Andrei Tarkovsky’s Poetics of Cinema

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Poetics of Cinema
Author: Thomas Redwood
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2010-05-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 144382240X

“If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens.” Almost twenty-five years after the death of Andrei Tarkovsky, the mystery of his films remains alive and well. Recent years have witnessed an ever-increasing number of film theorists, critics and philosophers taking up the challenge to decipher what these films actually mean. But what do these films actually show us? In this study Thomas Redwood undertakes a close formal analysis of Tarkovsky’s later films. Charting the stylistic and narrative innovations in Mirror, Stalker, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice, Redwood succeeds in shedding new light on these celebrated but often misunderstood masterpieces of narrative film. Tarkovsky is revealed here both as a cinematic thinker and as an artistic practitioner, a filmmaker of immense poetic significance for the history of cinema.

The Cinema of Poetry

The Cinema of Poetry
Author: P. Adams Sitney
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2015
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0199337039

The Cinema of Poetry emphasizes the vibrant world of European cinema in addition to incorporating the author's long abiding concerns on American avant-garde cinema.

The Cinema of Tarkovsky

The Cinema of Tarkovsky
Author: Nariman Skakov
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2012-01-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0857721194

The phenomenon of time was a central preoccupation of Tarkovsky throughout his career. His films present visions of time by temporal means - that is, in time. Tarkovsky does not represent time through coherent argument, Nariman Skakov proposes, rather he presents it and the viewer experiences the argument. This book explores the phenomenon of spatio-temporal lapse in Tarkovsky's cinema - from Ivan's Childhood (1962) to Sacrifice (1986). Dreams, visions, mirages, memories, revelations, reveries and delusions are phenomena which present alternative spatio-temporal patterns; they disrupt the linear progression of events and create narrative discontinuity. Each chapter is dedicated to the discussion of one of Tarkovsky's seven feature films and in each, one of these phenomena functions as a refrain. Skakov discusses the influence of the flow of and lapses in space and time on the viewer's perception of the Tarkovskian cinematic universe. He opens and closes his original and fascinating book on Tarkovsky's cinema by focusing on the phenomenon of time that is discussed extensively by the filmmaker in his main theoretical treatise Sculpting in Time, as well as in a number of interviews and public lectures.

Cinema Expanded

Cinema Expanded
Author: Jonathan Walley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2020-07-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0190938668

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity. In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.

The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky

The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky
Author: Vida T. Johnson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1994-12-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780253208873

"Johnson and Petrie have produced an admirable book. Anyone who wants to make sense of Tarkovsky's films—a very difficult task in any case—must read it." —The Russian Review "This book is a model of contextual and textual analysis. . . . the Tarkovsky myth is stripped of many of its shibboleths and the thematic structure and coherence of his work is revealed in a fresh and stimulating manner." —Europe-Asia Studies "[This book,] with its wealth of new research and critical insight, has set the standard and should certainly inspire other writers to keep on trying to collectively explore the possible meanings of Tarkovsky's film world." —Canadian Journal of Film Studies "For Tarkovsky lovers as well as haters, this is an essential book. It might make even the haters reconsider." —Cineaste This definitive study, set in the context of Russian cultural history, throws new light on one of the greatest—and most misunderstood—filmmakers of the past three decades. The text is enhanced by more than 60 frame enlargements from the films.

Cinema and Painting

Cinema and Painting
Author: Angela Dalle Vacche
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1996
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780292715837

The visual image is the common denominator of cinema and painting, and indeed many filmmakers have used the imagery of paintings to shape or enrich the meaning of their films. In this discerning new approach to cinema studies, Angela Dalle Vacche discusses how the use of pictorial sources in film enables eight filmmakers to comment on the interplay between the arts, on the dialectic of word and image, on the relationship between artistic creativity and sexual difference, and on the tension between tradition and modernity. Specifically, Dalle Vacche explores Jean-Luc Godard's iconophobia (Pierrot Le Fou) and Andrei Tarkovsky's iconophilia (Andrei Rubleov), Kenji Mizoguchi's split allegiances between East and West (Five Women around Utamaro), Michelangelo Antonioni's melodramatic sensibility (Red Desert), Eric Rohmer's project to convey interiority through images (The Marquise of O), F. W. Murnau's debt to Romantic landscape painting (Nosferatu), Vincente Minnelli's affinities with American Abstract Expressionism (An American in Paris), and Alain Cavalier's use of still life and the close-up to explore the realms of mysticism and femininity (Thérèse). While addressing issues of influence and intentionality, Dalle Vacche concludes that intertextuality is central to an appreciation of the dialogical nature of the filmic medium, which, in appropriating or rejecting art history, defines itself in relation to national traditions and broadly shared visual cultures.

Process Cinema

Process Cinema
Author: Scott MacKenzie
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 569
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0773558101

Handmade films stretch back to cinema's beginnings, yet until now their rich history has been neglected. Process Cinema is the first book to trace the development of handmade and hand-processed film in its historical and contemporary contexts, and from a global perspective. Mapping the genealogy of handmade film, and uncovering confluences, influences, and interstices between various international movements, sites, and practices, Process Cinema positions the resurgence of handmade and process cinema as a counter-practice to the rise of digital filmmaking. This volume brings together a range of renowned academics and artists to examine contemporary artisanal films, DIY labs, and filmmakers typically left out of the avant-garde canon, addressing the convergence between the analog and the digital in contemporary process cinema. Contributors investigate the history of process cinema – unscripted, improvisatory manipulation of the physicality of film – with chapters on pioneering filmmakers such as Len Lye and Marie Menken, while others discuss an international array of collectives devoted to processing films in artist-run labs from South Korea to Finland, Australia to Austria, and Greenland to Morocco, along with historical and contemporary practices in Canada and the United States. Addressing the turn to a new, sustainable creative ecology that is central to handmade films in the twenty-first century, and that defines today's reinvigorated film cultures, Process Cinema features some of the most beautiful handcrafted films and the most forward-thinking filmmakers within a global context.

The Theological Power of Film

The Theological Power of Film
Author: James Lorenz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2024-06-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1040049990

This book explores the theological power of film and seeks to render a properly theological account of cinematic art. It considers: What theology and theological practice does cinematic art give rise to? What are the perceptual and affective potentials of film for theology, and what, if anything, is theological about the cinematic medium itself? The author argues that film is a fundamentally embodied art form, a haptic and somatic medium of perception-cum-expression. This, combined with the distinct temporal aesthetic of film, invests cinema with profound theological potentials. The chapters explore these potentials through theological-cinematic analysis, emphasising the themes of encounter, embodiment, time, and contemplation, as well as three intimately connected doctrines of Christian theology: creation, incarnation, and eschatology. Throughout the book, the films and writings of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky emerge as a singular illustration of the theological power of film, becoming a crucial resource for theologicalcinematic analysis.

Dreams, Doubt, and Dread

Dreams, Doubt, and Dread
Author: Zachary Thomas Settle
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2016-08-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498223095

Films are modern spiritual phenomena. They function as such in at least three profound ways: world projection, thought experiments, and catharsis (i.e., as dreams, doubt, and dread). Understanding film in this way allows for a theological account of the experience that speaks to the religious possibilities of film that far extend the portrayal of religious themes or content. Dreams, Doubt, and Dread: The Spiritual in Film aims to address films as spiritual experiences. This collection of short essays and dialogues examines films phenomenologically--through the experience of the viewer as an agent having been acted upon in the functioning of the film itself. Authors were invited to take one of the main themes and creatively consider how film, in their experiences, has provided opportunities for new modes of thinking. Contributors will then engaged one another in a dialogue about the similarities and differences in their descriptions of film as spiritual phenomena. The intended aim of this text is to shift contemporary theological film engagement away from a simple mode of analysis in which theological concepts are simply read into the film itself and begin to let films speak for themselves as profoundly spiritual experiences.

The Epic Film in World Culture

The Epic Film in World Culture
Author: Robert Burgoyne
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2010-09-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 113585534X

With the recent release of spectacular blockbuster films from Gladiator to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the epic has once again become a major form in contemporary cinema. This new volume in the AFI Film Readers series explores the rebirth of the epic film genre in the contemporary period, a period marked by heightened and conflicting appeals to national, ethnic, and religious belonging.The orginal essays in this volume explore the tension between the evolving global context of film production and reception and the particular provenance of the epic as an expression of national mythology and aspirations, challenging our understanding of epics produced in the present as well as our perception of epic films from the past. The contributors will explore new critical approaches to contemporary as well as older epic films, drawing on ideas from cultural studies, historiography, classics, and film studies.