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.
Tarkovsky After Tarkovsky. (Film After Film)
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.
From Tarkovsky to Nolan via Soderbergh
In 2002, Steven Soderbergh’s
Some shots and scenes from Soderbergh’s film allow for a speculation that he creates a dialogue not only with Tarkovsky’s
Tarkovsky’s Legacy
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.
Von Trier as Tarkovsky’s Heir