Art as a means of overcoming the continuity gap in history: A. Tarkovsky returns to the culture of the early twentieth century. Article two

Annotation

This article continues a series of publications devoted to the work of Russian film director A. Tarkovsky. The problems of the first article were limited to raising the question of the birth of not just an innovative artist in Russian filmmaking, but also him as a thinker and philosopher. It is difficult to name such a phenomenon in Soviet and Russian cinema: for example, the famous film theorist and aesthetician M. Yampolsky considers it possible to name only one film director adjacent to the philosophical workshop, K. Muratov. Gilles Deleuze has the same question, but in relation to world cinema as a whole. As for Tarkovsky, he is certainly the first and main philosopher in Russian cinema. As stated in our first article about the director, in his early (and mature) work, one can fix the element of personal experience as an obligatory prerequisite for philosophical thinking. This article analyzes the next phase of Tarkovsky’s creative biography, when the director tries to correlate his personal experience and the ideas arising from it with philosophical systems already existing in the twentieth century in different cultures, not only Western, but also eastern. In modern Western philosophy, the director is close to existentialism. But in recent films, his growing interest in Eastern philosophical and ethical systems is noticeable, close to the judgment of A. Bely made in the epigraph to this article. This article also raises the question of the director’s return to the artificially interrupted Russian philosophical tradition that arose in the culture of the Silver Age. It is not only about the search for different stylistic forms in the art of this time, but also about emerging or revived philosophical ideas: this issue will be considered in more detail in subsequent publications.

Keywords

A. Tarkovsky as a director, A. Tarkovsky as a philosopher, philosophy and cinema, Russian religious philosophy, theurgic philosophy, Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy, the principle of continuity, medieval exegesis, the Silver Age, existentialism, hermeneutics, M. Mamardashvili, S. Kierkegaard, V. Solovyov, F. Dostoevsky, P. Chaadaev, R. Steiner, I. Evlampiev, V. Bychkov, D. Salinsky.

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This study was supported by grant No. 24–28–01588 from the Russian Science Foundation, https://rscf.ru/project/24–28–01588/; the Dostoevsky Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy