a stop, an «interruption of the context». Tarkovsky demonstrates this «messianic cessation of happening» (Benjamin’s expression), first of all, in The Mirror, where documentary footage interrupts the diegesis, tears «a certain epoch from the homogeneous course of history». This visual principle is echoed in a text: Pushkin’s letter to Chaadaev dated 19 October 1836, which in the film is read (quoted) by Ignat. In this and other similar scenes, Tarkovsky paradoxically sublimates and saves (in Benjamin’s sense) all the Soviet era, or, rather, its messianic, meta-historical meaning.

Coincidence-image vs. Excess-image: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hong Sang Soo & the Modernism of the Coincidental

Yoel Regev is a philosopher, professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His areas of expertise include materialist dialectics, speculative realism, history of modern philosophy. He has published papers in English, Hebrew and Russian dedicated to philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Marion, Alain Badiou, as well as to methodological problems of academic studies in Jewish mysticism and problems of radical secularisation.

Film is a radical means of revolutionary self-liberation of actuality; this argument by Gilles Deleuze places cinema in the very centre of the modernist project of «unspelling» and emancipation of reality. In the centre of the Deleuzian interpretation of cinema’s liberating essence is the notion of «time-image» that brings about the materialistic expropriation of theology’s inner core: the cinema of revelation-without-fear-of-God that turns the world itself, always new and always impossible, into the object of faith.

The aim of this paper is to uncover the fundamental duality of this Deleuzian notion. The confrontation of the modernism of excess and the modernism of coincidence will be shown to be one of the main conflicts of the modern cinema. The dialectic of this struggle of the two kinds of modernism and two strategies of «victory over time» is clarified with the help of films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Hong Sang Soo.

The End of Postmodernism? The Return of Modernism?

Andrei Plahov is a film scholar, film critic. Author of several books about contemporary cinema and the history of film. Honorary President of FIPRESCI. Programming Director of the Andrei Tarkovsky International Film Festival Zerkalo.

The idea of independent cinema was buried as obstinately and unsuccessfully as the idea of historical development. Postmodernism got entrenched in the late 20th century culture, and easily juggled with «the death of the Author» and «the end of History» concepts. Culture and art were stripped of ideology, but, it turned out, there was no place for the author’s individuality in that triumph of total freedom. Or this individuality had to be deformed in line with the demands of the mass audience-mostly composed of teenagers who have no experience with history.

Today, we are talking about the return of History-and that return does not mean the victory of reason, goodness, and justice. History is bloody and cruel; it ushers in wars (hot and cold ones), totalitarian regimes, and censorship. But, rather naturally, it also increases the role of the individual and their responsibility. The Author returns. What is it-a new modernism? Or, perhaps, we haven’t found the right word yet?