchten. Eine solches langfristige Vorhaben ermoglicht es, eine einzelne Idee im Kontext der Entwicklung von Absichten und Uberzeugungen des Regisseurs zu analysieren, da die Kommentare zu Der Idiot fast immer die Fragen widerspiegelten, die er sich bei der Arbeit an anderen Filmen stellte, als ob der Roman Dostojevskijs als eine Art Indikator, oder Spiegel, diente, um eigene Entscheidungen damit in Einklang zu bringen. Wahrend ich im Rahmen einer dokumentarischen Rekonstruktion bleibe, werde ich auch versuchen, Verallgemeinerungen und Annahmen uber einige Schlusselmotive von Tarkovskijs Werk zu formulieren: uber sein vielfaltiges Interesse an Dostojevskijs Personlichkeit und seiner Poetik, seine kunstlerische Wahrnehmung weiblicher Figuren, seine Herangehensweise an Verfilmungen literarischer Werke usw. Abschliesend mochte ich klarstellen, dass die Grunde, warum Tarkovskij seine Idee nicht umgesetzt hat, nicht auf den Widerstand von Goskino beschrankt sind, auf den gewohnlich bei der Diskussion von Der Idiot – sicherlich einer der bedeutendsten nicht realisierten Filme in der Geschichte des sowjetischen Kinos – Bezug genommen wird.

The Sound Art in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. Sound Ambiguities amid Visual Certainties

One of the aspects that most contributes to the narration of spirituality in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Zavrazhye, Russia, 1932 - Paris, France, 1986) is his particular use of sound.1 Although ...

Tęsknota za ideałem. Rola dzieci w filmach i filozofii twórczej Andrieja Tarkowskiego

The topic of the article is the role of child characters in Andrei Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. The first part concerns the early films in which children appear as main characters and represent a spiritual ideal. In the second part, later films are analysed in terms of the presence of adult characters striving for this ideal.

The Cinematic Gaze as ‘A Long Loving Look at the Real’: Andrei Tarkovsky and Walter Burghardt’s Theology of Contemplation

The Cinematic Gaze as ‘A Long Loving Look at the Real’: Andrei Tarkovsky and Walter Burghardt’s Theology of Contemplation

Репрезентация индивидуально-авторской картины мира кинорежиссера Андрея Тарковского в рассказе «Белый день».

The article deals with the description of the key elements of the conceptual space of the short story A White, White Day by Andrei Tarkovsky, which served as a basis in the key episode of the feature film Mirror. The aim of the research is to reveal and describe the main elements of the conceptual sphere of the short story. The object of research is the short story A White, White Day by Andrei Tarkovsky published in 1970 in the magazine Film Art in Movie Makers’ Stories section. The main method used in the framework of the research is conceptual analysis of texts. To reveal the readers’ background notions about the short story and the author, to determine the semantics of the title and to reveal keywords on the basis of readers’ reception, we also used the experimental data obtained in 2017 when 51 students of Novosibirsk State University were surveyed. The participants were asked to read the information about the text and to answer 2 questions. The first one was asked before reading and was related to information known to the respondents – about the short story and its author and about their associations with the title. The second question (about the text keywords) was asked after reading. The results of the experiment were compared with the results of the analysis of the separate contexts of the short story and the possible intertextual connections, and the verbal representations of the revealed key concepts were compared with the intermedial representations of the key concepts of the feature film Mirror. The following conclusions were made. 1. Even if readers do not know anything about the author of the text, its title and the epigraph create the particular semantic background on which the reception of the short story is superimposed: the notions about the loss of something good, about the mixture of positive and negative emotions, about the fact that the short story is based on the memories. 2. Through the title the individual concept of the white day is introduced into the conceptual space. This concept combines emotionally ambivalent notions about the supreme happiness lost forever, and it goes back to the poetry by Arseny Tarkovsky and Anna Akhmatova. 3. The frequently used lexemes and the short story keywords given to the respondents enable to reveal several key units of the conceptual space of the short story (the concepts of mother, water, childhood, war, wealth, grief, happiness, silence, home, church, fear, memory). 4. The key concepts of the short story are the conceptual basis of the subsequent film Mirror where the conceptual space gets more complicated and is supplemented by some new features.

МОТИВ ИКОНЫ В ПОВЕСТИ БОРИСА СПОРОВА «МОНАХ-СПАСИТЕЛЬ»

The paper discusses the nature and role of the icon`s motif in Boris Sporov’s story “Monk-The Savior”. It analyzes artistic parameters allowing to attribute this work to missionary prose (the evolution of a hero, a combination of crisis and choice-situations, the specifics of a false choice), focusing on the complex spiritual path of a person overcoming moral crisis and taking the path of reconciliation with God. The author explores the inner world of story`s main character, Ivan Korovin, displays his gradual refusal to protest against the Divine Providence, which is made possible through the knowledge of basics of icon painting. The study results in revealing that, at the first stage, the image of Christ the Punisher dominates the character’s consciousness, which is reflected in Ivan`s iconographic images of the Savior made without hands. At a later stage, the face of Christ the Punisher acquires a new shade — Christ the Sufferer, which partly draws together the hero, who had undergone moral and physical pain, and his Creator. Salvation through iconography is not a new motif to the Russian literature: B. F. Sporov remains here within the framework of the established tradition. The paper also establishes ideological and artistic parallels between the story “Monk-The Savior” and the works of Russian classical literature (Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky), as well as the cinematography (Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Andrei Rublev”).

THE TENSION BETWEEN CREATED TIME AND REAL TIME IN ANDREI TARKOVSKY’S FILM ANDREI RUBLIOV

This article starts with the presumption that Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) created a new conception of cinematic time. This impact on the theory of modern cinema was examined by philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) in his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image (in French: Cinéma 2, L’Image-Temps, 1985). The article asks the question: what were the conceptual and social circumstances for everyday time to be implemented in a specific movie? As an example, it takes the film Andrei Rubliov (director Andrei Tarkovsky, 1969), which underwent protracted critique and compulsory shortening. The article asks the question: what is the meaning and significance of the cuts made when passing from the first version of The Passion according to Andrei (in Russian: Strasti po Andreyu, director Tarkovsky, 1966) to the final Andrei Rubliov? What is the meaning of the cuts made to the scenes of violence and nudity? The research conclusions are: the impatience of the critics who demanded that the long scenes in The Passion according to Andrei be shortened speaks not about defects in the film, nor about the inability of Tarkovsky to calculate time, but rather about the inability of observers to grasp Tarkovky’s new conception of cinematic time. According to Deleuze, in his attempt to transfer into cinema the slow speed of everyday life, Tarkovsky created a feature of modern cinema, and made a turn from movement towards time; time in this particular movie is already made visible.

영화미학의 대화: 세르게이 파라자노프와 안드레이 타르코프스키

The artistic trend of the 1960s, defined as the “era of freedom and experimentation”, in the era of Thaw, two Russian directors, Sergei Paradzanov and Andrei Tarkovsky representing externally the so-called “Soviet Nouvelle Vague generation”. Both of them maintained a special rapport while continuing their cinematic aesthetics full of poetic parables and metaphors, and were accompanied by a series of aesthetic dialogue through various motifs in each other’s films. The friendship and emotional exchange that the two directors maintained throughout their film career not only enriched the two directors’ film world but also became an important driver for expanding the foreign presence of Russian films.BR In this paper, we considered how the two directors’ deep bond and cinematic communion influenced each other’s cinematic aesthetics, and how they were mutually reflected through aesthetic images and objects. Consistent images of “Imaginary material world” in Paradzanov’s films are also key elements that penetrate Paradzanov’s aesthetics, just as various symbols – images that are not directly related to film plots but onstantly protruding – reflect the director’s own psyche and worldview, while at the same time creating semantic unity that runs through the entire Tarkovsky’s film. The constant repetition of aesthetic images and objects in the two master’s films has also been an important device for creating an internal dialogue as well as an homage to each other.

Remembering, Forgetting, and Memory: A Study of Andrey Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia

Sinema araştırmalarında önemli bir yer edinmeye başlayan bellek ve onunla ilişkili olarak anımsama ve unutuş fenomenleri, birey ve toplumun kendilerini ve tarihlerini anlamlandırmalarında anahtar öneme sahiptir. Nostalji kavramı, 1688 yılında Johannes Hofer tarafından, memleketlerine dönük sıla hasreti çeken askerlerin bir hastalığı olarak tanımlanmıştır. Sonraki yıllarda ise yaşanılan zaman-uzamdan bir ayrılığı, uzaklaşmayı tanımlayan daha geniş bir kavram olarak kullanılmaya başlamıştır. Yaşanılan çağa karşı bir rahatsızlıktan ve korkudan beslenen nostalji, geçmişin metalaşması olarak anlam kazanmaya başlamış, sanat ve gündelik yaşamda önemli biçimde yer bulmuştur. Bu çalışmada, çağdaş Rus sinemasında önemli bir yere sahip yönetmen Andrey Tarkovsky tarafından 1983 yılında çekilen Nostalghia filmi incelenmiştir. Filmdeki ana karakterler olan Andrei, Eugenie, Domenico ve Andrei’nin dolayımıyla Sosnovky karakterleri anımsama, unutma, bellek ve bunlarla ilişkili biçimde nostalji kavramının imlediği zaman-uzam çerçevesinde nitel yaklaşımla betimsel içerik analizine tabi tutulmuştur. Bu yolla nostaljik imgelemenin idealleştirilmiş bir çağa yönelerek ve tarihi tersine çevirerek hem bireysel hem de toplumsal sorunlara bir çözüm sunmaya çalıştığı görülmüştür.

Хронотоп и литературные персонажи в неотрадиционалистской прозе (Творчество М.А. Тарковского в новейшем филологическом исследовании)

Хронотоп и литературные персонажи в неотрадиционалистской прозе (Творчество М.А. Тарковского в новейшем филологическом исследовании)

Figura świętego głupca w twórczości Andrieja Tarkowskiego

The figure of the “holy fool” in the work of Andrei TarkovskyThe article analyzes the figure of the “holy fool” — a specific cultural phenomenon of Russian Orthodoxy, which found its strong reflection in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. After showing the essence of the work of the Russian director, i.e. the internal conflict in man between the material and spiritual sphere, the Christian pedigree of the figure of the “holy fool”, which finds a special expression in Russian culture, is presented. Over time, it undergoes significant transformations. In Tarkovsky’s films, the figure of the “holy fool” allows the director to manifest his opinions and his view of the world, the role of art or the vocation of the artist. Tarkovsky’s “holy fool” evolves from a purely Christian figure, a humble and trusting figure fighting with all evil, through the original loner seeking consolation for others, to a figure, which destroys the existing order while awaiting the reaction of God connected with the restoration of the harmony to the world.

Viktor Turin's Turksib as an ecological message

The documentary by Victor Turin The Steel Way. Turksib (1929) is analyzed in this essay from the perspective of interaction between nature and society. The essay compares Turksib with the avant-garde films of Dziga Vertov and analyzes the language, editing system and poetics of intertitles characteristic of Turins film. It is noted that in the visual structure of Turksib images of the sculpting in time (according to Andrei Tarkovsky) allocate a significant role to the ethnographic pictures of local peoples life, virgin landscapes and wild and domestic animals. The accent is put on the emphatic rhythm of the intertitles, which actualizes the problems of interaction between nature and society. The construction of the Turkestan-Siberian railway through the Kazakh steppe and the Siberian forests demonstrates the advancement of scientism whose proponents are convinced of the inevitability of scientific and technological progress. The essay shows how the attitudes of the representatives of power, the transformers of the region lead to a change in value priorities in particular, towards the pacifying of the stubborn nature with the aim of putting it at the service of man. The essay ends with an analysis of Turksibs significance as an ecological message and concludes that if the ideas and artistic techniques of Turins film were developed further, the history of documentary cinema in the following decades could include ecology as one of its major directions.