After the Second World War, the very notion of sense-and thus, editing-was overcast with doubt, and film modernism began to look for other, «non-Eisensteinian» ways to articulate the author’s stance; first of all, through over-emphasising any given language tool. Long and extra-long takes are the flip side of collage and pamphlet aesthetics that constituted a very powerful and authoritative trend in the 1960s-1970s. Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema is one of the major phenomena within this trend. Cinematic postmodernism, in turn, never neglected long takes, but its reasons were almost opposite to those of modernism. Moreover, establishing the function of the long take used in a film allows the picture’s clear attribution to modernism or postmodernism even in the most difficult and vague cases when other criteria reveal no precise answers. The paper suggests and examines the tools for the functional analysis of the long shot, and validates its connection to the stylistic attribution of the film.
<p>Tarkovsky After Tarkovsky. (Film After Film)</p>J. Hoberman is the author, co-author, or editor of 12 books. He was a film critic for the Village Voice for 33 years and currently writes for The New York Times, Artforum and other publications; he has taught cinema history and theory at New York University, Harvard University, and the Cooper Union.
The paper discusses Tarkovsky’s film and theory, his posthumous influence on ambitious non-Russian filmmakers, including Béla Tarr and Lars von Trier, and the relevance of his thought for post-digital cinema.
<p>From Tarkovsky to Nolan via Soderbergh</p>Vasily Stepanov is a film critic, editor-in-chief of the Séance magazine.
In 2002, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris was released worldwide. Stanisław Lem asserted that Soderbergh’s film was based not on his novel, but on Tarkovsky’s picture. Film critics agreed with that perception.
Some shots and scenes from Soderbergh’s film allow for a speculation that he creates a dialogue not only with Tarkovsky’s Solaris, but also with Kubrick’s Space Odyssey. It is unknown if Soderbergh had read Martyrolog where Tarkovsky spoke negatively about the film, or if he had managed to discern the trace of Tarkovsky’s struggle with Kubrick in the cinematic structure of his Solaris itself. The making of the novel’s second screen version became a kind of a laboratory work for Stephen Soderbergh-he is not only a director, but also a theorist lately known for his alchemic editing experiments that include cutting Space Odyssey. In his Solaris, he lets Tarkovsky into Kubrick’s space, grafts Tarkovsky on Kubrick; or even puts Tarkovsky in the world of American science fiction film. Perhaps, it is because of Soderbergh that Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar became another recent film that brought Kubrick and Tarkovsky together in their indirect dispute?
<p>Tarkovsky’s Legacy</p>András Bálint Kovács is a film scholar, founder of the Film Studies Department at the Budapest University. Author of several papers and monographs, including Les mondes d’Andrej Tarkovsky (1987), Screening Modernism (2008), and The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes (2012).
The most important legacy of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre is his technique to invest the physical, mainly natural environment with the power of spiritualizing the dramatic scenes of the narrative. This attitude is originated in the Russian orthodox religious rituals, and the techniques Tarkovsky has developed to represent it has proven the most powerful stylistic solution for many-mainly Russian-filmmakers from the 1990s on. The paper shows how Hungary’s most acclaimed contemporary filmmaker, Béla Tarr made use of Tarkovsky’s legacy.
<p>Von Trier as Tarkovsky’s Heir</p>Anton Dolin is a film critic, film scholar and journalist. Radio presenter at Mayak and Vesti FM, TV host at Evening Urgant and constant writer for Afisha-Vozduh; author of five books.
