Sculpting in time, space and spirituality: the Soviet film instructor Andrei Tarkovsky and his inner journey through his seven feature length movies (1962-1986)

Abstract

Every year films of all kinds are produced, and the number of film directors is many all over the world. But among them there are individual geniuses who stand out from the crowd. The Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky is one of these geniuses. With his only seven feature length films, he wrote himself into the top history of the film world. The article attempted to analyse and discuss Andrei Tarkovsky’s sculpting in time, space, memory, and spirituality as well as how the director thought of himself as an artist who constantly struggled with the authoritarian powers of the state over art, and consequently how themes of artistic expression manifested in his work. The main question is whether the director’s films are his inner journey? Was Andrey Tarkovsky a dissident in the Soviet Union or not? What is the intellectual and cultural climate in which Tarkovsky operated? An understanding of the prevalence of religious rhetoric and non-conformist art in both Soviet and Russian history is required to comprehend how potentially radical the themes in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films were in the era of the Soviet Union.

Keywords

• “ivan’s childhood”
• andrei tarkovsky
• “solaris”
• soviet union
• “mirror”
• russian iconography
• “the sacrifice”
• “andrei rublev”
• “stalker”
• russian intelligentsia
• “nostalghia”