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 Distant (2002) does this by directly quoting Tarkovsky: its protagonist explicitly does not want to be happy, cultivating his «alienation». Less explicitly, but more radically this is done in Bakur Bakuradze’s Shultes (2008): the main character tries to edge out his accidental happiness (and there is no other happiness!) that was destroyed by a disaster, and turns into a professional «luck hunter», but fails.

Andrei Tarkovsky & the «Weak Messianic Power»

Alexander Skidan is a poet, essayist, critic, translator. Member of the editorial board at the New Literary Observer. Awardee of Andrei Bely’s prize (2006).

Andrei Tarkovsky probably never read, or even heard, of Walter Benjamin. But that fact is irrelevant for this paper; that discusses the structural similarity, or homology, between Benjamin’s idea of the messianic time and Tarkovsky’s cinema.

Unlike orthodox Marxists and theorists of social democracy, Benjamin criticized the idea of historical progress-in it, he saw a permanent disaster. In his opinion, it is the past, not the future that must be saved. The basic principle of his historical materialism is