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This chapter discusses Tarkovsky’s appreciation of newsreel-documentary films in the context of the Soviet film discourse over new documentary style in the 1960s. As Mandušić demonstrates, the sixties’ cult of authenticity achieved through the documentary representation of reality was one of many ways for the Thaw cinema to counter late Stalinist movies notorious for their excessive mythologization. Against the backdrop of these debates, Tarkovsky devised his theory of documentary realism in his essay “Imprinted Time” (1967), which he practically implemented in Andrei Rublev (1966). Aimed to recreate the authentic experience of time and space rather accurately reconstruct the historical environment of medieval Russia, Andrei Rublev applied visual strategies – extended duration, stable or static frames, composition in depth – that constitutes his method of direct observation.

This chapter provides a psychoanalytically-inflected analysis of the complex nature of Tarkovsky’s melancholia as the predominant affect in his films, functioning as a poetic critique of the reality principle, eschewing our symbolic separation from the Thing. Engaging with the theories of melancholia developed by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva, the authors trace its various configurations in Tarkovsky’s last three Soviet films: Solaris (1972) exhibits the melancholic clinging to the impossible past brought about by narcissistic withdrawal and interminable mourning; Mirror (1974) dramatizes the impossible return to a pre-symbolic childhood; the story of Stalker (1979) circulates around the unknown that grounds the world of the melancholic.

This chapter attempts to answer the question whether Tarkovsky’s insights in cinema, documented in interviews and in Sculpting in Time (1986), could amount to a coherent film theory. Although many scholars observe that one should abandon analytical reasoning while comprehending his films, they nevertheless follow a certain logic that seems to align with many of Henry Bergson’s philosophical arguments. The same could be said about Tarkovsky’s theoretical propositions: namely, his preference for intuition over intellectual cognition, psychological duration over chronological time, the past over the present as well as his foregrounding the dual nature of the film image in which subjective consciousness (spirit) and objective reality (matter) are coalesced into a single unit. Viewing Tarkovsky as being subconsciously Bergsonian, the author argues, could help us salvage his theoretical musings from being dismissed as unembarrassedly Romantic or outdated.

This introduction outlines the main tendencies in Tarkovsky studies, the most salient of which are English-language auteur studies, methodologically based in film history and formalist analysis, and Russian-language hagiographic and quasi-theological monographs fostering the religious cult of the director. This chapter argues that most Tarkovsky scholars trained in Slavic studies are somewhat reluctant to enter into interdisciplinary dialogue with other film theories and philosophical approaches by relying more on the traditional (empirically oriented) methods of film analysis developed by film history and film hermeneutics. This anthology, the chapter argues, attempts to overcome the methodological narrowness of Anglophone auteur studies on Tarkovsky on the one hand and Russophone hagiographic zeal on the other by opening up the field to different theoretical approaches.

This chapter examines Tarkovsky’s cinema in relation to contemporary philosopher Pierre Hadot’s concept of spiritual exercises. As the chapter demonstrates, each of Tarkovsky’s films could be seen as such spiritual exercises because of numerous parallels with Hadot’s theory: all his protagonists demand of themselves extreme forms of mental concentration, focused on goals that depart from the everyday and can only be seen as metaphysical, and all of them are quixotic seekers passionately involved in spiritually transcendent quests characterized by deep attention to the world around them. Furthermore, the author argues, the viewer’s experience could also serve as an example of Hadot’s idea of how spiritual exercises might be practiced via deepening and transforming habitual perception.

This chapter traces the presence of Tarkovskian thematic and stylistic motifs in a series of Zvyagintsev’s films, such as the father/son relationship in The Return (2003), elegiac visual techniques in The Banishment (2007), and the Brueghelian landscape in Loveless (2017). The chapter demonstrates how Tarkovsky’s explorations of the relationship between memory and ontology give rise to Zvyagintsev’s enactments of processes of individuation that are not predicated upon difference. The chapter also discusses how it is important for Zvyagintsev to maintain his own authorial autonomy from the depersonalizing influence of the inherited tradition.

This chapter focuses on the traumatic events in the director’s childhood that continued to haunt him throughout his life. Tarkovsky scholars often point out the autobiographical nature of his cinema and, more specifically, how the divorce of his parents influenced his cinematic representation of marital relationships. According to Helena Goscilo, for example, Tarkovsky’s personal trauma of paternal abandonment provides a clue to the narrative structure of his films. For Tsymbal, however, it is the director’s strained relationship with his mother, viewed in the context of André Green’s theory of the dead mother complex, that defines much of his artistic impulse. This chapter also discusses what hardships Tarkovsky experienced during the wartime and how his father’s influence inadvertently helped him choose his future profession.

This chapter focuses on Tarkovsky’s sound design that underwent several transformations throughout his career. Whereas in his early features the director used to employ a regular music track composed by Viacheslav Ovchinnikov, in his later films made in in the 1970s he worked together with composer Eduard Artemiev who created original and highly experimental soundtracks. As the chapter demonstrates, Tarkovsky primarily strived for the realistic sound aesthetic, requesting a variety of noises and natural sounds, in conjunction with electronic arrangement. At the same time his sonic realism progressively tends towards irrealism in his later films when selected natural sounds manifest their otherworldly dimension. His preference for natural sounds sounding unnaturally is especially evident in his last film The Sacrifice (1986), when Tarkovsky decided to work with the sound mixer only, Owe Svensson, without a composer.

This chapter offers a close reading of Tarkovsky’s diary from a Lacanian perspective by focusing on the director’s recurrent use of those key words which symbolically epitomize and organize the major thematic layers of his biography and cinema as well: namely, grass (or trava in Russian), persecution from the state authorities (travlia), and expense (trata). Phonetically consonant and etymologically derived from the same root tra- (or proto-Slavic ter), these words make up a coherent cluster of signifiers (trava-trata-travlia) which are centred around the director’s primal fantasy of the house. As the author argues, the signifying constellation “trava-trata-travlia” in Tarkovsky’s diary could be viewed as a psychobiographical code to the internal dynamics of his visual imagery

This chapter focuses on Lars von Trier’s lifelong engagement with the Russian master, which was openly admitted in his 2009 Antichrist’s shocking dedication. To unravel the complex relationship between the two directors, the chapter places them in the context of Harold Bloom’s rhetorical matrix of revisionary ratios and trace several stages of Tarkovsky’s influence on the Danish director: the early stage of antithetical completion, when the latter continuously attempted to push the former’s messianic project to new limits, and that of counter-sublime, characterized by von Trier’s impossible yet compulsive desire to forget Tarkovsky. The chapter also examines how von Trier simultaneously attacks and reinvents Tarkovsky’s spiritualist ideology of redemption from the position of European cynicism most vividly exemplified by Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1983).

This chapter explores how Ivan’s Childhood (1962) critically transcends the genre of the Soviet war movie by employing the child’s perspective on the war. Through his poetically and autobiographically enriched cinematic version of Vladimir Bogomolov’s original story “Ivan” (1957) that foregrounds the patriotic celebration of a child hero, Tarkovsky juxtaposes wartime violence with childhood as such and the protagonist’s private subjectivity, by letting the viewer enter his memories and dreams. The chapters argues that in Ivan’s Childhood the child’s eye view becomes the artistic dominant for the unique design of the film. By assuming a child’s perspective through disconcerting and unusual camera angles that replicate the point of view of a younger person, the film also disempowers the viewer and forces the audience into a subservient and vulnerable position.

This chapter discusses how Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) organizes its mise-en-scene to frame a relationship with mental and spatial infinity that speaks to timelessness, fluid immobility, and spiraled untraversability. By employing Aristotle’s terminology, the author demonstrates how Tarkovsky represents space as unfolded becoming through tableaux vivants and superimpositions of architectures. In support of this argument, the author turns to optical geometry, theories of painting, and architectural framings. The chapter also discusses an excess of vision in the film that parallels its treatment of time and space. In opposition to traditional notions of cinema as Cartesian monocular vision, the author maintains, Tarkovsky values curved, non-mechanical perspectives that align with Lyotard’s theories of painting and theater architecture.

It is not easy to make a distinction in the 1970s between films belonging to political modernism's mythical trend and those already transcending the modernist paradigm. It is easier to see the difference between the two categories through films that are distant enough in time from one another, but political modernism in the mid-1970s was just the transitional period where many elements of the postmodern were already present. This is true especially in some films of new cinema in Germany, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst Eats the Soul and Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass. Two basic principles of modernism are homogeneity of style and a sense of “objective reality,” both of which are closely related with the central role attributed to the “auteur.” This chapter examines the disappearance of the auteur in European modern cinema, including Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and films made by Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini. It also discusses Tarkovsky's use of serial composition in Andrei Rublev and the disappearance of nothingness in films such as Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982).

This chapter traces the evolution of Tarkovsky’s engagement with memory throughout his career. Whereas in Andrei Rublev he attempts to reconstruct Russia’s medieval environment by applying his method of direct observation, in Mirror the integration of the past into the present becomes thoroughly subjectivized through his modelling of material reality after his personal memories and photographs. Furthermore, by sharing the director’s individual realm of memory with viewers and making them accept it as their own, Mirror also aims to transcend it on the impersonal level. In his late features, Iampolski argues, Tarkovsky’s finally overcomes the subjective dimension of the past by shifting his attention to the objective trace of time expressed by the material indexality of things.

The director’s relationship to his actors, and how that collaboration works within the framework of self-projection. Attention is paid to personal relationships between actors and directors (familial, sexual, hostile), with a special focus on the striking frequency with which art cinema authors employ their mothers as actors in their films. This section works toward a new theory of film acting.

Fernando Zalamea begins with an emphatic argument that from mathematics to its plastic influence, Grothendieck topoi are used to understand the human and the nonhuman creativity in three variously relevant and yet different disciplines; that of cinema through the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, architecture through the work of Frank Gehry and art through the work of Anselm Hiefer. The chapter starts by introducing the work of Alexandre Grothendieck from a conceptual standpoint, focusing on his topos theory (1962), a general setting which encompasses both arithmetic (number) and geometry (space) under a common abstract perspective (sheaves: a far-reaching tool which helps to glue the local and the global). Grothendieck's revolution, wider than Einstein's interlacing of space and time, has radically changed mathematics, but its plastic influence beyond the specialty has yet to be developed.

This chapter discusses Solaris and its three film adaptations by Boris Nirenburg (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky (1972), and Steven Soderbergh (2002). Flawed as they are in different ways, each casts light on Stanislaw Lem’s original as well as on one another, illuminating the fact that a successful adaptation from a single-track medium like a novel to a multi-track medium like a film often requires major changes regardless of authorial intentions.

This chapter offers a Lacanian reading of Tarkovsky’s films in terms of an encounter with the radical otherness of the Kantian thing-in-itself, illustrated by the planet Solaris or Stalker’s Zone. This motif, the author maintains, is structurally quite similar to more commercial horror movies dramatizing an encounter with the unknown. The chapter emphasizes the importance of a materialist interpretation of Tarkovsky’s films in which an encounter with the impossible and traumatic Thing is thoroughly devoid of religious and mystical connotations that often accompany commentators’ discussions.

This chapter explores Solaris’s chiasmatic interpenetration of the real and the phantasmatic in the context of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh defined as the non-physical substrate of the visible world and the virtual. Thanks to its genre of science fiction, Efird argues, Solaris accomplishes more convincingly the physical realization of the characters’ dream imagery, which vividly exemplifies Tarkovsky’s cinematic materialism. Besides numerous scenes with mirrors, the dynamic chiasm of the flesh, which is both physical and spiritual, fully manifests itself in the ambiguous figure of Hari who is simultaneously the object of Kelvin’s memory as well as the self-conscious subject on her own.