Tarkovsky's Cinema

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Tarkovsky's Cinema

To begin, Tarkovsky’s cinema is not about historical realism or exposing the everyday as it really is. Cinema is unavoidably an especially paranoid representation of experience. Sculpture hewn in time resembles everyday events no more than wood sculpture does stumps. What makes Tarkovsky interesting might be gotten at in terms of doors and windows. Dalle Vacche[1] approaches the array of moments and differences in the style:

Tarkovsky’s refusal to attach these faces to a situation, to a decision, or to an exchange of looks with another character makes these anonymous and minor figures especially elusive. Yet their impact is undeniably strong. It is as if the viewer’s mind, unable to read the characters’ eyes, turns away from the distractions of the world towards deeper and unspeakable regions, thus reacting in a way comparable to the beholder of a holy face in an icon. (143)

Whether Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky 1966/1969) ‘accurately’ or precisely reveals the reality of life in the 15th century has nothing to do with any actual audiences’ reactions to the film as experience. Instead, what we can feel is the becoming of the experienced world into distraction from something else. As a spotlight, for its intensity, might remind us what is outside its beam, the sprawling and unlimited earthly world of the film points to something outside the widescreen frame. The film makes itself a diversion from something that had equally not existed before the image began moving – or had it existed? The movie is enough to send audiences fleeing to god. And is, in this manner, a proof of god much like Pavel Florensky’s by iconography: “There exists the icon of the Holy Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev; therefor...

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...ut-for-a-good-time watcher, but a door for the divine content of the experience to enter the viewer. Not much earthly made an impression surely, but then the movie also dances not just with a dichotomy of earthly and divine but also to summon it. Where many films lace images, objects, characters or voices with divinity, Andrei Rublev cuts all this clean off and paints God over it.

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[1] Angela Dalle Vacche, “Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev: Cinema as the

Restoration of Icon Painting,” Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in

Film (London: Athlone, 1996) 135-160.

[2] Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary

Press, 1996). 68

[3] Pavel Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” Beyond Vision: Essays on the

Perception of Art (2003). 201-272

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